Putting CRM at the heart of recruiting

14 April 2010 | By Sue Weekes

Whatever industry you are in, the customer is king and understanding his or her needs and wants will ultimately determine the success of your business.

Recruiters, however, have to juggle with another human dynamic: the candidate who has to be afforded a similar level of respect and on whom business success is equally dependent. The recruiter’s task is to balance the aspirations and needs of both and then apply equal attention to them. This, of course, is reliant on the skills of the recruiter but, like all modern businesses, to achieve success they need to be supported by the right systems and processes.

For the recruiter, the front office recruitment management system is the bedrock of these. Often, this system will have built into its customer relationship management (CRM) functionality. In many industries, CRM means what it says on the tin: the management of the customer relationship and is typically based on a set of methodologies, a database and software that enables you to better understand and serve a client’s needs. In recruitment, CRM has historically been less about focusing on the client and more about the agency’s performance when it comes to finding and placing candidates. While a major part of the CRM story, this by no means represents the whole picture.

“Placements and candidates are the most important parts of recruiting but CRM is about relationship management,” says David Alonso, director of TrackerRMS, which provides CRM and recruitment software. “It’s about keeping clients, ensuring they are loyal and making them feel they are being spoken to, and ensuring you have metrics in place to do so.”

To be fair to recruiters, the software hasn’t always made it easy to make the most of CRM functionality. “A lot of UK providers have been focused on managing the relationship between candidates and requirements, and just having storage for the CRM side rather than functionality,” says Peter Linas, UK managing director of software company Bullhorn. “A good system manages the complex relationship between client, client contact, requirements and candidates.”

A good system manages the complex relationship between client, client contact, requirements and candidates.

Without doubt, CRM will only ever be as good as the system in place to carry it out. Tim Barker, senior director product EMEA at Salesforce.com, one of the pioneers of software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM, says CRM has been constrained within many businesses by a “home-grown system” that grows organically rather than by proper design. “The instances of us replacing Excel or Access database is incredibly high,” he says. “A home-grown system can be easy and fast to grow but if you’re really successful as a company you will outgrow it and in the meantime will have created a view within the organisation that that is what CRM is: a simple contact management system.”

Putting robust CRM processes in place
Even if putting in place a true CRM system isn’t a priority for recruiters today, it is increasingly likely to become one. As we emerge from recession, agencies must ensure they retain clients as well as win new ones. They must not only work tirelessly on the client’s behalf but be seen to be doing so, too. As an example, Daniel Richardson, group chief technology officer of Bond International Software, says the transparency that vendor management systems offer hiring managers when it comes to how many searches and interviews have been carried out means agencies need to educate their recruiters to be a lot more savvy when it comes to logging information in their CRM systems. “If I’m a large agency or account holder for a major corporate and my recruiters have spent all day phoning and interviewing people I want it to be logged,” he says. “If I don’t record it and the client sees no activity logged, that could put the account in jeopardy.”

Another reason why recruiters must put in place robust CRM processes is to safeguard their knowledge about a client. “Because you’ve got a high churn of consultants, the relationship is leaving at consultant-level,” says Alonso, who ran his own recruitment agency until he sold it last year. “If I hadn’t had TrackerRMS, a lot of the information I had would have left when a person did. The idea of storing everything so you have a history of the client has to help give more longevity with them.”

Today’s systems allow recruiters to access both recruitment front office and CRM functions from one window and provide real-time analytics on the company’s performance as a whole or in specific areas. The best software will automate much of the CRM elements so the recruiter is free to carry on with their core tasks.

“The system should be easier to use than not to use,” says Neil Bolton, CEO of Recruitment Systems, which is based in Australia but provides its software, TRIS Recruitment CRM, around the world. “If it isn’t, people won’t use it and if they [the recruiter] are billing their quota the manager won’t have the guts to tell them to use it and the company will lose its most valuable asset: corporate information.”

Not all software providers believe the answer lies in implementing an external CRM programme. The approach taken by CRM provider Darwin Corp was to integrate CRM features into its vacancy management software of the same name and provide access to existing recruiting tools such as email, LinkedIn and a database through a single application. “With information already in different forms and in different places, throwing an external CRM programme in won’t actually make someone’s life easier,” says Darwin CEO Mike Chatha. “For us it’s about seeing Darwin not as a separate application but as the beating heart of an agency that connects recruiters, candidates and clients in a way that provides tangible benefits to all.”

Ease-of-use and integration with daily practices is important but a large part of extracting value from CRM software lies in knowing what metrics and intelligence you want to derive from the system. The key performance indicators (KPIs) input will vary from company to company but they need to provide the type of information that will help improve your business and better serve clients. So recruiters should really think about these and not just plump for traditional ones based around candidates, number of placements and individual’s targets. Alonso advises that they expand to include those that focus on the client. “KPIs now could be about how we keep existing clients rather than how many new business calls we make,” he says. “So more around client information to show what we are doing on this account.”

Integrating social media channels
Recruiters can also expect more integration between CRM and social media to reflect how the industry is changing and the new channels that are emerging. As Richardson says, if a recruiter has spent all day logging candidates on LinkedIn, it needs to be recorded like any other piece of recruitment activity. CRM software is also becoming more social. Earlier this year Salesforce launched its Chatter application (in a private beta test) that leverages many of the benefits of social media internally within an organisation (see Recruiter, 20 January) and it is likely Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs and social networking features will be built into other applications. Alonso says TrackerRMS’s new features are built very much around web-based applications and will offer compatibility with the iPhone and Blackberry.

Richardson also sees more Web 2.0 and social CRM software helping the general communication processes with a client. “Historically if there’s been a phone call or an email there’s been a manual process to update the CRM system,” he says. “Now there is a more diverse range of methods to communicate with clients and, if you’ve got a blog out there detailing what you’re doing, you can push that information to individual clients and automatically record that fact. For instance, you could send a Tweet to a client to say ’we’ve updated our roadmap and sent you a link to it’, and then store that in your CRM system.”