If you’re struggling to place more candidates, more frequently with more clients, taking an inbound recruitment approach, you can connect with passive and active job seekers, engage with their network, and delight candidates and clients throughout the application and hire process. A CRM is a tool that makes it easy as pie to build better relationships, nurture your leads and in turn place more candidates with more roles! This article from Hubspot Specialist Catch The Cat Marketing looks at how a CRM can give your recruitment agency a competitive edge.
What is a CRM?
“What is a CRM?” I hear you say. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.
For recruitment companies, your most valuable asset is your database. It’s common in recruitment companies for these details, about those customers; who they are, how they’ve interacted with your organization, to be spread out in different places.
Your prospects and customers will feel the pain if your team isn’t on the same page.
From your candidate or clients perspective, they have a relationship with one unified company, not a collection of different people in different departments.
Everyone in your team should have visibility to every client/candidates needs, wants and current state, so they can pick up the conversation where it left off.
What if we told you, you could achieve this?
A central hub of all of your clients and candidates information, contact details and interactions with your brand, that’s easy for every member of your team to gain access to- what a dream!
Inbound Recruitment
The best employees out there aren’t always looking for a job, and if they are, they might not be considering your company as a place to grow their career.
The way people find, research, and apply for jobs has changed- as a result of this so should the way you recruit.
Over 75% of job seekers now start their search on Google. It’s easier and faster than ever to discover what a workplace is like, which positions are available, and even find salary information.
Recruiters need to think more like marketers to create an engaging, helpful candidate and client experience. By setting out to attract potential employees and educate them with helpful content at the right time in their recruitment process.
This is called Inbound Recruitment.
Leading CRM software; HubSpot– pioneered the inbound recruitment methodology. The image below breaks down each stage of the recruitment process.
Inbound recruiting creates a remarkable candidate experience through employer brand content and marketing strategies that help companies build relationships with top talent.
Your CRM software is going to be your secret weapon and competitive edge, things that would have been labour intensive, become automated and joyful.
A Competitive Edge
Your database is likely to contain two distinct customer types; clients and candidates.
These customer types can then break down further into buyer personas.
Without segmenting your candidates from your clients you risk damaging your relationship with each audience by sending the wrong message.
For example, if you send out a list of job openings to potential clients, this could leave your clients feeling resentful, as the content isn’t relevant to them.
Your CRM allows you to send targeted messages to each buyer persona, instead of using a blanket message approach for your whole database. Instead you can identify at which stage in the recruitment process your clients/candidates are, so you can communicate with them in the right way.
There are a whole host of tools as part of a CRM that are extremely beneficial to a recruiting agency, helping you place more candidates, more frequently to more clients whilst making your teams lives 10000x easier in the process.
These tools include:
- Social media management & listening tools i.e. Hootsuite
- Email Marketing i.e. MailChimp
- Automation workflows i.e. HubSpot
- Paid for advertisement i.e. Facebook & Instagram
- SEO & more i.e. Google Adwords
We’re going to use our age-old analogy of walking into a bar and talking out loud until someone responds. You wouldn’t do it.
You would tailor your message dependent on the person you’re trying to have a conversation with.
If you haven’t already, read our last article on how to use personalisation to resonate with your candidates and clients, you can read it here!
Your CRM should encompass multi-channel marketing for job seekers and passive candidates to engage with your company on a variety of platforms and channels.
This allows you to be able to track your candidate/client journey with your agency,.
- Have they liked a tweet about recent job positions?
- Opened and clicked your email?
- Downloaded an E-book?
All of these track able interactions with your agency give you a rounded, holistic view on how ready they are to be placed or to hire.
The more interactions with you the more likely they are to be ready to start looking for a new role or looking to hire.
Your CRM does all the legwork for you, allowing you to be a better recruiter.
If your business doesn’t already use a CRM, what are you waiting for?!
Do you want to cut time spent chasing leads from channel to channel and place more candidates more frequently, with more clients?
As a HubSpot Preferred Partner we have a whole host of knowledge to divulge to you whether it’s to learn more about inbound marketing, or HubSpot.
Written by Ella-Rose Andrews, Inbound Recruitment Specialist at Catch the Cat Marketing.
