What Is Candidate Relationship Management

What is Candidate Relationship Management?

Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to manage and enhance the relationship of past, existing and future job candidates. A recruiting CRM is used to improve the candidate’s experience and encourage better candidate engagement. CRM involves mentoring passive candidates, so that they can go through the recruitment pipeline when, and if a suitable job application becomes available.

What is a candidate relationship management system?

A candidate relationship management system is a technology tool used to enhance candidate relationships. Usually, a candidate relationship management system will include tools such as a candidate database, email/marketing tools, and applicant tracking system. An example of a candidate relationship management system is Fountain.

How do companies use CRM for recruiting?

CRM for recruiting involves creating positive relationships between candidates and companies to fill open job positions. CRM for recruiting includes a database where candidates’ names and details are stored so they can be vetted and nurtured, as they move throughout the recruitment pipeline. Resumes are only one aspect of candidate relationship management tools. Some of the purposes of a candidate marketing campaign is to continually improve the type of candidate, as well as the quality of information gathered about each job applicant.

CRM for recruiting encompasses the use of different types of campaigns. For example, a company could use a talent campaign made up of communities of students at universities. The sourcing and nurturing of the students could involve special promotional events, such as careers fairs. The aim is to provide students with a lasting and positive impression of the company for when they are ready to enter the employment market.

Most companies use CRMs to fill evergreen roles. These are roles that need to be filled all year round. For example, on-demand jobs in the gig economy. Companies use CRM to provide a steady flow of prospects so that they have people who are eligible for open vacancies. This technique reduces the time to hire and also the cost to hire rates.

Why is candidate relationship management important?

Candidate relationship management helps to provide the best candidate experience, which is extremely important in a market of low employment rates and high competition for jobs.

Here are some additional reasons why CRM is important to companies:

• The candidate experience can affect job acceptance rates

Research from Glassdoorhas shown that the average cost per hire is around $4,000, when taking into account recruitment technology, background checks, pre-employment screening and advertising spend. These costs show that companies need to do all they can to hire the best candidates the first time around.

Additionally, IBM has found that job candidates who were satisfied with how the recruitment process was handled were 38% more likely to accept a job offer than those who had a negative hiring experience. This research also showed that 54%  of candidates who had a good hiring experience accepted the offer, as opposed to 39%  who were not satisfied with their candidate experience.

IBM’s study also found that even at the decision stage where the candidate is considering factors like, benefits and the salary, the experience they had while hiring, still makes up for about a third of their decision-making process.

• The candidate experience affects a company’s customer churn

In 2015, Virgin Media received about 150,000 job applications, which turned out to be about 3,500 new hires. Virgin believed that around 27,000, or 18%  of the people who applied for their jobs, were already customers. However, a negative candidate experience led to 7,416 of these job applicants leaving Virgin Media. These figures show that a bad candidate experience was very costly for Virgin, to the tune of around $6 million in revenue for one year.

IBM has found that only 25% of candidates who are unsatisfied with the recruitment process become new customers. This is opposed to 53% of satisfied candidates who will become customers of companies where they experienced a positive recruitment process.

• Bad recruitment experiences can go viral

Negative candidate experiences can spread very quickly through social media and employer review sites, like Glassdoor. Nearly 60% of candidates report having a bad candidate experience and 72%  of these candidates share their experience in an online forum or a review site.

Low unemployment and higher competition to source and recruit the best candidates mean that company branding is very important when recruiting the best candidates. A negative candidate experience followed by bad reviews can have a negative impact on your company and brand. Generally, the career site of companies is becoming less influential. In 2014, 65% of candidates would go to a company career site to find out information about the company, in relation to hiring. In 2017, this figure was reduced to 58% . Candidates are beginning to trust reviews left on independent sites increasingly, instead of what they read on company career sites.

• Candidates who are ignored do not reapply

Talent Board, which is a nonprofit organization that concentrates on promoting a quality candidate experience, conducted research and found that 47%  of applicants had received no response from a job they applied to nearly two months after they made an application. Only 20%  of job applicants received a notification by email and only 8%  received a phone call to inform them about the outcome of the job application.

Failing to communicate with job applicants has a direct and negative impact on future applications to your company. In fact, 80% of job seekers said that they would not apply for another position that they are suitable for if a company failed to notify them of the progress of their application.

