All You Need to Know About Setting Up Your Recruitment CRM

Candidates are usually at the center of recruitment matters. However, hiring companies are just as significant. Without them, recruitment agencies would hardly have work or ensure business continuity.

But most discussions focus on fostering positive relationships with job applicants and attracting the right ones. However, every experienced recruiter knows that turning leads into customers and developing lasting collaborations are among the pillars of a successful recruitment agency.

Efficient communication ensures that HR and recruitment professionals understand what candidate profile would fit the job opening, where to look for them, and how to approach them. Yet, recruitment consultants often have many overwhelming responsibilities, making it hard to track everything and keep candidates and customers in the loop.

And because of that, they leverage tech tools to streamline conversations and data sharing. Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) is the number one choice of recruitment professionals who want to ensure seamless collaboration with their clients. 

It’s no wonder the global CRM software market will likely reach $94.4 billion by 2027. That explains why the growth of this software market isn’t slowing down. Companies with sales teams, marketing departments, and customer service are the most frequent users of this kind of software. But they all demand similar features, such as contact management, interactions tracking, scheduling, reminders, pipeline monitoring, sales automation, and a central database. 

Therefore, CRM has invaluable characteristics that enable recruitment agencies and businesses to accelerate processes and reinforce connections with job applicants and clients. Here’s what you should know about this software.

What is Recruitment CRM?

Recruitment Customer Relationship Management (CRM) represents tools that enable recruitment firms and agencies to manage their leads, clients, and customers. It helps recruiters and hiring managers to organize data, store interactions, and enhance communication to boost sales and productivity.

This software also provides valuable insights that set the ground for more efficient strategies and improved collaboration with potential and existing clients. It typically offers in-depth analytics and reports that help develop positive connections and get the best results. 

Even though it shares the same acronym with Candidate Relationship Management, these two systems are different. Customer Relationship Management serves for tracking and handling interactions and work with a recruitment agency’s customers and partners.

On the other hand, candidate software helps recruiters manage relationships with job applicants and oversee the hiring pipeline. Both systems have their benefits, but the former is the best solution for landing new business partnerships without affecting the quality of these collaborations. 

Research has shown that more than nearly a third of companies say that a CRM gives them access to better customer data. But this software also improves the relationship and lead management, increases client satisfaction, and enhances workflow standardization. 

CRM users continue increasing, but the software is also becoming more accessible and flexible. As a result, more users now access these tools from multiple devices.

Recruitment agencies can also choose different solutions nowadays as on-premise software is no longer the only option. Thanks to that, recruitment agencies won’t hassle setting up their CRM or learning to use it. Providers are responsible for maintenance and upgrades, ensuring that software runs smoothly and encounters no glitches.

Thus, cloud-based CRM enables recruitment agencies to subscribe only for features and functionalities they need. They can avoid purchasing characteristics that don’t align with their recruitment requirements. 

CRM features depend on the vendor, but the most common are contact management, lead management, sales forecasting, sales analytics, and reports and dashboards. These systems are multifunctional and offer numerous advantages to recruitment agencies.

ALSO READ: Recruitment CRM: the Essential Tool for Recruitment Agencies During and After the COVID-19 Era

Benefits of Using CRM

1. Enables Customer Lifecycle Tracking

Every relationship requires mutual effort, keeping in touch, and remembering significant dates and information. Recruiters should foster tight-knit and stable connections with their leads and clients, not only job applicants.

Otherwise, they could lose an opportunity to seal the deal and build meaningful partnerships. Because of that, recruitment agencies should understand the needs and expectations of their customers and keep them in mind when implementing new strategies. 

The best way to achieve that is to track their progress throughout the sales funnel and have all data in one pipeline. That way, recruiters can detect potential issues before escalating and introduce necessary tweaks. 

Recruitment CRM allows them to add a new contact to the system and memorize the crucial points of their communication from day one. Moreover, this makes it easy to move leads and clients to different stages as operations advance. 

That’s necessary for keeping customers informed and providing a thorough onboarding to candidates. However, an all-encompassing CRM also offers detailed client profiles. 

These tools are helpful as they enable recruiters to go beyond the click and drag options. Instead, they have a complete set of information in one place, streamlining processes and ensuring better decision-making.

Hence, recruitment CRM allows recruitment agencies to create a customer network in an easy-to-access dashboard and find relevant data. Thus, they can update past and current interactions as they see fit.

2. Communication Centralization

Recruitment can get messy, especially in the first stages, when recruiters initiate new contacts and expand their network. Because of that, it’s beyond necessary to have relevant data and information in one platform.

