Introduction
All employers must rely on candidate relationship management tools in the current recruitment landscape. It is the best way to engage with the candidates throughout recruitment. Not only does this tool help them enhance candidate experience, but it also helps build a positive brand image. But, the US market today is very competitive.
As a result, many US companies are struggling to find top candidates for their open roles. So, in this situation, how can employers keep candidates engaged and informed throughout the hiring pipeline? The answer is by using CRM software! Continue reading the blog to learn more about this powerful software in detail.
What are candidate relationship management tools?
Candidate relationship management tools are computer software recruiters use to interact, engage, or communicate with job applicants. The software helps employers attract, manage, and nurture candidates from the beginning of the hiring cycle to the end. Moreover, CRM’s relevant automated communication features allow employers to build meaningful relationships with candidates.
Thus, businesses can use CRM software to fill open positions with the best candidates from the large pool. Usually, candidate management systems serve as powerful recruitment marketing tools for recruiters. But if you are a business owner, you can also use this tool for marketing purposes to engage customers.
How do candidate relationship management tools work?
Now, you must have known what candidate relationship management tools exactly mean. The next question is, how can these tools help you find top talent for your open roles? You might not know that a CRM tool can reduce your workload by automating candidate-related tasks in the hiring process.
For example, a recruitment CRM tool can store and manage all the candidate data in its database. Moreover, it can extract relevant information from each candidate’s profile, such as experience, skills, etc. The recruiters can use this extracted data to connect with candidates personally and build effective relationships during recruitment.
Besides this, candidate management systems help companies to:
- Build a large talent pool that exists in an easy-to-use and accessible database.
- Identify, attract, manage, and nurture all the candidates who are part of the recruitment funnel.
- Automate many recruitment activities like sending emails to candidates, scheduling interviews, performing background checks, etc.
- Generate detailed reports to measure hiring success and create new hiring strategies.
In short, candidate relationship management tools allow recruiters to nurture and cherish candidates as the company’s customers. Large business organizations can also use CRM software to collect, organize, and manage thousands of job applications.
How is CRM software different from ATS software?
Earlier, companies used to rely on ATS to automate hiring tasks as the ATS system is an all-in-one hiring tool. However, large-scale organizations that manage high-volume applications cannot only use ATS software.
It is because ATS was not designed keeping candidate relationship management in mind! Only the candidate relationship management tools are specialized tools built to manage and track each applicant’s journey from start to finish.
From attracting and managing candidates to sending them offer letters, a candidate relationship management software covers all the candidate engagement activities in all hiring steps. Thus, large-scale businesses should rely on CRM software to meet candidate management and recruitment marketing needs.
Did you know? According to the CRM statistics by WebFX, 74% of companies report that CRM software gave them easy and improved access to candidate data. It proves that CRM’s detailed reporting and candidate-tracking features contribute a lot to the recruitment efforts of businesses.
Top benefits of candidate relationship management tools
As a modern recruiter, you may know the importance of good candidate experience. Keeping candidates engaged has many benefits. Thus, it is an essential recruitment aspect. If you are still confused about how candidate relationship management tools make hiring candidates easy, read the below benefits:
- Build a talent pool
All companies need access to a large talent pool to fill their job vacancies with top talent. Recruitment CRM software becomes very useful while identifying or attracting the best candidates. It is because the software stores all the information and data of ex, current, and potential candidates in one place.
By doing so, a firm can focus on building a large talent pool to fill available positions. Hence, if you need to recruit a new employee, you only need to find them among those already stored in the candidate relationship management tool’s database.
- Detailed candidate profiles
When you have to identify qualified candidates for your open positions, every detail in the resume counts. The best candidate relationship management software can extract all the relevant information and data from different resumes. It then decides which candidate profiles match the job and overall company requirements.
The software sorts and ranks the candidates based on their skills, experience, and qualifications. After the tool completes all these steps, it will allow the recruiter to communicate with candidates and track their progress. Moreover, some high-end candidate relationship management tools enable companies to perform background checks before hiring candidates.
- Automated communication
Automated communication will only make sense when you know how much effort candidate engagement demands. When recruiters engage with many candidates, there is always miscommunication and misunderstandings. However, the candidate relationship management tools can avoid such situations by allowing employers to engage actively with all the candidates.
Since effective communication and engagement is the key to keeping candidates informed, candidates will enjoy a seamless recruitment experience. This way, recruitment CRM software reduces the recruiter’s workload and keeps candidates informed. So, it is a win-win!
Choosing the best CRM software: Features to look for!
You cannot just invest in any CRM software without understanding its features. If you want to choose the best to help you survive in the competitive US marketplace, you need to look for a few specific features in the candidate relationship management tools you are about to invest in.
Below are some basic features that you should look for:
- Recruitment workflow automation
The primary reason why many recruiters adopt CRM software is to automate time-consuming hiring tasks and eliminate all the manual hiring tasks from recruitment. It makes workflow automation a key feature to look for in the CRM software. Therefore, you should ensure that the candidate relationship management tool you choose should automate repetitive and manual hiring tasks.
- Profile creation and data management
The CRM software you choose should offer candidate profile creation and management features. Besides this, the tool should include candidates’ personal information, such as resumes, contact details, cover letters, and more, in their profiles. Some of the best candidate relationship management tools also update candidate profiles in real time based on their interactions with the company.
- Seamless integration with ATS
Another vital feature to look for in candidate relationship management tools is integration with ATS. If the CRM software you adopted integrates smoothly with your current ATS, well and good. However, if the CRM software fails to integrate with your ATS software, there are more chances of data duplication and inaccuracies. Thus, find a CRM tool that can integrate seamlessly with ATS.
- Candidate rankings
Your candidate selection process will become much easier and quicker when you can evaluate candidates based on the score that your hiring software has given them. Thus, your CRM software should offer candidate rank features and give candidates a score based on their skills, experience, and qualifications. You can then conveniently use this ranking to judge top talent from many applications.
- Candidate filtering
Your hiring process will become unorganized and scattered if your CRM software puts all candidates in your recruitment pipeline in the same category. Therefore, looking for candidate filtering and ranking features in the CRM software is essential. This feature will not only make hiring systematic for you, but it will also help you to differentiate between qualified and unqualified candidates.
- Quick resume parsing
Every CRM software can perform resume parsing, but only the most solid software can parse multiple resumes in less time. Therefore, if you receive bulk job applications for your open roles, resume parsing is the first feature you should look for in the CRM software. This feature will help you streamline your resume parsing approach and also allow you to filter in the most suitable candidates.
- Easy-to-read reports
When using candidate relationship management tools to manage candidates, you should also track their progress to understand the hiring process better. But you can only do this if your CRM tool offers advanced reporting and analytics features. This feature will provide easy-to-read reports and accurate analytics that will allow you to track candidates throughout recruitment.
Conclusion
Candidate experience is the top priority for every business worldwide. Hence, nothing can be better than adopting candidate relationship management tools. So, if you are looking for the best CRM software, we suggest you try Pitch N Hire! Their advanced software can help you attract top performers for your company. So, do not just trust us but see it for yourself by booking a FREE demo of their CRM software today!