Where the company followed up with an email or phone call to notify them, the same candidates said that they would be 3.5 times more likely to reapply to the same company if another job opened up. Only 43%  of candidates could view the progress of the applications in 2017, this is down from 61%  in 2015.

Fountain has the functionality to enable companies to ensure that every single applicant is kept informed of his or her progress. Our solutions help companies keep in touch with two, 20 or even 20,000 candidates at one time.

Read this case study to find out how our automated messaging helped The Turas Group to efficiently manage and effectively communicate with all job applicants who applied for a position at one of the top fast food restaurant franchises (Chick-fil-A) in the U.S.

A candidate’s experience is one of the best ways to improve different hiring metrics

Important hiring metrics like time to hire and cost to hire can be positively affected by CRM. A simple process like informing candidates of what is happening with their application can have a positive impact on all of your hiring performance indicators.

When IBM surveyed candidates, 63% said that they were satisfied with their experience as a job candidate, 24% were neutral and 12% disagreed. The survey also found that 22% of applicants said that there was not enough information shared during the hiring process and 18% said that the application process was too slow.

• Use candidate relationship management tools to improve the candidate experience

Around 99% of companies that participated in a survey said that they used applicant tracking software (ATS), which comprised of assessment systems and reference checking systems. This indicates that hiring technology is used by most companies. This technology, however, has to be used correctly to provide benefits to both the applicant and the company during the hiring process.

In order to get the most out of candidate relationship management  tools, it must be combined with a human touch. Unfortunately, 85% of applicants who were unsuccessful had doubts about whether the applications were seen or reviewed by human beings.

Human interaction can include personalized automated emails and SMS, in-person meetings or phone calls. An absence of any of this types of communication could portray your company in a negative light to job applicants. In order to provide exceptional candidate experiences, your company needs to make the most of modern hiring software that provides some form of human relatability.

In fact, at Fountain, we have found that automation and artificial intelligence does not replace recruiters. Instead, it makes them better.

Request a free and personalized demo of Fountain today to find out how our modern hiring software platform could increase your candidate engagement while boosting your recruiters’ efficiency.

Key elements of candidate relationship management systems

• Recruiting CRM database. Generally, a recruiting CRM system is similar to an empty spreadsheet. The database has various fields and needs to be configured according to your company’s needs.

• Dossier or profile. The main part of a recruiting CRM is the individual candidate’s profile or record. This shows all the different types of information that is collected about the candidates, which includes social media reports and the amount of contacts made with each candidate. These types of information make contacting the applicants more effective. Keeping detailed records of how and when a candidate has been contacted allows recruiters to manage individual contacts more efficiently.

• Categorization tagging. Tagging makes it easy to group candidates based on different criteria. For example, some companies can tag by job titles or job requisitions. Sometimes broader categories can be used, like sales, engineer or operations.

• Campaign management. This aspect of the recruiting CRM enables recruiters to manage how an email campaign is used while they update the individual records of the candidates. These campaigns can also include phone calls, webinars and face-to-face meetings.

• Schedule integration. Individual profiles of candidates need to show which meetings and appointments have been scheduled, along with useful notes. The scheduling integration can be utilized with calendars, emails and different tools to set appointments and interviews.

• CRM and ATS. The end goal of a recruitingCRM is that the candidate should be easily tracked in the ATS. Therefore, your CRM and ATS need to effectively integrate and communicate with each other.

What’s the difference between CRM and ATS

A recruiting CRM nurtures the relationship with passive candidates with the aim of converting them to actual applicants. An ATS, however, is used to process applications by using a conventional recruitment workflow. A recruiting CRM is a system of all active and passive candidates, which includes candidates who have applied previously.

Candidate relationship management tools help recruiters to manage their candidates’ skills by segmenting different categories. Recruiters are also able to nurture passive talent by using targeted messaging to encourage candidate engagement, during the phase before the applicants enter the hiring process. An ATS is concerned with dealing with applications that have been received after a job has been advertised.

Conclusion: What is candidate relationship management?

The best candidate experience is no longer something that is optional for companies. Candidates value clear and timely communication with some level of personalization in order to feel that your company values their application. From a candidate’s point of view, the value that is placed on the application process will translate to how the company will treat the applicant if they start working with the company.

If you are looking to provide the best hiring experience for your on-demand, hourly or gig workers, sign up today for a free trial of Fountain to benefit from our expertise in recruiting the best candidates, faster. This is all while ensuring that your company is represented in the best light to every candidate.