What a recruitment CRM should really do

Everyone and their mother wants a recruitment CRM (candidate relationship management) tool these days.

In this case, rightfully so: With competition for top talent tougher than ever, Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn and the necessity of finding more right-fit (not just more) applicants ... building your own database of interested candidates is imperative for hiring and business success.

The broken promise of "basic"

A basic CRM does that. It's a database of people (names and email addresses) that have opted in to your brand in some way:

• If you have a talent network, you can capture name and email
• If you have a talent community, you can capture name and email
• If you have job alerts, you can capture name and email

Great. You get your team a standalone recruitment CRM, implement a way to capture lead information on your career site and start acquiring names and email addresses.

Now what?

Not surprisingly, we found that 48% of the Fortune 500neversend an email to their lead database after a confirmation of signup! That means nearly half have either no strategy or the wrong tool in place for what to do after they capture initial information a huge missed opportunity, not to mention a broken promise to every candidate who opted in to learn more about the organization. The candidates' inbox, from you, would look like this:

Nada. All you have is a stagnant, database of names that you aren't communicating with or learning more about.

The big wins of "dynamic"

So how do you transform a basic CRM database list into a gold mine of data about real people your potential hires?

By understanding how a true, dynamic CRM paired with a holistic recruitment marketing strategy and thoughtful nurture strategy can help you hire successfully for business growth:

1. Building Candidate Profiles: A dynamic CRM brings to life the names you capture by building more complete candidate profiles about their social presence, job interests, skills and interactions. It's not a one-and-done data capture; within technology like a Recruitment Marketing Platform, the CRM is one component of a comprehensive strategy that is constantly updating and tracking more information on every living, breathing person in the database.
2. Sourcing More Efficiently: Everyonefishes for the same talent in the LinkedIn pool and no one really knows what will happen to that database now that Microsoft is involved. You need to build your own database that only you can source from, filled with people you know have opted in to learn more about your brand. LinkedIn contacts are cold leads. People who have raised their hand to communicate with you are warm leads. Paired with a more complete candidate profile, your sourcers can stop starting from scratch every single req.
3. Automating Personalized Reminders: Personalization can come with automation. Case in point: A handful of interested leads start your application process, but drop off before they complete. A dynamic CRM that integrates with your ATS can automatically trigger a personalized email that reminds those specific leads to finish their application. That's point-in-time personalization: messaging triggered by actions people do or do not take.
4. Segmenting Target Candidate Audiences: The purpose of a CRM is to capture leads, then manage those leads and relationships until the right point of conversion. A robust CRM enables you to segment candidate audiences into multiple databases or nurture workflows, like campus, hourly or veteran. Segmentation is pivotal for more efficient sourcing and more personalized messaging Ð all which leads to a better chance of finding the right candidate for the right opportunity at the right time (right-fit hires!).
5. Nurturing with Relevant Content: When you capture names, then learn nothing more about them and send them nothing about you, your CRM database is futile (remember that empty inbox above?). A talent network and nurture strategy go hand-in-hand Ð and the CRM is the engine behind that strategy. A CRM won't create the content for you, but it will inform why, how and when you create it.
6. Tracking Every Interaction for Insight: You have likely never met most of the people in your CRM database but you can learn a lot about them. By utilizing a CRM within a Recruitment Marketing Platform, you can see every interaction that contact has with your brand, from social media to career site to email opens to event attendance. This can inform how you message to a certain job family or the types of content most successful with veterans, for example. It turns data points into insight for future decision making.

Can your CRM do that? It should. When you use a robust CRM as part of a larger recruitment marketing strategy, the end result benefits your potential candidates and hires with more relevant messaging, more timely communication and a more personalized experience. Their inbox will look like this:

I won't even ask you which inbox looks better. You already know.