A recruitment CRM, or customer relationship management software, is a vital tool for recruiters where they can store candidate and client data and handle all of their operations in one place. Whilst a lot of recruitment agencies still keep their data in simpler systems or use Excel Spreadsheets, a CRM goes far beyond storage, enabling you to work more efficiently, automate manual processes, and keep your candidate database warm at all times, which leads you to faster and more accurate placements. A great CRM puts data at the heart of your agency, amplifying your growth.
Some of the main functionalities of a good recruitment candidate management software include:
- Candidate management system: A good CRM will sort through the candidate data for you, suggesting top matches for each of your new roles, handling automated communications, and keeping track of any changes or developments. Instead of wasting hours after you post a new role on sifting through CVs and contacting relevant candidates, a CRM can automate large parts of a recruiter’s role, saving time and allowing you to focus on what’s important.
- Client management system: Similarly to your candidate interactions, the other side of the recruitment coin is obviously your clients. Keeping all of their data, active roles, and preferences in one place is essential to improving efficiency and staying on top of your roles.
- Recruitment compliance sy: One thingrecruiters can lose a lot of time on is compliance. With the right CRM, youwill be able to handle all your documentation from within the software, keepingtrack of your candidates’ and clients’ status, and even locking you from takingaction on an uncompliant candidate or client. Thissaves your agency from lost rebates and having to then struggle with payingback or trying to get your money back from unreliable clients.
Using the right recruitment CRM can increase revenue by as much as 29%, increase your team’s efficiency, and decrease the amount of human error within your work, ultimately impacting the quality of your results. A highly tuned recruitment system can also increase your existing candidate engagement by as much as 85%, allowing you to operate CRM-first and save money.
Good recruitment software will keep your database warm, allowing you to decrease the time spent juggling manual admin tasks and communications. But another big influence a CRM has on your agency is changing the way you and your team go about making placements – with a warm database, you will make the CRM your first touchpoint, instead of going straight to job boards with each new role. This not only draws out the entire process but also costs you money you could have saved.
A good recruitment CRM will not only increase your efficiency and reduce manual tasks, allowing you and your recruiters to handle higher volumes of work – it will also reduce human error, help you make decisions and set strategies based on data, which in turn helps your agency become more agile and enables you to maximise the return on investment from each candidate and client.
Here are some of the most important benefits of using a recruitment CRM, explained:
Streamlined candidate and client management
A good CRM automates a lot of the manual tasks surrounding candidate and client management, allowing you to focus on relationship building and handle higher volumes of work. This is vital to your agency’s growth and scalability.
Recruitment software not only stores your data but, more importantly, can also match the candidates with roles or clients; automatically showing you the best matches for the role you’re currently recruiting for. It will rank your candidates based on their engagement levels, making it easier to cleanse your database and keep it warm at all times. With active talent pools, you can divide your candidates by requirements like sector, salary expectations, and more, which then gives you a simple way to automate communications to different groups whilst maintaining a personal touch.
With task management, your CRM will remind you of any follow-up calls you need to make, and integrations with relevant communications platforms will allow you to set up BD sequencing and emails from within the recruitment software. This way, all of your information, notes, and communications on each client and candidate will go through the CRM and be easily accessible – and you and your recruiters won’t have to dig to find updates and relevant information. Your recruitment CRM will become the single source of truth for your agency, serving as the heart of all your operations and simplifying all of your processes.
Job management and applicant tracking
The heart of every recruiter’s job is obviously making placements – and that means writing job adverts, posting them on different job boards, sorting through applications, and more. It also means the more roles you’re working, the more admin work you have – and the easier it is to get lost in piles of information.
The right CRM will automate the entire process for you, from writing job adverts with AI-powered tools, to posting them automatically across job boards with one single click. What is more, it gives you the option to skip this step completely, because each of your new roles will be matched with a list of appropriate candidates already within your database – allowing you to save time and money.
Reduced human error
With everything going through your CRM, from candidate and client data to communications and notes from meetings, you don’t have to worry about any information ever getting lost. This not only streamlines your day-to-day operations, as you (and your recruiters) don’t have to waste time searching for data, but also protects your agency from unavoidable human errors, data losses, and forgotten clients or candidates.
Data-driven decision making
It’s vital for your agency’s growth to have a CRM that shows you real-time reporting data – because you’re able to see the effects of your strategies at all times and track your results. Instead of only reviewing the effectiveness of your strategies once a month or at the end of the quarter, you can track and make shifts on a regular basis. Seeing them clearly will allow you to make more informed decisions on any strategy adjustments and fix straight away, instead of waiting until the end of a slower month to realise you need to make some shifts in the month ahead.
Great CRMs also offer you the option to benchmark your agency against others in your sector, giving you insights into the market situation and allowing you to see whether lower results are due to a part of your strategy not working, or the generic situation in the market at the time.
Now that you know the value the right CRM can bring to your agency, it’s time to decide what “the right CRM” means for your agency – and where to start looking for it.
Within six months of using Firefish, you’ll see candidate engagement levels increase by 200% and your recruiters converting 25% more placements.
Book a DemoToday, Firefish helps recruitment companies of all sizes and industries to accelerate growth by putting data at the heart of their recruitment agency, and it’s recognised by users who have voted us as the best Recruitment CRM software provider at a number of awards.