During times of economic uncertainty, building and executing a talent strategy is a huge challenge for many companies. While some industries are seeing a reduction in hiring, headcounts, and budgets, others are still struggling with a tight labor market, low-quality applicants, and huge competition for critical roles. Whichever camp you’re in, the one thing experts agree on is that the talent rollercoaster isn’t over yet.
In a turbulent market, a shift away from reactive recruitment towards proactive talent sourcing is crucial. Having a strong talent community (or talent pipelines) increases organizational resilience in the long term, lowers hiring costs, reduces time-to-fill —and means you’re never starting your talent search on the back foot. But to make this shift towards proactive recruitment, you need the right tools. The secret? A recruitment marketing CRM.
A recruitment marketing CRM helps you to maximize your inbound sourcing methods. When used in conjunction with your career site, job boards and other inbound channels, the CRM makes it easy to surface, nurture and progress candidates through your talent pipeline, and allows you to easily build out talent communities for particular regions or roles. It’s the engine room of your recruitment marketing strategy —and your key to securing high-quality talent in any market. Using a CRM to supercharge your inbound channels and optimize your outbound sourcing, you’ll be better equipped to find the right people, for the right roles, at the right time.
What is a recruitment marketing CRM?
A CRM is a recruitment marketing tool that helps recruiters source talent at the pre-apply stage. They can help recruiters build talent communities, sort and nurture potential candidates, and automate many of the ongoing administrative tasks involved in proactively sourcing and engaging talent within your pipelines. Plus, they can help drive applications by tracking user behavior and preferences throughout the pre-apply stage. This can help recruiters better target candidates with relevant content, and push them through the funnel. CRMs also offer insights and analytics to help evaluate your pipeline health, what’s working and what’s not. That way, you’re able to optimize your approach.
Here are 6 ways a recruitment marketing CRM can accelerate your hiring efforts:
1: Build out talent communities
Talent pipelining and talent communities are crucial to hiring team success —no more ‘post and pray’ each time there is a new role. Using talent pipelines reduces recruiting costs and lowers time-to-hire —both vital in a tight talent market. Connecting your CRM to your career site or other inbound sourcing channels means that as potential jobseekers show interest, you can capture this interest in your CRM. Then you can sort and tag each potential candidate based on skills, interests, roles or locations —so that when the perfect role arises, you’ve always got potential candidates in mind.
2: Surface and sort talent —fast
With fewer jobseekers than jobs, today’s recruiters need to act fast to secure the best people. A CRM allows you to quickly identify well-suited candidates for your open roles. For example, Clinch uses engagement scoring and skills matching to surface best-fit talent with less manual input from recruiters. So you’ll be able to spend less time trawling for qualified candidates and more time talking to applicants.
3: Automate repetitive processes
A recruiter’s time is valuable —so the less of it spent on repetitive tasks, the better. A CRM saves recruiters’ time by automating some of these tasks, streamlining workflows, and creating scalable processes. That way, candidates continue to progress through the hiring process without hands-on involvement from time-poor hiring teams. With Clinch’s CRM, you can automate candidate communications and application reminders, but also administrative tasks like tagging, sorting, and adding them to a project. It’s about reducing administrative burden without compromising on candidate experience.
4: Nurture candidates through the hiring journey
Having talent segments within your CRM means you can target jobseekers with specific interests. The more personalized and targeted the communication, the more likely that a candidate will engage. But, manually staying engaged with high volumes of potential applicants takes a huge investment of time and resources. Using automation you can nurture and engage candidates through targeted workflows, sharing relevant content, stories, and job alerts. Showing this specific content helps to create a low-touch, highly personalized candidate experience, boosting application volumes.
5: Use dashboards to see what’s working and what’s not
One of the benefits of a CRM is the ability to drill down into the data. Whether it be assessing your pipeline or evaluating workflow efficacy, you’ll get a clear picture of what parts of your pre-apply recruitment funnel are working, and which need your attention. Get a birds-eye view of your talent communities and see real-time snapshots of your pipeline health. Or, use predictive analytics to predict critical skills gaps within your talent pipeline, so you’re never on the back foot. Clinch dashboards can also show you top requisitions and your daily to-do list — so you know exactly where to invest time and effort each day.
6: Find your perfect fit —anytime, anywhere
The Clinch CRM stands out from competitors with its browser extension capability. With our CRM, you can take the power of the tool with you while you browse talent websites like LinkedIn. If you engage with a great candidate, you can capture and progress them through your hiring funnel, without ever needing to leave the tab.
The final step? Choose the right partner
It’s crucial to find the right recruitment marketing solution to support a proactive recruitment strategy —to help you capture interest, build talent pipelines and drive people to hit ‘apply’. The good news? This is Clinch’s specialty: we’re on a mission to ensure recruiters never start with zero candidates. Even better? Our latest enhancements to our CRM mean you’ll have all the tools you need to take your recruiting to new heights.
Want to see the power of Clinch in action? Book a call with a Recruitment Marketing specialist today.
