Candidate Relationship Management Software: Why is it Vital to Improve Candidate Experience?

August 8, 2023

The recruitment industry has significantly evolved over the last decade. While the primary reason is an exponentially rising demand for quality talent, candidate expectations too, have significantly transformed. As an employer, ensuring a great candidate experience is necessary today. So building relationships and engaging candidates become a critical part of recruitment.

A positive candidate experience makes a candidate 38% more likely to accept a job offer from a company. But that’s not the only positive – it directly impacts your personal brand, and hence, the quality of talent that you acquire.

Talent hunters are now competing in a virtual race with their competitors. Considering the deep influence of candidate experience, planned candidate relationship management is the most optimal strategy to stand out. But recruiters today already have more than enough on their plate - continuously engaging and tracking candidates manually can be further overwhelming. The road to redemption? Scale your engagement efforts smoothly using candidate relationship management (CRM) software.

Wondering what exactly a CRM solution helps you with? And why do you need it over the existing ATS platforms? We will answer all of these and more in the blog. Stick around for an insightful discussion about candidate relationship management.

What is Candidate Relationship Management Software?

At its core, candidate relationship management is a process of maintaining a positive relationship with candidates in your talent pipeline. From identifying qualified candidates to engaging them proactively, a CRM strategy covers all you need to do in order to stay at the top of their mind.

63% of job seekers reject a job offer in case of poor candidate experience. It’s quite evident that this approach is vital to fulfilling the current and future talent requirements of your organization. Let’s now find out what is candidate relationship management software and how it help in improving the candidate experience.

In their quest to hire top talent, recruitment teams broadly chase two objectives:

sourcing quality talent, and
engaging their talent pool positively to ensure talent retention and serve great candidate experience.

A candidate relationship management (CRM) system is a recruiting software used by talent teams to manage candidate engagement activities in an organization. With a combination of automation and centralized access to all the touchpoints of the recruitment journey, a company can maintain healthy relationships with candidates over time and consistently hire quality talent.

A recruitment CRM software is considerably similar to a customer relationship management tool which is used to keep track of all touchpoints in the buying journey. From leads to engagement – a relationship management tool automates the repeated tasks, provides a high-level view of the entire pipeline, and helps measure the performance using relevant engagement metrics.

Suppose you’re hiring for a role at your company, and before sourcing candidates externally - you decide to first evaluate the company’s database to find qualified talent. A candidate relationship tool would be particularly handy here as you can instantly get all the candidates with the required skills and qualifications, check their previous engagement activity, and find their details. Once you are convinced of those candidates, you can simply launch outreach and nurture campaigns using the recruitment CRM tool. Further, if a candidate is interested, you will be notified and they will be moved forward in the recruiting process.

Here’s how a comprehensive candidate relationship management software helps your business hire and retain top talent efficiently:

Automates outreach and engagement messaging for all your candidates
Moves candidates consistently through the recruitment funnel
Enables easy collaboration among recruitment teams so that they stay in sync
Provides a complete overview of the recruitment pipeline along with candidate status, sourcing and engagement analytics
Notifies you in case of candidate response and engagement
Helps to hire managers interview, evaluate and select candidates quickly and conveniently
Creates a talent pool for future hiring purposes

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Why is a Candidate Relationship Management Software Critical for Your Recruitment?

From a birds-eye view, candidate relationship software helps recruitment teams find and hire the right talent. Additionally, it also enables passive talent engagement at scale. The key to successful talent acquisition lies in the strength of your talent pipeline - there’s no doubt about that. So establishing and maintaining quality relationships with candidates becomes even more important.

However, a recruitment CRM has multi-dimensional benefits. It not only helps manage an applicant’s end-to-end recruitment journey but also takes care of the mundane repetitive tasks that take up most of the recruitment teams’ time. From quick talent sourcing to thoroughly automating processes like email nurturing, interview scheduling, and contracts – a CRM tool makes life a whole lot easier for hiring teams.

