CRM is a tool that is used by many businesses to keep track of their sales and opportunity pipelines. When used by businesses, it stands for Customer Relationship Management. However, with its increased popularity among recruiters, it is also referred to as Candidate Relationship Management. During sales recruitment, CRM enables the recruiter to have an all-round, 360 degree view of every aspect of the process. This quality makes the CRM tool uniquely suited to track clients from both sides i.e. both the candidate and the company that is seeking personnel.
In addition to facilitating effective tracking during recruitment, CRM also provides support for both long and short term recruitment strategies on a single platform. Other benefits of CRM include:
- Seamless co-ordination among team members. Team members often seek structure in the CRM. This is because it helps to break down the recruiters’ big vision into more manageable tasks that the sales recruiter can perform with relative ease, on a day-to-day basis. Additionally, this tool standardizes operations across all team members, thus ensuring that there is neither redundancy nor neglect.
- Ability to seize the best candidates and opportunities. The CRM tool enables sales recruiters to clearly define their recruitment processes and strategies. This, combined with the ability to track each candidate right from the ‘lead’ stage and through the opportunity pipeline, ensures that opportunities to recruit top-notch candidates are not lost.
- Ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. CRM enables sales recruiters to have comprehensive information readily accessible and available when crucial decisions need to be made. Since many of these decisions have the potential to completely change an individual’s life in addition to affecting the company that they are going to be placed in, it is important for the recruiter to have all pertinent information at his/her fingertips. CRM is therefore invaluable in enabling the recruiter to consider all the data and make the best decisions for both clients, within less time.
How to Optimize CRM for Recruiting
One of the ways to get great results from CRM as a recruiter is to utilize it for consistent communication with sales candidates, both active and passive. This is beneficial in that it enables the recruiter to send targeted messages to selected people. Besides this, it helps to keep the sales recruiter in the candidate’s radar and vice versa.
The recruiter may also use CRM to integrate each candidate’s social media profile with other information collected; such as their resume and contact information. With the steady rise of social recruiting, integrating social media into CRM enables recruiters to contact candidates through their social profiles, which keeps them more relevant and visible to the candidate.
Factors to Consider when Selecting a CRM for Recruiting
- Management Reports. The sales recruiter may need to go through reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It is therefore essential that the CRM chosen supports this feature.
- The frequency at which the CRM is updated. One recruiter may find frequent updates to be distracting and intrusive while another may find the updates useful. Either way, it helps to know how often the tool gets updated, as well as how the update would potentially affect one’s data and consequently, the recruitment process.
Choosing an ideal CRM depends entirely on what one’s needs are. There is no one-size-fits-all provider as what is ideal for one sales recruiter may not be a very good fit for another.