That’s among the most powerful characteristics of a recruitment CRM. It enables recruiters to store everything in one place, communicate messages to relevant parties, and organize contacts.

Instead of using multiple websites simultaneously, recruiters can talk with their leads and clients via a single platform due to the email integration. That way, conversations won’t be scattered through various apps, and they’ll receive every message in their CRM. 

But efficient communication also includes staying ahead of critical deadlines and arrangements. Recruitment CRM enables recruiters to sync activities and ensure they don’t miss out on events, meetings, presentations, and conferences. 

Thus, this is a stellar way to keep teammates in the loop and ensure everyone is on the same page. After all, transparency and equal participation are essential for healthy collaborations. 

3. Sales Analytics Tracking

An efficient recruitment CRM should provide valuable insights to recruiters, enabling them to use the key metrics meaningfully. That’s also necessary for landing new sales and running successful operations.

For instance, CRM lets recruiters know how much time they need to move every customer throughout pipeline stages, understand how they reached them, and the success and failure rate.

It’s no surprise a CRM software can significantly improve sales. That creates a positive chain effect, ensuring a thriving business and higher performance. 

4. Collaboration Improvement

Fostering lasting connections depends on team effort. Hence, it’s crucial to maintain open communication with teammates and ensure everyone can participate equally.

Recruitment CRM enables HR professionals to invite their customers and points of contact via a designated guest portal to collaborate. But it also lets management and relevant decision-makers monitor team progress, resulting in constructive feedback.

Thus, teammates have access to all project details, enabling them to take over seamlessly if the recruiter in charge can’t do it. As a result, communication with clients and candidates doesn’t suffer, and collaboration continues to flow.

5. Increased Productivity

Recruiters can work faster when a recruitment CRM allows them to have all the necessary tools and data in one place. They receive invaluable insights, enabling better-informed decisions as they understand what their customers need. 

Thanks to that, they can focus on more meaningful aspects of recruitment and nurture positive relationships with clients. It’s no wonder productivity increases when using a CRM. 

6. Better Insights

Recruitment agencies shouldn’t wonder whether their sales teams should put in an additional effort or their work is providing stellar results. Recruitment CRM offers an on-the-ground and high-level view of rep performance.

Thanks to that, decision-makers know details regarding team-level and individual conversion rates across deal phases, velocity, and size. They can then develop a data-based approach to team management and ensure recruiters convert leads into clients. 

7. Sets the Ground for Lasting Connections

By providing relevant analytics, information, and making communication easier, recruitment CRM helps recruitment agencies ensure stellar customer experience and develop lasting connections. As a result, their businesses become more stable and productive. 

A Must-Know CRM Glossary

Here’s what CRM-related terms recruitment agencies should know before subscribing:

• Lead – Leads are the individuals and companies that have expressed an interest in your services. They might consider collaborating with you and hiring you to find the best candidate for their job opening. If they found your recruitment agency thanks to your marketing efforts, this lead is a Qualified Marketing Lead (MQL). On the other hand, an SQL (Qualified Sales Lead) interacted with you thanks to your sales team. 
• Source – Every lead you land came from somewhere. Various sources enable companies and professionals to discover your recruitment agency, such as referrals, trade shows, webinar attendees, website forms, social media, or internet search results.
• Contact - Contacts stand for individuals your CRM will add to the platform and save their name, last name, and email. However, you can also include other information, such as yearly business revenues, company name, job title, etc.
• Deal – Deals or opportunities stand for potential sales and converting leads into clients. A deal undergoes multiple sales process stages before reaching that level. Therefore, you must connect it with contacts and ensure you know how far you’ve come with potential clients to sell your services. 
• Deal Stage – Sales process consists of various phases. However, the exploratory call is the first stage in most cases, and it includes your reps talking with prospects to seal the deal. 
• Pipeline – Recruitment CRM makes things easier by organizing deal phases. Hence, every sales team member should have theirs, allowing them to track progress and understand how close a lead is to become a client.
• Activity – Emails, calls, new contract records, and other activities your sales team members perform fall under the term activity. 

The Importance of Developing CRM Strategy

The customer relationship management strategy represents the plan recruitment agencies and firms develop to enhance the collaboration their sales teams, marketing departments, and customer support have with leads and clients. However, it’s also about how they use their CRM systems to grow business and improve communication. 

Because of that, it’s necessary to first develop a CRM strategy before using the software. Besides providing a roadmap, it's easier to track objectives and stay on track. 

Although recruitment CRM offers numerous features, you might not need all of them. Consider your recruitment needs first and how you’ll improve connections with clients. 

Also, think about customer traits, interactions, and behaviors that impact your business and use them to identify relevant CRM reports and analytics. Identify your ideal client persona, needs, goals, and places they frequent.

