There seems to be a fairly significant movement from recruiting as an applicant tracking system to a relationship management system. At this point, I’m advocating recruiting CRM’s in some niche areas of talent acquisition. The idea behind the recruiting CRM is that in recruiting in general, you best candidates are the passive candidates – those who are not actively looking for jobs. Often, high quality candidates are those who have a high level of engagement to complement their expertise and skills. Facing the facts, highly engaged employees are those who are not about to leave their current employers. Highly engaged employees are also those who are quite dedicated to their work and probably enjoy what they are doing – they are much more productive.
In any given organization, the vast majority of jobs are commodity jobs. You can pull together a list of qualified candidates from a job bank or other source and have a pretty reliable selection of qualified candidates. The problem is in your leadership and senior talent positions. These positions require candidates already in short supply, and quite often, you simply can’t cobble together a list of qualified candidates simply from one of the normal job sources. Your candidate list in fact may consist of a number of names you have encountered over the years, but who work for competitors and who are not likely to move. In fact, you may have already identified candidates as part of your succession planning but you’re not doing anything with those names.
In comes the recruiting CRM. The idea behind the CRM is that you should treat the recruitment of senior talent as an ongoing and long term sales process. The CRM technology can manage and record your interactions with potential candidates over a long period of time, allowing you to target candidate’s years in advance. If a potential candidate is familiar with you and your organization, they are actually likely to pick up the phone when you call, as opposed to you just being another unanswered voice mail. By the time you call, they are acquainted with you, understand the value proposition of your organization, and alternatively, you understand what the candidate’s wants and needs are – possibly knowing what your organization can offer to attract them over.
Certainly recruiting CRM’s will continue to grow in exposure as the much talked about talent crisis continues. Recruiting those top 200 positions will become increasingly difficult and extending the recruiting cycle to pre-requisition activities will only make more sense.
8 responses to “Recruiting CRM’s”
But why stop there?
Time and time again, people stop talking at “recruiting” when it comes to CRM within an HR Department or a Talent Acquisition team. Don’t stop…keep going.
Once you have a CRM system, expand its uses. In addition to potential candidates, you can now manage relationships with your hiring managers, with your current employees, with your diversity program, with your university recruiting, with your succession planning, conduct event management, etc.
We are in the business of people management. If you are the only person in your department and you will be an employee for life, you can stay using your Outlook and Excel..it works. But if you are on a team at a medium to large company and you are working off of spreadsheets… you are a transactional worker and your job is a “commodity job.”
Soon enough, the big bad wolf will come along and blow your house down.
The stable houses made up of many, many bricks laid team member by team member day by day are the builders in our industry.
In these days, we all need value in what we do…and will need to be able to show it. Those living on spreadsheet management are worth the paper they print their worksheets out on.
Wholehearted agreement here Sean. Thanks.
Dubs all you are describing is what third-party and house recruiters actually do for a living- always have, always will…..
People who post jobs on boards and then process the results are not really recruiters, although they wear the title. They are clerks. Thats not prejorative: without clerks, the world stops.
Every ATS should have solid CRM capability- and why not ?
Everyone will be ill-served if now they have to buy ATS and CRM because the boundries are fluid and change with time, business cycle, and personnel.
Glad to see the shift however, as it puts $$ in my pocket…..
Oh yea, the passive/active candidate argument is a basically silly one at its core: we are all active for the right offer and we are all passive even when we are unemployed if we are not looking at YOUR job……
[…] Worst case – even if this happens, can companies look at a “CRM” kind of a solution to manage talent? I think this will be especially relevant for roles which are highly specialized and/or senior level. A nice starting point to think about this can be found at this SystematicHR blog post. […]
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[…] capital outlay for software licensing.Steve Boese HR Technology – Tuesday, March 17, 2009 READ MORERecruiting CRM’sIn fact, you may have already identified candidates as part of your succession planning but you’re […]
Oh yea, the passive/active candidate argument is a basically silly one at its core: we are all active for the right offer and we are all passive even when we are unemployed if we are not looking at YOUR job…