3 Things to Look for in a Modern Recruitment CRM

by Bob McHugh Mar. 24th, 2017

Category: Tips, Tricks, and How-Tos

Choosing a CRM for your recruitment agency is a critically important decision, but it can also be an overwhelming one. Which features actually matter, and which are just white noise? These are the three most essential traits of a recruitment CRM for gaining and sustaining a competitive advantage in today’s market.

Automation

It’s time to do away with manual data entry. It’s time-consuming, unreliable, and inconsistent. All recruitment agencies are engaged in the constant battle against time—no recruiter or salesperson has ever complained about having too many hours in the day. It’s no surprise, then, that it can be difficult to encourage employee buy-in for CRMs that require manual data entry. Your employees need to stay focused on building relationships; they don’t have time to tell a CRM what they’ve already done.

A modern recruitment CRM should automatically capture your team’s interactions with customers.  What should automatic data capture look like? Great examples of automatic data capture can be found in fitness technology like the Fitbit. These devices revolutionised how people achieve their fitness goals by automatically capturing all of your physical activity and delivering insights which encourage you to reach your health and fitness goals. A recruitment CRM can operate in a similar way for agencies.

Predictive Intelligence

Want to get ahead of the competition? The recruitment industry is a competitive and fast-moving one, and a reactionary approach won’t cut it.

It’s instructive to think of predictive intelligence in a CRM through the analogy of advancements in vehicle technology. Today’s smartest cars take proactive action before accidents happen. Instead of developing a better airbag, automobile manufacturers have developed cars that alert you if you drift out of your lane and tell you if something’s in your blind spot so you can avoid an accident.

Your recruitment CRM should be proactive and prescriptive, too, suggesting the next best step for your reps rather than simply serving as a historical data repository. While it’s certainly helpful to track sent emails and total calls, predictive intelligence takes this knowledge to the next level and puts it to practical use.  A CRM with predictive intelligence can inform recruiters on which call to make and which relationships to direct their efforts.

Industry Expertise

The recruitment sales model is unique to the sales model of every other industry. You aren’t selling a product. And although clients purchase recruitment services, you ultimately deliver people. Interactions involving people are inherently more complex on both sides of the transaction and require a tool purpose-built to manage this complexity.

A recruitment-specific CRM is designed to successfully deliver immediate value to your agency along with impactful results. General CRM solutions force you to either change your process to fit their model or over-invest and spend months or years customising a solution that hasn’t been developed for a recruitment business.

General CRM solutions are powerful, but they’re built to solve the needs of other industries. That forces you to invest in a great deal of functionality your agency will likely never use, while at the same time, not receiving the full scope of capabilities necessary to run a successful recruitment agency. General-purpose CRM systems just don’t work the way recruitment consultants and recruiters do.