Candidate Relationship Management Software: Why is it Vital to Improve Candidate Experience?

The recruitment industry has significantly evolved over the last decade. While the primary reason is an exponentially rising demand for quality talent, candidate expectations too, have significantly transformed. As an employer, ensuring a great candidate experience is necessary today. So building relationships and engaging candidates become a critical part of recruitment.

A positive candidate experience makes a candidate 38% more likely to accept a job offer from a company. But that’s not the only positive – it directly impacts your personal brand, and hence, the quality of talent that you acquire.

Talent hunters are now competing in a virtual race with their competitors. Considering the deep influence of candidate experience, planned candidate relationship management is the most optimal strategy to stand out. But recruiters today already have more than enough on their plate - continuously engaging and tracking candidates manually can be further overwhelming. The road to redemption? Scale your engagement efforts smoothly using candidate relationship management (CRM) software.

Wondering what exactly a CRM solution helps you with? And why do you need it over the existing ATS platforms? We will answer all of these and more in the blog. Stick around for an insightful discussion about candidate relationship management.

What is Candidate Relationship Management Software?

At its core, candidate relationship management is a process of maintaining a positive relationship with candidates in your talent pipeline. From identifying qualified candidates to engaging them proactively, a CRM strategy covers all you need to do in order to stay at the top of their mind.

63% of job seekers reject a job offer in case of poor candidate experience. It’s quite evident that this approach is vital to fulfilling the current and future talent requirements of your organization. Let’s now find out what is candidate relationship management software and how it help in improving the candidate experience.

In their quest to hire top talent, recruitment teams broadly chase two objectives:

sourcing quality talent, and
engaging their talent pool positively to ensure talent retention and serve great candidate experience.

A candidate relationship management (CRM) system is a recruiting software used by talent teams to manage candidate engagement activities in an organization. With a combination of automation and centralized access to all the touchpoints of the recruitment journey, a company can maintain healthy relationships with candidates over time and consistently hire quality talent.

A recruitment CRM software is considerably similar to a customer relationship management tool which is used to keep track of all touchpoints in the buying journey. From leads to engagement – a relationship management tool automates the repeated tasks, provides a high-level view of the entire pipeline, and helps measure the performance using relevant engagement metrics.

Suppose you’re hiring for a role at your company, and before sourcing candidates externally - you decide to first evaluate the company’s database to find qualified talent. A candidate relationship tool would be particularly handy here as you can instantly get all the candidates with the required skills and qualifications, check their previous engagement activity, and find their details. Once you are convinced of those candidates, you can simply launch outreach and nurture campaigns using the recruitment CRM tool. Further, if a candidate is interested, you will be notified and they will be moved forward in the recruiting process.

Here’s how a comprehensive candidate relationship management software helps your business hire and retain top talent efficiently:

Automates outreach and engagement messaging for all your candidates
Moves candidates consistently through the recruitment funnel
Enables easy collaboration among recruitment teams so that they stay in sync
Provides a complete overview of the recruitment pipeline along with candidate status, sourcing and engagement analytics
Notifies you in case of candidate response and engagement
Helps to hire managers interview, evaluate and select candidates quickly and conveniently
Creates a talent pool for future hiring purposes

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Why is a Candidate Relationship Management Software Critical for Your Recruitment?

From a birds-eye view, candidate relationship software helps recruitment teams find and hire the right talent. Additionally, it also enables passive talent engagement at scale. The key to successful talent acquisition lies in the strength of your talent pipeline - there’s no doubt about that. So establishing and maintaining quality relationships with candidates becomes even more important.

However, a recruitment CRM has multi-dimensional benefits. It not only helps manage an applicant’s end-to-end recruitment journey but also takes care of the mundane repetitive tasks that take up most of the recruitment teams’ time. From quick talent sourcing to thoroughly automating processes like email nurturing, interview scheduling, and contracts – a CRM tool makes life a whole lot easier for hiring teams.

Especially in case of large-scale hiring needs, you need to ensure you’re engaging numerous talent pools – and which efforts of your recruiting teams are yielding the best results. Candidate relationship software helps you track the right metrics reflecting your sourcing, engaging and relationship-building performance

Let’s now take a look at the top 5 reasons why you need candidate relationship management software for your recruitment.

Build Talent Pools Seamlessly

The primary purpose of maintaining a database of sourced candidate profiles is to build an internal talent pool for your company. In order to maximize your recruitment outcomes, you need to proactively build and nurture a pool of passive candidates who are qualified to meet your hiring criteria.

More than 73% of the overall workforce today consists of passive job seekers. Hence, you need a candidate relationship management solution along with a strategy that takes care of both active and passive talent engagement. This is specifically useful for roles with extensive competition and hence, are tough to fill, like tech hiring these days.

A recruitment CRM solution provides you with much more than just a database. It’s a comprehensive automated system that helps in expanding, nurturing, and recruiting your talent pool.

Automate Personalized Engagement

One of the most crucial factors impacting candidate experience is engagement – which needs to be both timely and personalized. Generic messages sent to the masses don’t work anymore. So you not only need to communicate frequently to your target candidates but effectively too. A candidate relationship software allows you to automate your personalized engagement and scale your recruiting efforts.

Right from the beginning – outreach to nurture campaigns (until the candidate finally applies) to recruitment cycle updates, reminders, and progress tracking - a candidate relationship management software automates all the mundane tasks of various recruitment stages.

