How to Choose the Best Recruitment CRM for Your Business

First thing’s first: what’s a recruitment CRM?

A recruitment CRM is a kind of software that recruiters can use to build and nurture relationships with potential candidates. Now, you may have noticed there’s an acronym in there — and “CRM” can stand for a few different things, so let’s clear up exactly what kind of CRM we’re talking about here: CRM stands for Candidate Relationship Management. The name adds up, because your recruitment CRM is designed to help you save time by automating the administrative side of hiring-related tasks — so that you can focus more of your energy on building and nurturing relationships with both existing and prospective candidates. A recruitment CRM can help recruiters: build talent pipelines, develop lasting candidate relationships, sort and manage existing candidates, and make more data-driven decisions.

How is a recruitment CRM different from an ATS?

A lot of people use the terms “recruitment CRM” and “ATS” interchangeably. The reality is that neither should really stand on their own. (That’s why Loxo bundles the two into one feature. Oh, and our ATS/Recruitment CRM is totally free. Forever. Just saying.) Like a recruitment CRM, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are also used to help with candidate tracking, management, and communication. There are some key differences though.An ATS is a repository for applicants that helps manage your company’s application process. A really good ATS (there are only a few of them out there) helps recruiters automate the hiring process a bit — from job postings to application sorting to onboarding. An ATS can also help improve hiring metrics like hiring velocity — which can have a positive impact on client and candidate retention. Think of your ATS as addressing more short-term/current day hiring needs — not so much the longer-term, strategic needs. That’s where your recruitment CRM comes into play: view any candidate within your database with a few clicks, dig into their past experiences, and look at their skills to assess how well they’d fit into certain roles you’re actively looking to fill. With the limitations of an ATS in mind, many have opted to integrate their ATS with a recruitment CRM.

Integrating your ATS with a recruitment CRM

By integrating your existing ATS with a recruitment CRM, you can:

• Better manage large volumes of applicants
• Store and manage candidate records more efficiently — and with more data
• Create a system-of-record that decentralizes data across your entire team — for easier insights into performance, trends, and more

However…When you integrate two platforms that were not designed to work together, all sorts of challenges can arise — from inaccurate data mapping to a lack of standardization, and beyond. Remember earlier, when I mentioned that Loxo’s ATS & CRM are bundled into one product (and that said product is completely free, forever)? Having these two systems tied together from the jump makes it so much easier to ensure data quality and enforce best practices across your entire team — which makes long-term strategy so much more possible. We talk a lot at Loxo about how the best recruiters are those who become true strategic partners and talent advisors to their clients or hiring teams — not just helping fill one role, but helping create long-term, forward-thinking talent plans. Doing so depends on your ability to analyze past performance, double-down on winning behaviors, and accurately create talent pipelines that support forecasted needs. Taking things a step further, having a fully-integrated Talent Intelligence Platform — one that brings sourcing, contact info finding, outreach, candidate relationship management, reporting, and more all under one roof — becomes a game-changer. It shouldn’t take 10+ tools to make one hire, but unfortunately that’s become standard practice in the recruitment industry, with bolt-on tools getting duct-taped on to ATSs left and right. There’s a better way. …But that’s a soapbox for another day. For now, back to recruitment CRMs — and how to find the right one for your needs!

Why you need a recruitment CRM

Lever’s 2020 State of Recruitment report found that only 45% of recruiters say they have sufficient technology and tools to create relationships with prospective hires. Good technology is table stakes for recruiters at this point — regardless of market shifts or ebbs and flows. In order to stay competitive, you need to be able to synthesize large amounts of candidate data as efficiently as possible. Your primary directive as a recruiter, though, is not to wrangle technology; it’s to build relationships. In both the short and long term. Technology — specifically a recruitment CRM — can help with that. A recruitment CRM is a must for recruiters who:

• Are dealing with a large volume of candidates
• Seeking to fill multiple roles — whether within the same organization or across multiple
• Are seeking talent in niche industries
• Are working on typically hard-to-fill positions
• Have a large amount of inbound applicants
• Want more data around individual recruiter performance and overall team performance
• Are looking to streamline their outputs
• Are interested in developing long-term relationships with candidates who may or may not be a good fit for a role right now

Once you have an established candidate database within your recruitment CRM, you should be able to search from it directly as your first step in any candidate selection process. Ideally, you’d then be able to choose the most qualified candidates and drop them into your shortlist — all without having ever used LinkedIn, other sourcing tools, or job boards.

