Recruitment businesses are traditionally very people-intensive. It’s an industry built on personal relationships, in which you’re managing two streams of business simultaneously – candidates (B2C) and employers (B2B). Double the work, and (sometimes) double the pain. There’s a lot of unstructured incoming data to process, a lot of people requiring updates, and a lot of information to retain. This should be where your CRM comes into its own, but for lots of businesses the CRM feels like yet another administrative burden. If this is the case for you – read on. You could benefit from CRM automation.
What is a CRM for?
First, a quick refresh – what’s the point of a CRM? Originally, the CRM was a way to store all customer details in one place. Today, however, the CRM is much more than a digital rolodex. It’s more like the Cyrano de Bergerac of customer relationships – full of the insights sellers need to win customers’ hearts.
For recruitment companies, the CRM must navigate two distinct workflows. On the candidate side, it holds all the relevant details, such as qualifications, experience, salary expectations, etc. On the employers’ side, it will store the details of available roles, specific requirements, as well as the history with that employer, where successes and failures can be used to inform future approaches.
In addition to all this, the CRM should also keep the specifics of every interaction with both candidates and employers, so that everyone in the business can see the latest developments. When used well, the CRM enables you to:
- Attract and engage the right candidates – the lifeblood of any recruitment businesses.
- Collect and maintain relevant candidate data. This information must be searchable, and you need to be able to cross-reference it with employers’ requirements.
- Facilitate easy communication with candidates and employers. Keeping people up-to-date with progress is critical to building trust and developing strong relationships with clients.
- Report on your processes. Reports give you an oversight on the whole recruitment process, so you can see – for example – where any bottlenecks are cropping up, the diversity of applicants, the best source of applications, etc.
You may also wish to open up the recruitment pipeline so that employers can see how you’re progressing with filling their vacancy, how many candidates you have in the pipeline, etc. Similarly, candidates may also want some visibility on their progress with an application.
What is CRM Automation?
Working with so much data has the potential to be highly labour-intensive. Because there are only so many vacancies that one person can manage, and so many conversations they can have, the personal nature of the business can make it difficult to scale. Recruiters may find themselves frustrated by their inability to take on more clients, and frustrated employees have a habit of finding new jobs.
All in all, it pays to try to reduce the admin burden where you can – which is where Business Process Automation (BPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) come in. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as CV screening, interview scheduling, and reference checks, CRM automation allows recruiters to give their time to high-value people-centric activities, such as candidate assessment and client relationship management, and reduce the workload of administrative tasks.
How can CRM automation help recruiters?
Between the many steps of the hiring process and the number of people involved, it’s all too easy to lose a CV, miss an email, forget a reference or background check, or schedule an interview for the wrong time – any of which could have a significant impact on your ability to hire the ideal candidate. Automated workflow systems ensure that recruitment processes follow standardized procedures, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring consistency across the organization. For example, you could automate:
- CV screening – Automated systems can scan CVs and applications, extracting relevant information such as skills, experience, and qualifications. By using predefined criteria, these systems can filter out unqualified candidates, reducing the chance of human oversight or bias in the screening stage.
- Skill matching – Automated tools can compare the skills and qualifications of candidates with the requirements of the job. By analysing keywords and contextual information, these tools can identify the best matches, ensuring recruiters don’t overlook qualified candidates or mistakenly shortlist unsuitable ones.
- Updates – Automated communication tools can send personalized emails to candidates at different stages of the recruitment process, providing updates on their application status, next steps, and relevant information. This keeps candidates informed and reduces the likelihood of miscommunication or missed notifications, while also freeing up the recruiter to focus on what they do best.
- Document-gathering – You can enable checks at various stages in the recruitment flow to ensure documentation is received, the candidate has the required right to work, references, visas and you have the required consents. You can add and track various types of compliance documentation checks such as proof of ID, visa status, qualifications, certifications, right-to-work, etc., ensuring nothing is missed.
The ability to scale up
Above all, CRM automation helps you do more with less. Growing your revenue doesn’t have to involve increasing your headcount when you’re freeing up your team by automating labour-intensive tasks. CRM automation enables you to handle larger volumes of applicants, applications, shortlist candidates efficiently, and manage multiple hiring pipelines simultaneously – without sacrificing quality.