This not only helps you level up your recruitment but also keeps candidates informed about their hiring progress – which adds up immensely to a positive candidate experience.

Boost Recruiting Team’s Productivity

80% of surveyed executives believe automation can significantly boost their team’s productivity. From the sourcing stage to engagement, screening, interviewing, hiring and onboarding – recruitment teams have a lot to do at any given point in time. As a recruiter, you wouldn’t want to continuously manage and track the talent pipeline - given how much time it takes.

Having a candidate relationship management system in place ensures your recruitment teams focus on the more human side of recruiting. To break it down further – recruiting CRM helps you focus on interacting and interviewing candidates rather than manually maintaining the recruitment pipeline. Especially, when you’re hiring for multiple roles – automation extensively boosts your productivity.

Strengthen Your Employer Brand

What do you think largely drives people’s decision to work with you or to apply for a job at your company? It’s the employer brand – how the external workforce sees you as an employer of choice. A number of factors contribute to a successful employer brand, candidate experience being the biggest one.

82% of candidates consider employer brand and reputation before applying for a job. A positive recruitment experience for candidates, regardless of the results, helps you spread the word about your company’s hiring culture. Additionally, quality candidate experience also conveys how deeply you value your employees.

If you’re wondering how recruitment CRM software boosts employer brand – it promises consistent, error-free, and quality engagement with your candidates - and hence delightful experiences.

Optimize Time and Cost of Hiring

Time and cost of hiring are two of the most crucial recruitment metrics. No matter how big an organization is, optimizing the cost and time of hiring is always a core recruitment objective. With end-to-end automation using CRM software, the productivity of the recruitment team increases, and the average time required to hire candidates is substantially cut off. Not to forget – having a CRM tool saves a lot of repeated work like sourcing candidates again when you have talent requirements, and hence cost is significantly reduced too.

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Top 5 Candidate Engagement Strategies to Follow for Effective Hiring

We have already discussed the impact of candidate engagement and how huge a role positive candidate experience plays in hiring top talent. As per a survey, when candidates were asked if they ever decline a job offer and why did they do so – 58% of them said it was due to a negative candidate experience.

Recruiters need to understand that they’re not the only ones chasing and recruiting those candidates. The talent market is trickier than ever before, and the only way to ensure you stay in line with your company’s hiring requirements is by following a candidate-centric approach.

Engagement now drives your recruitment funnel – helps you deliver a prolific candidate experience and positively impacts your employer brand. Let’s now dive deep into the top 5 engagement strategies you must follow to boost candidate experience and amplify your hiring outcomes.

#1 Frame a Hiring Timeline

The topmost reason for candidates to drop off a recruitment funnel or not even apply for a job is long recruitment cycles. Every company has a unique set of steps in their recruitment journey. However, to attract and retain quality candidates through a great candidate experience - you need to pre-define the complete hiring timeline for your recruitment process.

Talent acquisition is not a straightforward process, but recruiters must inform candidates well in advance about the recruitment process and the timeline to set their expectations right. Also, ensure that you mostly stick to the timeline and not just share with candidates for the sake of it.

#2 Ensure Clear & Consistent Communication

Over 96% of job applicants expect atleast a confirmation email once they apply for a job - but only 8% get this. Even some of the basic requirements of candidates have been long ignored but as times are changing, recruiters need to tweak our strategies too.

Right from the beginning, stay consistent with your engagement and communication activities -

Inform candidates about each step of your recruitment process
Share updates and regular reminders related to their recruitment progress
Be transparent and let each candidate know about their results (yes, even rejected ones) as soon as the outcomes are in your hand
Execute multiple nurture campaigns for passive talent pool

#3 Review Fast and Respond Faster

Not only has the attention span of consumers dropped significantly – but candidates too, now expect recruiting cycles to be shorter and faster. Hence you need to cater to these requirements and review applications quickly to move candidates toward the interview stages faster.

On the other hand, make sure you respond to candidates within a few hours in case they have any queries or want to know the updates on recruitment rounds. The pace at which you push candidates throughout the hiring funnel directly impacts the candidate experience and hence your recruitment.

#4 Regular Feedback

The most underrated element of recruitment – is feedback. Not only does it give a brief overview of a candidate’s performance, but it also helps recruitment teams evaluate their efficiency. In order to serve a prolific candidate experience, seek regular feedback on the different rounds of interviews, guidance, support, and convenience offered to candidates along the way.

Not to forget – give consistent feedback to all candidates for their performance during screening, evaluation, interview rounds, and other interactive touchpoints. It will further boost candidate experience.

#5 Level Up with Automated CRM Software

Handling all the recruitment – sourcing, engagement, and pipeline management tasks manually can be easily overwhelming for your recruiting team. It also harms their productivity.

The optimal way through is to use a reliable automated solution for streamlining your candidate relationship experience management. From adding profiles to the talent pool to running different nurture campaigns and engaging with talent consistently - sophisticated CRM software takes care of your entire recruitment pipeline.

Supercharge Your Candidate Experience & Engagement with Nurturebox

Why settle for high efforts and mediocre results when you can get the best results wih minimal recruitment efforts? Nurturebox is an end-to-end talent sourcing and engagement platform that enables you and your recruitment teams to scale up their hiring seamlessly.

With a one-stop platform for sourcing profiles from LinkedIn, reaching out to candidates via multiple channels, engaging them with multiple campaigns, and analyzing your candidate engagement performance – Nurturebox is the comprehensive automated CRM tool you need.