Beware of false promises from so-called "recruitment CRMs"

The problem is that many tools that claim to be full-scale recruitment CRMs are actually just ATSs wrapped up in a fancy new name — and they actually have clunky processes and UX that don’t allow you to search through your own database to find candidates.(To this, I’d ask: “Well, what even is the point of having a CRM in the first place, then?” I guess we just can put that question right up there with “Chicken or the egg?” and “Where do babies come from?” on the list of Philosophical Stumpers.) This probably won’t shock you, but Loxo’s recruitment CRM makes searching your own database incredibly intuitive. Not to mention, you can then take things a step further by searching Loxo Source’s database, widening the scope a bit (read: to the tune of 1.2 billion professionals).

The ROI of a recruitment CRM

Insights and reporting

In order to maintain your edge in a market that only continues to become more competitive, understanding what’s working, what isn’t, and knowing how to double down on winning behaviors is critical. A recruitment CRM makes it easy to look at every stage of your hiring process to see where efficiency drops off, what the ideal number of candidates to have on your shortlist is to result in a hire, hiring velocity, and beyond. And getting on top of these metrics can help you make drastic improvements to your hiring process and overall workflow that can add up to a big difference in revenue. Part of this comes through the “in-between” steps — the way your recruitment CRM plays with the rest of your talent tech stack (or your Talent Intelligence Platform, if you’re using Loxo. Which you definitely should be. Ahem.). For example: you can set triggers in your recruiting CRM so that anytime a candidate is moved into the next stage of the funnel, they’re notified via email or text. Using custom outreach sequences you’ve built in Loxo Outreach, you’re able to find the balance between “automation” and “human interaction.”

Time and cost savings

On the note of automation — the whole point of a recruitment CRM is to offload some of the manual administrative tasks to technology, so that you can spend your energy on building actual human-to-human relationships. Those admin tasks can add up — and for a long time, they were a huge drain on recruiters. And when recruiters are stuck doing manual tasks that feel secondary to their primary goals, a lot of best practices tend to fall by the wayside. The problem is that when no one is collectively focused on maintaining data quality or upholding standard operating procedures, data quality tends to suffer — leading to duplicate profiles, missing pieces, out-of-date data, and just overall labor redundancies. So not only are you spending time doing the admin — you’re also spending time working around all of the issues that half-hearted admin brings about. It’s a vicious cycle, and one of the reasons a recruitment CRM can be so powerful.

Factors to consider when choosing a recruitment CRM software

So now that you’ve got a good understanding of what a recruitment CRM is and why you need one… how do you decide between the countless tools that all claim to help you “make more hires” and “save time” and, of course, “save money”? You need to select the recruitment CRM that meets your unique business needs and delivers the best results, but anyone on the market for a recruitment CRM should consider these main factors:

Integration with overall workflow

If a recruitment CRM doesn’t fit within the context of your existing tech stack OR isn’t part of a better integrated system that you’re looking to make a switch to, you won’t experience the full value of the tool. A recruitment CRM is only as good as the data it contains — and if it isn’t integrated with the rest of your workflow, you won’t benefit from all that the tool could offer. It’s important to ask:

• Does this recruitment CRM seem to fit into your existing workflow — or, even better, does it provide a path to improving your processes entirely?
• Does the technology infrastructure exist for this recruitment CRM to integrate with your existing tech stack? Or does it exist within its own product ecosystem that you could move your entire workflow into?

