What Is Candidate Relationship Management, and How Can it Improve Your Hiring Process?

The days of waiting for great candidates to apply for open positions are over. Currently, there are more than 11 million job openings in the United States and fewer than 6 million people are unemployed. This imbalance makes it harder for recruiters to find, attract, and hire top-tier candidates.

The best candidates are typically passive as well. They might be interested in a new job, but they’re not actively looking. LinkedIn reports that as many as 70% of the workforce is made up of passive talent, but 87% of them are open to new jobs.

One of the biggest challenges in hiring is finding those passive candidates. Candidate relationship management (CRM) platforms can help in building a candidate pipeline and managing your hiring process more effectively.

What is candidate relationship management?

Candidate relationship management (CRM) is a system that helps HR teams and hiring managers manage the recruitment process and related relationships with candidates. It operates similar to the way customer relationship management software works to track customers across touchpoints and keep them engaged.

Candidate relationship management software has replaced spreadsheets and files as a way to track and manage candidates. In today’s tight job market, CRMs also provide a better way to attract, engage, and nurture top talent through the hiring process.

A CRM should help you in 4 core areas:

• Discover. Find active and passive job candidates to increase your talent pool.
• Screening. Assess candidate skills for current and future openings.
• Engagement. Stay in touch with candidates throughout the hiring process.
• Hiring. Track the stages of the hiring process from recruiting to onboarding.

How CRM improves your hiring process

Most large companies have been using applicant tracking systems (ATSs) to screen candidates and track them. CRMs are a natural extension of traditional ATSs by adding more robust tools to manage relationships beyond sourcing and screening.

By bringing together all of your hiring activities into one centralized platform, a CRM can improve your process by automating:

• Building candidate pipelines
• Recruiting emails
• Job offers and approvals
• Interview scheduling
• Pre-employment screenings (background checks)
• Digital workflow

In B2C transactions, personalized emails can increase open rates by as much as 50% and create more conversions. In recruiting, CRMs can draw information from resumes, experience, and online sources to automatically generate personalized emails.

Another significant advantage of a CRM as part of your HR software stack is that you get a variety of metrics and reports. This lets you measure performance and see the impact of your recruiting efforts.

Candidate relationship management success factors

Like any other business tool, how you use your CRM will go a long way in whether it helps you attract, recruit, and hire candidates. Here are a few tips to help improve your success.

Segment potential candidates

Your CRM can segment potential candidates in your talent pipeline based on their skills and experience. This helps you to tailor your outreach, branding, and marketing efforts to entice the right type of candidates for your job openings.

Build dynamic career sites

Some candidate relationship management platforms allow you to create dynamic career sites on your website. This tracks candidate interactions and customizes what candidates see when they visit your site. For example, if an engineering candidate clicks on an email to view job listings, they would see relevant jobs on your careers page at the top of the list. If they click on a particular job opening, other jobs can be automatically resorted to surface similar openings on the fly.

Provide follow up

One of the most frustrating parts of the hiring process for candidates is a lack of contact between stages.

For example, recruiters might be aggressive in getting to an initial interview, but then go silent. Candidates get excited about jobs and then get ghosted. A CRM can keep candidates informed at each stage of the hiring process, the same way you keep customers warm by providing updates and relevant information to keep you top of mind.

Regular communication can help create a professional and positive experience even if you end up not hiring them. Job applicants who do not get a job offer are 80% more likely to apply again if they had a positive impression.

Job applicants who do not get a job offer are 80% more likely to apply again if they had a positive impression.

Track data analytics

A CRM can generate a lot of data. Use data visualization dashboards to track key metrics to gauge success. Your candidate relationship management can help you discover bottlenecks in your hiring process and refine your hiring process. You can get answers to questions like:

• Where do your best candidates come from?
• How do candidates interact with your career site?
• How many candidates start, but don’t finish applications?
• Are your outreach campaigns effective in driving candidates into your pipeline?
• How do candidates feel they have been treated during the hiring process?

You can also track key initiatives, such as diversity.

Another key metric to track is the offer acceptance rate. Low acceptance rates can indicate you may need to review the hiring process, compensation packages, or job requirements.

Nurture future candidates

Often during the recruitment process, you identify high-caliber prospects that don’t quite fit the current openings you have. These are people you want to stay in touch with. Your candidate relationship management platform can help you stay in contact by automating regular communications. For example, you can send company updates, newsletters, and notices about new openings that are a better fit.

This helps keep your company top-of-mind when the right opening comes up.

Landing top quality candidates

Keeping your organization staffed with high-quality employees is crucial to your success. Yet, it’s a struggle for most companies in today’s current environment. A recent study found that half of all workers described their company as understaffed. Those working in these conditions feel increasingly overwhelmed and burned out. That leads to more people quitting and even more openings.

Companies need to change the way they approach the recruiting and hiring process if they want to find and land top-quality candidates. Candidate relationship management software is one tool to help them do that.