The Magic Of Recruitment CRM In A World Of Virtual Work
The pandemic accelerated existing trends in virtual work, automation, and the recruitment industry. This has led to companies trying to adopt new behavior revolving around technologies like a recruitment CRM.
Sectors like finance, management, professional services, and IT have the highest potential, with more than half of employee time spent on activities that can be effectively done remotely. Data suggests that about 20% to 25% of the workforce could ditch the morning commute and work from home between three and five days a week. And this has brought a radical change in the way companies manage recruitment.
Also, check 5 Reasons You Need a CRM For Recruitment
Now, these trends like virtual work and automation are here to stay, and for good reasons.
The Future Of Recruiting In Virtual Work Is Adaptive
Organizations are changing their recruiting strategies, processes, and allocation of resources, moving from a company-centric to a candidate-centric orientation. This has led to a shift from analog systems to hyperautomated, digital-first engagement with candidates and clients.
Solutions like CRM help make automated, algorithm-based decisions making, and align your recruitment process, pipelines, and selling capabilities around clients. In recruiting, they automate various manual, time-intensive tasks such as communicating with candidates, updating clients, and more.
As virtual interactions with employees increase, companies need to find ways to attract and influence top talent. A good place to start is conducting a talent mapping exercise. It helps companies assess their existing workforce, create an ideal candidate persona, learn competitors’ hiring strategies, and ensure they have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Do You Need A Recruitment CRM For Your Executive Search Firm?
Short answer? Yes.
Long answer. Hear us out.
The main benefits of using a recruitment CRM is that you’ll finish more recruitment projects on time, accelerate your overall project speed, and scale your business quickly.
Research reveals that 78% of employers say using an applicant tracking system makes finding great talent easier than ever. Executive search firms that use recruitment software have more successful projects and hire faster in less time.
If you’re thinking, “but we don’t have large projects, does that mean we don’t need recruiting software?”
Using recruitment agency software regardless of the size of your firm can have a transformative effect on your productivity and collaboration. This, in turn, enables you to deliver better and faster results for your clients and candidates.
Also, check 5 ways to improve your recruiting productivity
Imagine this. You have a small-sized recruiting firm with 3-4 recruiters. They spend a ton of time doing manual entry work, sending updates, creating reports, and so on. If they’re able to automate at least a part of each of these tasks, they’ll save a lot of quality time. Then, they can focus on nurturing better relationships with clients, hire more quality candidates, and perform efficiently even for bulk-hiring projects.
This is exactly how you scale your staffing agency, especially in a virtual work environment where companies are expanding globally.
It isn’t enough to tell your recruiters, “work together more, folks!” That’s not going to bring any actual results or efficient systems where you can get things done. They will probably nod along and get back to how they’ve always handled projects. That’s when a recruitment CRM comes in.
Also, check Are you equipped for the new and better way of doing recruitment?
With a recruitment CRM, you can recruit and combine talent globally, across functional departments. For example, you can source high-quality candidates faster and automate hiring journeys, interview scheduling, and even communications with clients.
Benefits of using a recruitment CRM tool in virtual work
Whether you’re a small recruiting agency or a full-fledged executive search firm, recruitment CRM tools can help you organize, manage, and streamline your recruiting workflows efficiently.
Now, let’s look at some of the concrete benefits of using a recruitment CRM tool –
1. Centralized data helps build a single source of truth (SSOT)
It’s not uncommon for recruiters to find themselves using several different tools for various tasks: sourcing, interviewing, interview scheduling, collaboration, and more.
However, with a recruitment CRM, you build a single source of truth (SSOT). A single source of truth is a standardized source of operating information that everyone in the organization agrees is true and trusted.
Think of it like this. Instead of pulling data and analytics from multiple sources, you get to see the entire picture of how each hiring pipeline is progressing. Also, it shows how your team is working together in a recruitment dashboard.
With a single source of truth, recruiters move faster, avoid data duplication, and hire faster while they scale. They can view their candidates’ status or job openings without having to spend time searching for each communication spread across emails, spreadsheets, or files.
A recruitment CRM helps you build this SSOT in your recruitment organization. And a single source of truth goes beyond just the operational ease – it plays a crucial role in building company culture and helping you scale faster.
In a remote, asynchronous environment, a single source of truth can help ease communication, enhance collaboration and keep them engaged in their shared mission.
2. Reduced manual workload, higher efficiency
Recruitment projects often have many repetitive or recurring tasks. And the most efficient way to handle them is by automation.
With a recruitment CRM, you can eliminate a lot of unnecessary manual data entry. For example, you can use a Chrome extension to source candidates with one click.
So, instead of filling out candidate details like name, job status, company, skills, contact details, and more – you could simply use an extension to fetch all that data into your dashboard.
3. Organize and Optimize For Client and Candidate Outcomes Rather Than Operational Ease
Every recruiter has unique needs from a recruitment CRM. We’ve seen some of our customers use it to bring advanced automation to their hiring processes, while others use it to optimize their internal workflow to offer a better experience to candidates and clients. It really is ‘To each to their own.’
Every recruitment firm or even an individual recruiter has a defined goal. And using a powerful recruitment tool can help you reach that goal effectively and efficiently.
Regardless of what your goal is – to hire more quality candidates, hire faster, use automation, or adopt a centralized platform – a good recruitment software will also help you improve your collaboration with candidates and clients. This, in turn, will help you optimize the results for your candidates and clients.
How? It’s simple.
75% of applicants never hear back from employers after applying for a job, and 60 percent never hear back from employers after an interview. As a recruiter, you might have a lot of irons in the fire, but your candidates deserve to know their recruitment progress. If they’re rejected, you should be able to follow up with them and share interview feedback.
