Think about every interaction you have as a recruiter—interviews, meetings, emails, phone calls, and text messages. Having a recruitment CRM software in place helps you automate a large part of these interactions while keeping them relevant and personalized. 

A recruitment CRM software is an efficient system to attract top talent and engage candidates. That’s why most recruiting businesses turn to recruitment CRM software to win the talent war, nurture relationships with candidates, and streamline the recruitment process. 

But, what about managing your clients? 

When you’re scaling a recruiting business, you can end up spending a ton of time sending cold emails to prospects. In fact, even when you’ve onboarded a new client, you need timely communication to build a successful relationship. 

A client emails you their hiring requirements; after you shortlist the candidates based on these requirements, you send an email notifying them; and so on. You can set up automated email sequences to save yourself valuable time that you’d otherwise invest in manually sending out updates and following up with prospects.

The good news is recruitment CRM software can help you do all of that. You just need the right approach to use it. 

In this article, we’ll outline the importance of CRM in recruitment, suggest a tool that fits in your tech stack, help you build a 4-step lean approach to recruiting, and answer a few questions about how a recruitment CRM software works. 

Why is CRM important in recruitment?

A recruitment CRM (aka, customer relationship management) software incorporates all of the recruiting processes and operations related to maintaining a talent pool, sourcing qualified candidates, nurturing relationships, winning deals faster for your recruiting business, and so on. 

A recruitment CRM empowers teams to segment audiences, track performance, and organize work. Think of it as a single source of truth (SSOT) that helps all the stakeholders stay on track, improve cross-functional collaboration, and make better decisions. 

It might seem slightly overwhelming at first to work with a CRM in your recruiting business. So it’s important that you adopt an easy-to-use and powerful platform like Recruiterflow that is widely used by small to large-sized recruiting agencies. An intuitive interface combined with intelligent automation makes Recruiterflow a true recruitment CRM software to use.  

There are many different ways a recruitment CRM can help you: 

• Win clients faster with more relevant, targeted information – Maybe some prospects know all about your recruiting business and are one email away from a decision. Or maybe your sales team already contacted them and they’re not looking to engage at the moment— you might want to keep them in your list for future communications. Others may simply need more information to learn about your hiring workflows before making a final decision. A CRM will help you connect with prospects effectively by showing them the right information they need to move forward in the recruiting sales funnel. 

• Nurture and educate your candidates – Sending a “thank you for applying” email isn’t going to cut it anymore—you need to nurture your candidates better to ensure you don’t lose out on top talent and give them a delightful candidate experience. Ask yourself, “What do candidates need to know before each stage of the hiring process?”. A CRM can help you nurture relationships based on the candidate’s recruitment stage, then personalize your emails to educate them further. 

• Improve and optimize hiring workflows – A good recruitment CRM software will help you draw insightful data from your recruitment dashboard—the best channels that get you the most candidates, high-performing recruiters, revenue per recruiter, time to fill, progress in specific pipelines, candidate journeys, and so on. You can use this data to optimize your future hiring campaigns and get better results. 

With benefits like these, it’s no surprise why more recruiters are adopting a recruitment CRM tool. It’s worth pointing out that not every CRM is built the same—each and every recruitment CRM platform differs in its features, use cases, and pricing. We’ll get to this later in the article. 

How to use a recruitment CRM in 4 simple steps 

One of the worst things that can happen with a CRM is when it’s too loaded for your needs— lots of features, complicated automation, thousands of integrations, and more. 

Imagine if you’re a staffing agency looking to scale from a team of 20 recruiters to 50, would you really need such a complex tool to begin with to improve collaboration or streamline processes? 

If you want to use automation, and you want it fast, you need a lean approach that helps you cut down on any unnecessary tasks and keeps your team laser focused on things of higher importance. Not only do platforms like Recruiterflow come with all the features you’ll need to automate various parts of your hiring process, but also give tons of customization and user control access that will help you build recruiting pipelines and focus on client management. 

Let’s take a closer look at how you can take a lean approach to use a recruitment CRM software and not overwhelm your team: 

Step 1: Start by creating valuable content for your email campaigns 

If you’re looking to increase email open rates, provide a better candidate experience, or simply reduce repeatable tasks from your to-do list, start by working on your email campaigns. Start by creating email templates that matches your candidates’ hiring stages. 

Let’s say, for example, a candidate is rejected at the interview stage. Create a candidate rejection email campaign that includes 2-3 emails covering different information. 

Email 1: Notify the candidate that they’ve been rejected and share constructive feedback from the interviewer  

Email 2: Send more job opportunities similar to the role they applied for

Email 3: Ask them for a review 

Another example could be automating your client communications like updating them about new candidates. To fast-track this process, you can even use pre-built automation email templates and personalize fields in your recruitment CRM directly.  

Step 2: Build intelligent rule-based automation 

Say the hiring manager is working on a project for a new hiring requirement when she realizes that she needs to assign a task to someone who isn’t yet a collaborator on the project. Instead of opening up the project dashboard to send them an invite, she can automatically invite all relevant stakeholders, assign tasks, and send emails for every hiring project by using the Recipes feature in Recruiterflow. 

These recruiting automation workflows increase efficiency by reducing the amount of time spent on manual, repeatable tasks in your recruiting process. This could be especially useful if your team handles tons of tasks and things fall through the cracks—forgetting to schedule events, replying to emails, following up with clients, and more. 

To create rule-based automation, you need to identify the trigger and actions:

Trigger: The event that kicks off the automation

Action: The action the software will take after the trigger has been activated.  

While recruiting automation workflows can be extremely powerful and save your team’s efforts and time, building them needs a lot of precision and foresight. That’s why you need to start small and create smaller automation workflows. Test it out. Experiment with different triggers and actions. Repeat. 

Step 3: Design customizable hiring pipelines 

Recruiting is all about managing candidates and generating new leads. Modern recruitment CRM software tends to provide customizable pipeline management. This way, you can quickly get a glance at your candidates’ journey and easily understand the health of your pipeline. 

Your team can answer burning questions like- how many qualified candidates were sourced, how many candidates rejected the offer letter, and others.

Building pipelines shouldn’t take days. Your recruitment CRM should provide the features you need to fully set up in a couple of minutes. 

Recruiterflow does this by providing you with customizable hiring pipelines with drag and drop interface. You can structure all the steps involved in a hiring process—from the first touchpoint with the candidate to finally accepting the offer.  

Step 4: Track metrics to improve performance 

It’s easy to guess what’s working for your business. But assuming things based on high-level information can often lead to longer time to fill, siloed teams, and churn. 

Recruitment CRM software offers a detailed analytics and metrics dashboard through which you can figure out exactly what’s happening within your teams, individual hiring pipelines, and client deals. You can identify which platforms get you the most candidates, what’s the conversion rate for clients, measure the interview-to-hired ratio, and more. 

One of the things about Recruiterflow is that it helps you dive deeper into useful analytics and generate reports. You can identify bottlenecks in your recruiting process and work on opportunities to hire faster and improve candidate experience. 

Recruiterflow: Best CRM for recruitment agencies 

It doesn’t matter how many features a recruitment CRM software offers if they’re too complex for your needs. Or if a platform is easy to use, but doesn’t provide flexibility to your team to build automated email sequences and get relevant data about your recruiting processes. 

At Recruiterflow, we’ve built a platform that caters to the needs of fast-growing recruiting companies. Create a simple and effective recruiting pipeline on Recruiterflow. Since it’s a web-based, flexible, and customizable platform, you can set it up in just a few minutes. 

Sign up for a free trial today and see how our recruitment CRM software can start working for you.