You’ll understand what type of customers you want to add to the platform and what you prefer to avoid. But you’ll also discover how to reach them and use recruitment CRM to retain them. 

Finally, outline the customer journey. Think about how your ideal customer usually came in touch with your recruitment agency. 

How many touchpoints did they require before contacting you, becoming a client, and extending collaboration? Your customer database will expand and transform the buyer journey over time.

But your recruitment CRM will enable you to track these changes and respond efficiently. After establishing your strategy, it’s time to discover how to use your software.

How to Set Up and Use a Recruitment CRM

Deploy a Recruitment CRM On Your System Platform

If you opt for a cloud-based recruitment CRM, all it takes is to launch it on its system platform and get it going. The vendor is responsible for hosting, enabling you to skip the hassle of implementing software and relying on an IT team to maintain it.

Instead, you can log in to your account right after subscribing. The next step is to store your contacts.

Connect You Recruitment CRM with Your Email and Calendar

Make the most of CRM capabilities by linking it with your email and calendar, and other apps the platform supports. That way, you’ll have all the necessary data in one place, accessible and ready to use. With Manatal, users can install a Chrome extension that would allow them to import LinkedIn contacts directly into the CRM. 

Add Your Sales Team

The reps on your sales team should get to know the platform as soon as possible to ensure accurate and up-to-date data. Thus, it enables them to become familiar with the features and use them more efficiently. 

Hence, adding relevant users should be your priority. But before doing that, get their buy-in by clarifying how your Recruitment CRM will help sales teams add more value to the business and land new clients.  

If you fail to sell software advantages, your reps might not be keen on using it. It’s wise to ask your most successful salespeople to share their experiences and advocate for CRM to make their colleagues more willing to experiment with the platform. 

Customize Your Recruitment CRM Settings

Align your Recruitment CRM platform with your sales objectives and processes. Ensure it reflects the customer journey stages as that makes the UX more intuitive. Manatal, for example, enables you to provide a better experience to the clients - as well as members of your sales team - as the software adapts to the processes that have been put in place. 

That’s why you should first understand these phases. Consider taking a few weeks to analyze your sales process and track how prospects come in touch with your services. 

For instance, identify what might be the reason that convinced a client to choose you instead of another recruitment agency. Discover how long it took them to reach out and become a customer. 

Import Your Contacts

Perhaps you’re using spreadsheets or another recruitment software. But your new CRM can transfer the contacts to its platform, typically as a CSV file. Alternatively, Recruitment CRM like Manatal offers to arrange the migration of your data when transitioning from a previous platform.

As a result, you keep crucial information and get a seamless workflow. 

Segment Your Customers

It’s essential to tailor the communication to every customer by conducting segmentation. That way, you’ll better meet their needs and avoid using templates. 

Identify your long-term clients and the new ones. Decide how the process should look for each contact and label them accurately. 

Integrate Other Recruitment & Communication Tools

An efficient recruitment CRM has an open API and allows integration with other platforms that help you streamline processes. That way, you build an interconnected system and use the benefits of other apps directly in your CRM.

Customize Your Dashboard and Ensure Your Team Can Use It Efficiently

Your CRM dashboard should give you a comprehensive overview of your collaborations and team’s performance. That allows you to keep everyone on the same page, provide the most efficient direction, feedback, and coaching. 

The dashboard should serve as a control panel that enables you to tailor it to your unique needs. Choose the statistics you want to see, customize your activity metrics, and discover how your CRM can give you more personalized insights. 

Set Up Notifications

Choose the notifications you want to receive by going to the settings and deciding what’s necessary for your team’s processes and collaboration with clients. Set different reminders that ensure you don’t forget about any meeting, deal, or customer and stay ahead of the deadlines.

Set Up Roles & Permissions

Every team member has different tasks and responsibilities. That’s why you should manage roles and permissions and give access to specific information only to designated individuals. 

Enable Analytics & Reports

Data plays a central role in successful recruitment and collaboration with customers. Therefore, set reports and analytics and choose how often you’ll receive them.-

Setting up your CRM doesn’t need to be a daunting task. Focus on the features that apply to your business needs and identify how the platform should help you achieve your goals. 

Consider adopting a cloud-based CRM instead of on-premise as it provides a more intuitive dashboard. Thus, you will pay for the functions you need and can use them right after subscribing. Manatal’s recruitment CRM is an advanced and affordable SaaS that offers numerous features and enables the integration of various apps and platforms.

Discover how Manatal can help you improve collaboration with your clients and boost team efficiency by starting your 14-day Free Trial.