Recruitment Technology – Why is the CRM Market so Difficult to Navigate?

For the entire time I’ve been running the UK Recruiter site and forums people have asked for help on choosing a recruitment database. There are hundreds of CRM products on the UK market and it’s challenging, to say the least, to know what to go for.

I’ve been approached by a new product vendor who are about to launch yu:talent and they’ve asked me to review the product. I thought a little review and summary of the current situation in the market might be useful ahead of me taking a look.

So what exactly is a CRM? In general business terms it stands for customer relationship management and is a tool for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. Inhouse recruiters use a business CRM as well as an ATS (applicant tracking system). For agency recruiters the CRM is the customer (candidate and client) relationship tool as well as the recruitment process tracking and quite often a multitude of other things. I’ll come onto some of those shortly.

Then there is the question of all these hosting options. In the old days your CRM was based on a server in your own offices with ‘dumb terminals’ giving you access, then the internet came along and SaaS and The Cloud started confusing everyone. These days some CRMs are still server based but most are moving to the cloud. This generally makes for easier integration, higher security, lower cost of ownership and obviously more flexibility about where you use the product.

What should your CRM do?
I think I’ll write a later post about how to choose a CRM but if you are looking at functionality here is a great list from Recruiter.com’s 2013 report on software trends.

The core functions that recruiting software vendors typically address:

1. Applicant database and tracking (recruiter activity)
2. Assessment
3. Background verification
4. Candidate communication
5. Career site
6. Client and company activity tracking (CRM-like functionality)
7. Compensation
8. Compliance and EEO / OFCCP handing
9. Employee referrals
10. Internal team collaboration (hiring managers and team leaders)
11. Job distribution
12. Mobile deployment
13. Onboarding
14. Performance
15. Recruiter performance reporting
16. Recruiting vendor management and referral tracking
17. Recruitment marketing analytics
18. Requisition approval and workflow
19. Social distribution and social recruiting
20. Sourcing
21. Succession
22. Planning
23. Talent Management

I’d be interesting to see if any products tick all those boxes – but those that don’t should allow for easy integration with other products and the connectivity of internal systems.

We do a couple of technology events a year and I see at least a dozen CRMs in detail at those. Bullhorn and BondAdapt are still the big players in the market. I see Colleague and Arithon as making great efforts in technology development and relationship building and a new player I also quite like is FireFish. Companies like Voyager, Microdec and IQX continue to grow their market share within their niches too. I’m certainly keen to check out this new kid on the block in the form of yu:talent!