When you’re slammed with manual work, you don’t have time to attend to each applicant individually. We get that. But, when you automate a large chunk of your daily emails and tasks, you can focus on building better relationships with your candidates.
Clients, on the other hand, need progress reports and status updates. Recruitment tools make it easy to find information on different projects, job postings, candidates, and important metrics in one place. So, creating project reports and sending status updates becomes much easier and faster.
4. Faster Time To Fill Rate
You’d be surprised to know that the average time to fill a job is 42 days, according to the Human Capital Benchmark report by SHRM. However, the average time to fill varies across industries. For instance, the average time to fill a position in logistics may be longer than the average time to fill a job at an IT company.
A good recruitment CRM helps you at each stage of your hiring process. It lets you build proactive hiring pipelines and eliminate manual data entry work.
For example, you could automate interview scheduling and eliminate the need for back and forth with applicants. Or you could build a talent pipeline that helps you reach out to the right people when looking to fill specific job positions.
5. Cost-Effective Than Running A Physical Office
As a recruiter, you might spend ungodly amounts of time and money on managing your on-premise recruitment software.
By baking in cloud-based recruitment software in your tech stack, you can bring down operational costs significantly. In fact, in the virtual work era where most companies are comfortable with distributed teams connecting over a VPN network, a good recruitment CRM is a cost-effective way to run your recruitment firm.
With cloud-based recruitment software, you typically pay on a subscription basis. This means you can pay an annual or monthly fee for it. Moreover, you get customer support and automatic upgrades – which are included in your total cost.
Features To Look For In A Recruitment CRM
When you’re managing a virtual, asynchronous team of recruiters, it’s important to use a premium-quality recruitment CRM. A powerful recruitment agency software can fuel your organization’s operations – especially collaboration and sales – and set you up for success.
There are tons of recruitment software available out there. But each of them differs in terms of their ease of use, functionality, integrations, and cost.
Let’s take a look at the four most important recruitment CRM features for distributed teams.
Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
When choosing a recruiting agency software, you need to use one that covers all your needs by allowing you to source candidates, post job listings on multiple job boards and social media networks and manages your end-to-end hiring pipelines. Or else, you risk your systems working in silos leading to reduced efficiency and speed in hiring.
If your recruitment software includes an applicant tracking system (ATS), you’ll be able to source candidates directly, manage great volumes of incoming applications, and keep all the candidates’ information centralized and organized.
That said, a key feature of an ATS is its agility to meet your future recruitment needs. So, while your company may be small right now, you need a tool that’s capable of handling larger hiring workflows – without costing you speed and quality of hires. Moreover, it should be intuitive, so your recruiters and hiring managers genuinely enjoy using the tool.
Automated workflows
As the recruitment manager of a distributed team, you’ll already be facing challenges related to collaboration, scheduling, pipeline management, allocation, and other hurdles. What if you could remove manual tasks from at least a portion of your workflows?
By choosing a recruitment CRM that lets you automate repetitive tasks, you’ll get two major benefits. Firstly, since automated workflows are completely accurate, you eliminate the risk of human error like delayed communications or entry errors. Secondly, automating workflows frees up human resources to focus on more important tasks, like building relationships with clients.
The right recruitment CRM lets you visualize your workflow easily. Visualizing your hiring workflows lets you know exactly where your candidates are in the pipeline and what you need to complete next.
Analytics
Analytics in recruitment is more than just your time-to-till. Often, hiring success directly correlates to business success.
With the right technology, you can track, record, report, and analyze important recruiting reports to recognize meaningful patterns. Insights from your hiring pipelines can help you manage your recruiting teams more effectively, improve candidate experience, and produce better results for clients.
Data-driven selling is the next step for many organizations: 60% of B2B sales organizations plan to transition from experience- and intuition-informed selling to data-driven processes in the next five years. Still, companies see many challenges standing between their current state and a data-driven future.
Integrations
The virtual work environment is all about your team’s ability to do their job by collaborating and communicating with others. Here, the goal is to find a recruitment CRM that supports integrations with applications your team uses every day.
For example, does it integrate with your advert posting tool and show real-time updates of the candidates who apply for your jobs? Does it offer a Chrome extension to source candidates and add them to your recruiting dashboard? Can you connect business applications like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and others to streamline your communication?
Simply put, all of your team members should be able to access and use their existing applications (tech stack) with the chosen software. You’ll want to avoid software that offers little integrations or is limited to use in particular countries.
Here’s What You Can Do With Recruiterflow
Recruiterflow is a powerhouse recruitment agency software that enables recruiters to hire better and scale faster. It’s much more than an ATS and recruitment CRM for executive search firms.
With a complete suite of features, Recruiterflow helps you streamline your hiring pipelines, automate the movement of different stages through these pipelines, and help boost speed and productivity.
For example, you can create a recipe on your CRM board that will automatically notify candidates about their hiring status – application status, skills and assessment tests, interview scheduling, and more.
You can set up alerts to notify team members each time there’s an update at any stage of the hiring process. Automatically being notified when a task or stage is complete – and assigned to you – means that:
- Every stakeholder related to that task now has the latest update and can move on to other things.
- The person responsible for taking charge next can jump into work immediately.
This ensures that your team works faster to complete more projects. Especially with virtual work, you’ve got more challenging business needs. And having a platform that is aligned to your goals and ready to help you solve your problems anytime is a great option.
Acclaimed software review site Capterra has given Recruiterflow a 4.7 out of 5 score, which is a coalition of several authentic reviews of our user interface, automation, and customer support.
With Recruiterflow’s unified platform, you can easily create various custom workflows, and notification alerts, and see where each hiring process stands in real-time. Say goodbye to manual data entry, laggy communication systems, or back-and-forth calls with team members.
To see how Recruiterflow can help your recruiting business, start your free 14-day trial today.
