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7 Features To Look For In A Recruitment CRM

Using a Recruitment CRM (or Talent CRM) comes with many benefits that stretch far beyond the HR department. A CRM backed by explainable AI can help you manage candidate pipelines, hire more proactively, measure team performance, and can even make a positive impact on the organization’s bottom line.

But not all CRMs are created equal. So if you are about to add a Talent CRM to your HR tech stack (or are considering switching to a different one), you should know what the most important things to look for are when evaluating vendors.

Here are seven features and capabilities to look for when looking for a recruitment CRM.

Proactively build a talent pipeline

Before AI-driven HR tech tools came on to the scene, recruiting teams had a popular saying – “post and pray” – meaning that they would post a job ad and simply hope for the best. They would hope that the right candidates would find the job posting and apply so they can fill the role in a timely manner.

But this type of reactive approach to recruiting and hiring is outdated. There are now much better (more proactive) ways to ensure that you have the right candidates with the right skills, in your talent pipeline, right when you need them.

The right Talent CRM can help your recruiting team do just that – build out a pipeline of qualified candidates with highly in-demand skills. Additionally, a CRM can help you identify skills gaps that exist in your workforce, so you can accurately build candidate pools and talent pipelines around each of those key skills to fill the gaps. This makes it much easier and quicker for recruiters to fill roles as the demands of the business change over time.

Get a 360-degree view of your talent data

It’s difficult to make recruiting decisions with confidence if you don’t have the proper data to back them up. That’s where a Talent CRM can help. With this kind of AI-powered tool, your recruiters and hiring managers can easily view every candidate (and employee) in your database – their relevant skills, connections to your organization and their history. This allows you to fill your talent pools with qualified candidates and make more informed hiring decisions.

It’s imperative that the CRM you choose keeps your data enriched and updates dynamically. A modern recruiting team shouldn’t have to waste time and resources updating data line by line – not to mention the room for error that manual updates tend to create.

When your CRM gives you a holistic view of your talent data, your recruiters can make better hiring decisions – with confidence – much quicker than if they had to sort through resumes and CVs manually. A CRM can help your recruiting team speed up their time-to-hire, allowing them to fill vacancies much more efficiently.

Automatically fill talent pools with candidates with the right skills

Automating some of the most time-consuming and manual processes involved with recruiting not only saves recruiters time, but the organization money. A Talent CRM can help your recruiters identify and hire the best-fit candidates while unlocking new efficiencies.

Right now, recruiting teams around the world are being asked to do more with less. And in this difficult economy, many organizations have even gone as far as to reduce the size of their talent teams, putting even more pressure on their remaining recruiters to pick up the slack.

But even those businesses who have reduced their workforce will begin to hire again – it may be in a few months or next year, but recruiters should be equipped with the proper tools to hire and fill critical roles proactively, regardless of the current state of the economy.

The right CRM can help your organization automate parts of the recruiting process that would take much longer otherwise, and can ensure that your recruiters have pools of candidates (with the right skills) to dip into at a moment’s notice.

Schedule interviews with ease

The benefits of a Talent CRM should go beyond building pipelines and talent pools of qualified candidates. It should serve as a virtual “one-stop shop” to help recruiters with their workflow, and that includes scheduling interviews.

Anyone who has conducted interviews before (or even has been interviewed before) understands the hassle of the back and forth between the employer and the candidate when trying to schedule an interview via email. This process often takes more time than it should, and that’s just one more area where a CRM can help.

The right Talent CRM can display all the available interview times, allowing candidates to select every date and time slot that they would be available either in person or virtually. This makes the recruiter’s job much easier when it comes to scheduling because now, all they have to do is select a time that is convenient for the hiring manager, out of all the options the candidate chose.

Find candidates with the potential to succeed

In modern talent teams, current skills and qualifications are not the only factors to be considered – potential should also be taken into consideration during the hiring process.

With a Talent CRM, you can easily identify candidates who have the skills you need already, as well as candidates who have some of the skills you need, plus the potential to learn and develop those other skills quickly. A CRM also lets your talent team surface candidates that match the profiles of existing high-performers within your company – giving you an extra boost of confidence that you are making the right hiring decisions.

Recruitment CRMs can also help by organizing and recommending “silver medalists” – candidates who performed well in your interview process previously, but were not given an offer – ensuring that no stone is left unturned when searching for your ideal candidate.

Track the ROI of different recruiting channels

This is one that business leaders care about a lot – reporting and ROI. HR tech products are an investment, so you need to be certain that the CRM you choose makes it easy to track the ROI of your recruiting efforts.

You should be able to track the highest-performing recruiting channels with ease – helping leadership make decisions about where to invest more and where to cut back.

For example, your employer brand team may host networking events in your office with the intention of drumming up interest in your company, attracting top talent, and increasing applications. But your leadership team is going to want to know how many of those attendees actually applied, compared to how much was spent on the event.

A Talent CRM can help you evaluate each of your recruiting channels to justify spend, get more budget, and prove the effectiveness for your efforts.

Our Beamery customers have sees benefits such as a six-day reduction in time-to-hire, when top candidates are resurfaced from our CRM (on average), a 20% lift in female hires, with better overall DE&I insights – along with 97% of employees reporting greater confidence in navigating their careers.

Accelerate your sourcing efforts

A Recruitment CRM can also help you speed up your organization’s sourcing process. Sourcing doesn’t have to be the long, manual task that it traditionally has been. With a CRM, your sourcers can quickly identify the best-fit candidates for each role, without combing through stacks of resumes one by one.

This allows sourcers to create candidate pools around certain skills or groups of skills that recruiters can tap into whenever they have a requisition to fill that requires that specific skill.

The right Talent CRM can help your team accelerate their sourcing efforts from within the CRM itself – and on job boards and social sites – helping you fill roles with the right talent quickly, and reducing your overall time-to-hire.

In 2023, it’s hard to dispute the value that a Talent CRM can bring to a large enterprise. A CRM brings so many benefits – improved recruiter efficiency and effectiveness, better data, more accurate decision making and reporting, and reduced talent acquisition costs.

But, it’s vital that you go with a CRM product that has all the key features that will set up your recruiting team (and your organization as a whole) for sustainable success.

Learn more how a CRM can transform your recruiting process. And watch our webinar with Human Resource Executive on-demand, to learn how to get the most out of your HR tech stack.