Importance of Candidate Management
Talent is the core pillar on which a company’s future is built. Hiring the best talent plays a big role in creating a powerful competitive advantage for any company. However, many companies miss out on signing the best talent due to mismanagement of the candidate relationship during the hiring process. Most of the companies are unaware about the importance and knowhow of maintaining good relationships with candidates, right from the hiring process to onboarding. This leads to both wasting of time and effort, while also proving to be costly.
In this article, we will showcase why Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) is so crucial for companies and highlight the best practices to be adopted for CRM.
Candidate Relationship Management Process
When a company is looking to hire new staff, it is essentially adding more steel to their foundation. The right talent fit is important for the company to grow, while ensuring that the company operations are managed well. In today’s world many companies face big competition not just for local talent, but also to attract international talent to work for them. The best candidates have many suitors. And these candidates pay a lot of attention to the interaction with the company’s representatives and the efficiency of the hiring process.
However, there is a lack of awareness of robust CRM among the recruitment and Human Resources teams in most companies. A strong process supported by digital tools can go a long way in improving the way a company handles its relationships with candidates and directly impacts the candidates’ performance in the company.
Having the right candidates who match the company’s needs and culture will enable companies in harmonisation of goals, setting out new objectives and to define the future direction of the company. This also supports the roadmap to success that the leadership has drawn out. To this effect, CRM entails a comprehensive management of relationship with candidates. This ranges from setting up the company’s profile and brand image right through to dealing with ex-employees.
Benefits of a robust CRM process for Talent Acquisition:
A well-executed CRM process enhances talent acquisition, while defining the candidate relationship and expectations. A robust process brings with it the following benefits:
- Build Attractive Brand: It enables the company to build a clearly defined "employer brand" to attract the best talent
- Gain Access to Talent Pipeline: It helps companies access a larger talent pipeline attracted to the company’s brand
- Deepen Candidate Relationships: By using a strong CRM, companies can gain insights into the candidates’ requirements. Further, they can demonstrate how the company matches with the candidate’s skillset, values and professional goals
- Identify Gaps in Recruitment Process: A good CRM will enable companies to identify the deficiencies in the recruitment process. It helps plug the gaps via a built-in iteration to obtain feedback for improvement of the entire process
- Increase Success Rate of Hiring: By robustly implementing CRM, companies can attract candidates who are impressed by the company’s culture and work environment. In addition, strengthening the effectiveness of the recruitment process also helps the company better evaluate the candidate’s worth to the business, while enabling the HR team to identify if the candidate is a good cultural fit for the company. This leads to an increase in the success rate of hiring talented candidates
- Reduce Costs: By managing the CRM efficiently, companies can reduce their hiring costs significantly. This includes reduction of costs associated with processing candidates that are not right for the company, as well as the cost of candidates who need to be replaced
Key Aspects of CRM
Companies need to carefully manage their CRM process to hire and retain high quality talent. A good CRM enables access to a strong and wider talent pool, while also helping organisations build a deeper talent pipeline. With most of the recruitment being done online, it becomes critical that companies can utilise the right digital CRM tools. A well-executed digital transformation process will play a major role in enabling companies to switch to a technology first approach.
To remain competitive and attract the best talent, recruitment teams need to pay close attention to the following aspects of the process:
- Data Management: Through technology solutions, companies can capture candidate data in a meaningful way. This includes being able to aggregate potential candidates from larger talent pools. Good data management enables companies to track down previous applicants whose skills are suitable for new roles. Companies can also conduct performance analytics using this data
- Segmentation: With some companies receiving thousands of job applicants annually, it can be quite difficult to sift through the applications to find the right candidates. Hiring teams need to create appropriate segmentations based on criteria such as job roles, seniority, technical skills etc., to quicken the process of finding the right candidates. In addition, hiring teams should create targeted messaging based on the segmentation
- Scheduling: One of the key elements of the hiring process is the scheduling of interviews and updates to candidates. Hiring teams need to maintain timely schedule of interviews and provide regular updates to candidates through the recruitment process
- Feedback Management: During and post the hiring process, hiring teams need to both collect feedback from interviewers and as well as provide this feedback to candidates in a timely manner
- Effectiveness of recruitment process: Strengthening the effectiveness of the entire recruitment process is quite important and having a robust CRM can enable the HR teams to be more efficient. The shorter processing time bring efficiency benefits for recruitment, and are likely to significantly increase in the probability of hiring the right talent
Best Practices for Establishing a CRM Strategy
To find and onboard the best talent, companies need to ensure they have a well thought out CRM strategy based on industry best practices. These practices are a key contributor to gaining competitive advantage in the industry by consistently and effortlessly attracting top-tier candidates.
- Open communication channels: Hiring teams must keep their communication channels open and be available for the candidates to address their queries and concerns. This helps the candidates feel at ease with the hiring process and is a key element for building trust.
- Regular feedback and engagement: As candidates move forward in the recruitment process, it is vital to give them regular feedback on their engagements with the company. In addition, collecting feedback and inputs from the candidates can be important in gauging their interest and concerns. Hiring teams must endeavour to convey feedback and updates to candidates who do not pass the hiring rounds. This leaves a positive impression with the candidates, who won’t need to keep second guessing on their progress.
- Staying in contact with promising candidates: It is always useful for the hiring team to remain in touch with candidates who reach the final round but fail to meet the cut. These candidates could be potentially suitable for future roles. Staying in contact with them through email campaigns, company updates and such can be useful to reengage with them at the time of hiring.
- Post-hiring onboarding process: Once a candidate has been selected, hiring teams should ensure that they conduct the post-hiring onboarding in a timely fashion. Candidates need to be informed about requirements for onboarding and should be given as much support as possible to enable candidates to join the company hassle-free.
CRM to Strengthen A Company’s Talent Foundation:
Candidates are often looking for key differentiations between competing organisations. With high quality candidates being in demand, maintaining a good candidate relationship will play a big role in driving a company’s talent growth in the right direction.
Most candidates often place a large weightage on how the recruitment process is conducted. This is considered a barometer to determine how much the companies are in-line with their stated values. By deploying a robust CRM strategy, companies can make a good impression on candidates. It ensures that the employee experiences are positive, enabling them to perform well. By positively managing the development of employees, companies can both attract and retain talent to drive the company’s growth.