The recruitment industry runs on relationships. Without the ability to act as mediators, negotiators, and advisers recruitment consultants struggle to build trust. This is made harder still as they have to nurture relationships with two distinct audiences: candidates and clients. Both require much of the same level of care and attention, but have very different needs and measures of success. Without a robust CRM and CRM automation, maintaining these relationships becomes difficult.
With so many active candidates and clients, managing the flow of information and communication manually can create bottlenecks and manual errors. This should be where a CRM system comes into its own, automatically capturing key information and adding it to candidate and business records.
By creating a single source of truth for their data, recruiters can leverage all the information available to them. Without the tedium of searching through emails or spreadsheets. Despite this, some recruitment consultancies see CRMs as another tool to maintain, despite it’s capacity for integration and automation.
CRM – A Recap
Originally, the CRM was a way to store all customer details in one place; essentially a database with a decent UI. Today, CRMs still retain the capacity to house a lot of data, but they take care of how the data is gathered and provide the means to communicate.
The ability to gather, house and segment data allows businesses to gain actionable insights faster. Specifically, when it comes to candidates, a CRM like Microsoft Dynamics 365 allow you to identify which candidates have skills that match open roles.
This alone can save considerable time as candidate CVs no longer need to be screened. Rather an alert can be created so recruiters know when a candidate has come in with the desired skillset.
This shortens the hiring cycle as recruiters can draw up shortlists without manually scrutinising hundreds of CVs. Similarly, when a strong candidate lands in an inbox, recruiters can use Dynamics 365 and tools like it to cross-reference those key skills with the kind of skills their clients look for.
This increases the hit rate of speculative CVs when they go out.
In addition to all this, the CRM should also keep the specifics of every interaction with both candidates and employers. Everyone in the business can see the latest developments allowing for a slicker more professional experience. When used well, the CRM enables you to:
- Attract and engage the right candidates.
- Collect and maintain relevant and searchable candidate data.
- Facilitate easy communication with candidates and employers and provide accurate, real-time updates.
- Report on your processes. Reports give you oversight on the whole recruitment process and identify potential issues early.
What is CRM Automation?
Without functionality like CRM automation, working with so much data has the potential to be highly labour-intensive. With recruitment so dependent on building strong relationships and the ability to respond quickly, it’s hard to scale.
The challenge is that the processes exist for a reason and mistakes can be costly. Especially if a recruiter misrepresents a role or a candidate.
Similarly, as recruiters are often targeted on the amount of outreach they do each day, manual processes can cause good recruiters to fail simply because they’re busy.
Fundamentally, there are only so many vacancies that one recruiter can manage, and so many conversations they can have. This can lead to frustration on an individual and business level because it leaves roles unworked and stalls growth.
Reducing the level of admin and manual processes allows everyone in the business to go faster which allows for more profitable business outcomes.
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?
Manual processes are always at risk of errors. Mistakes get made and a certain margin for error is acceptable. But the busier we get or the more pressure we feel, the propensity for making mistakes increases. 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, or schedule an interview for the wrong time. Any of which could impact any deals that are in the works. Automated workflow systems ensure that recruitment processes follow standardised procedures, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring consistency across the organization.
CRM automation allows you to:
- CV screening – CRM automation 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 job requirements. 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 personalised 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 – Leveraging functionality in tools like Dynamics 365, you can enable checks at various stages in the recruitment flow. This will ensure documentation is received, the candidate has the required right to work, references and visas. You can add and track various types of compliance documentation checks such as proof of ID, visa status, qualifications, or certifications, ensuring nothing is missed.
Scaling with CRM Automation
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 and applications giving you a segmented talent pool that is easy to access and utilise. Automation can help recruiters shortlist candidates efficiently, and manage multiple hiring pipelines simultaneously without sacrificing the quality of the candidates or the service.
To learn more about how CRM automation within Dynamics 365 can transform your recruitment consultancy, speak to a member of the team, today.
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