Do You Have Good Relationships With Your Candidates?

by Winston J Pancake

Recruiters need to think like the Marketing department. While marketers work on branding the company and creating relationships with leads, recruiters focus their efforts on engaging with potential candidates, even if they are passive job seekers. Your goal is to develop strong alliances with passive and active jobseekers, which is becoming increasingly more important as competition in the market grows. Concurrently, you are building a strong candidate pool that you can use for the future. For example, if you receive an application from an outstanding candidate but don’t have an open requisition that matches their qualifications, you should nurture the relationship with that prospect in case a job opens up that is a fit.

Maintaining successful candidate relationships is not an easy task without the right software to do so. Do you have the right tools to manage a successful talent pool? Make sure you have everything you need by checking off this list:

· A way to import and store potential candidates easily from different sources. You don’t have time to manually enter all the data that you receive from prospects. That’s why you will need a reliable Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) tool that will work like you do. Look for a system that imports resumes in bulk and coordinates with LinkedIn profiles. It should also include a way for passive job seekers to put their name in your system.

· An efficient search tool. Hopefully, you will have a vast database of resumes to which you can refer when you are in need of a great candidate. That means you need an effective way to search for that person. It also needs to be a platform that everyone on your team can see, not just one recruiter. Creating a talent pool with a Candidate Relationship Management system is a much different process than applicant tracking; a CRM consists of potential candidates as well as those that have already applied. This means there will be a bigger database, so you’ll need a good way to search through all the resumes.

· Social media integration. Social media is a great tool for recruiters to promote branding and share open requisitions. This gives you an advantage because your business will promote its culture while notifying qualified professionals about job openings. If you do your research, you’ll find that there are applications that that will convert your company’s Facebook page into a career site. Find a software platform that has a “set it and forget it” tool so you can send job postings through your various networks.

· A great communication system. In order to nurture candidate relationships, you need to have an open communication policy. Your CRM needs to include an option to track various Internet conversations about your company.

· Integration with your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). If your ATS and CRM are connected, you will save a great deal of time. Make sure that whichever software platform you choose, it automatically pushes potential candidates to your ATS.

· Data reporting. As a recruiter, you want to track your job performance and understand your candidate pipeline. It helps to know how the applicant heard about the job and applicant engagement rates. Find a CRM data analytics so you can perform to the best of your abilities.