Scalability

Every recruitment firm or in-house recruitment team has different needs — but the need to be able to scale up or down is pretty standard across the board. Hiring needs (especially in recent years) fluctuate rapidly — and having a tech stack that allows for that is important. A recruitment CRM that is able to meet the whole-organization needs of your company — both today and down the line — is key to your decision. More than that, though, many present day teams are distributed — some with teammates spread all across the globe. Your recruitment CRM needs to be a source of truth across that entire distributed workforce — something that helps unite efforts and streamline processes. Recruiters know that recruitment across various industries can be a wildly different story — with certain industries having seasonal ebbs and flows, others having set hiring timeframes, and others still being a bit more up in the air depending on market conditions. Knowing your niche and understanding the quirks of your industry (or industries) can help you make the right decision as far as your tech stack goes.

Time-saving automations

We live in the age of AI — whether you like it or not. At Loxo, we believe in leveraging AI for administrative tasks that used to take a ton of manual effort. The end goal is to free up more of a recruiter’s time to spend on building actual human relationships. Basically: Let the robots handle the boring stuff, and keep the human stuff…human. With that being said, automation and machine learning integration are two things you can look for when choosing a recruitment CRM. With AI being as trendy as it is, a ton of recruitment tech companies are claiming to “use AI” in their products. What a lot of these companies mean is that they have an integration with ChatGPT... Not much of a value-add, when you could just use the program yourself for free. I’ll take a moment to toot Loxo’s horn for a second: We’ve been investing in artificial intelligence since before it was en vogue. In fact, our platform is currently on its 4th generation of proprietary machine learning. Which is a fancy way of saying: We built our own AI (Loxo AI), designed specifically for the needs of recruiters ten years ago — and it just keeps getting better/smarter with time. Any recruitment CRM worth its salt today will allow you to automate certain activities. Here are some things to look out for:

• Automatically logging activities like calls and emails
• Building automated outreach campaigns that candidates can instantly be dropped into once they hit certain criteria
• Instant access to candidate contact information with one click
• Scheduling calls, emails, and interviews with applicants and clients
• Fine-tuned AI-powered sourcing that uses a combination of your filters + historical candidate data to surface best-fit candidates you’d likely miss elsewhere

Help, when you need it

This one may sound like table stakes... But we’ve heard time and time again from recruiters that access to reliable and informative customer support is one of the biggest things missing from a lot of recruitment CRMs out there. Any time you’re using new technology, there’s a bit of a learning curve. If you’re not able to get the assistance you need to ramp up on activities and ensure you’re getting the most value out of the platform, your outcomes will suffer. The key to ensuring there are no business disruptions is looking for a recruitment CRM that has:

• A large volume of self-led learning and development material,
• An active help center, and
• Access to real-time assistance from a dedicated support team

This added level of assistance will be helpful both during your implementation period and on an ongoing basis.

The best recruitment CRM is the one you actually like using

At the end of the day, user adoption is key to data integrity. Which is why the most important thing you should evaluate when on the hunt for a recruitment CRM is: Will my team actually use this tool?Further:

• Is the user experience intuitive?
• Is the interface simple and easy to use?
• Does the workflow make sense within your existing processes? Or does it do one better and provide a smoother and more efficient process?
• Is there a steep learning curve, or can I expect that my team will get up to speed quickly?
• Does the platform incentivize usage, providing reports and other personalized data that helps recruiters improve performance?
• Does using this platform save us time, or is it just more tech to wrangle?
• Does this platform play nicely with my other tools — or, better yet, replace them entirely?
• Does this platform enable me to build long-term relationships with candidates?

Choosing a recruitment CRM can feel overwhelming. It’s definitely not a decision to take lightly, as your recruitment CRM is your source of truth when it comes to candidates.Using the criteria above, you should be able to identify a good fit. A recruiting CRM that helps support your business as it grows. And one that helps you position yourself as a strategic partner to hiring managers and clients alike. If you’ve read this far, we’d love to have you give Loxo’s ATS/Recruitment CRM a spin. Our free trial gives you access to our entire Talent Intelligence Platform for 7 days. No credit card required. And then, at the end of your 7 days, you maintain access to our ATS/CRM for free, forever. No strings attached. Click here to get started.