Especially in case of large-scale hiring needs, you need to ensure you’re engaging numerous talent pools – and which efforts of your recruiting teams are yielding the best results. Candidate relationship software helps you track the right metrics reflecting your sourcing, engaging and relationship-building performance

Let’s now take a look at the top 5 reasons why you need candidate relationship management software for your recruitment.

Build Talent Pools Seamlessly

The primary purpose of maintaining a database of sourced candidate profiles is to build an internal talent pool for your company. In order to maximize your recruitment outcomes, you need to proactively build and nurture a pool of passive candidates who are qualified to meet your hiring criteria.

More than 73% of the overall workforce today consists of passive job seekers. Hence, you need a candidate relationship management solution along with a strategy that takes care of both active and passive talent engagement. This is specifically useful for roles with extensive competition and hence, are tough to fill, like tech hiring these days.

A recruitment CRM solution provides you with much more than just a database. It’s a comprehensive automated system that helps in expanding, nurturing, and recruiting your talent pool.

Automate Personalized Engagement

One of the most crucial factors impacting candidate experience is engagement – which needs to be both timely and personalized. Generic messages sent to the masses don’t work anymore. So you not only need to communicate frequently to your target candidates but effectively too. A candidate relationship software allows you to automate your personalized engagement and scale your recruiting efforts.

Right from the beginning – outreach to nurture campaigns (until the candidate finally applies) to recruitment cycle updates, reminders, and progress tracking - a candidate relationship management software automates all the mundane tasks of various recruitment stages.

This not only helps you level up your recruitment but also keeps candidates informed about their hiring progress – which adds up immensely to a positive candidate experience.

Boost Recruiting Team’s Productivity

80% of surveyed executives believe automation can significantly boost their team’s productivity. From the sourcing stage to engagement, screening, interviewing, hiring and onboarding – recruitment teams have a lot to do at any given point in time. As a recruiter, you wouldn’t want to continuously manage and track the talent pipeline - given how much time it takes.

Having a candidate relationship management system in place ensures your recruitment teams focus on the more human side of recruiting. To break it down further – recruiting CRM helps you focus on interacting and interviewing candidates rather than manually maintaining the recruitment pipeline. Especially, when you’re hiring for multiple roles – automation extensively boosts your productivity.

Strengthen Your Employer Brand

What do you think largely drives people’s decision to work with you or to apply for a job at your company? It’s the employer brand – how the external workforce sees you as an employer of choice. A number of factors contribute to a successful employer brand, candidate experience being the biggest one.

82% of candidates consider employer brand and reputation before applying for a job. A positive recruitment experience for candidates, regardless of the results, helps you spread the word about your company’s hiring culture. Additionally, quality candidate experience also conveys how deeply you value your employees.

If you’re wondering how recruitment CRM software boosts employer brand – it promises consistent, error-free, and quality engagement with your candidates - and hence delightful experiences.

Optimize Time and Cost of Hiring

Time and cost of hiring are two of the most crucial recruitment metrics. No matter how big an organization is, optimizing the cost and time of hiring is always a core recruitment objective. With end-to-end automation using CRM software, the productivity of the recruitment team increases, and the average time required to hire candidates is substantially cut off. Not to forget – having a CRM tool saves a lot of repeated work like sourcing candidates again when you have talent requirements, and hence cost is significantly reduced too.

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Top 5 Candidate Engagement Strategies to Follow for Effective Hiring

We have already discussed the impact of candidate engagement and how huge a role positive candidate experience plays in hiring top talent. As per a survey, when candidates were asked if they ever decline a job offer and why did they do so – 58% of them said it was due to a negative candidate experience.

Recruiters need to understand that they’re not the only ones chasing and recruiting those candidates. The talent market is trickier than ever before, and the only way to ensure you stay in line with your company’s hiring requirements is by following a candidate-centric approach.

Engagement now drives your recruitment funnel – helps you deliver a prolific candidate experience and positively impacts your employer brand. Let’s now dive deep into the top 5 engagement strategies you must follow to boost candidate experience and amplify your hiring outcomes.

#1 Frame a Hiring Timeline

The topmost reason for candidates to drop off a recruitment funnel or not even apply for a job is long recruitment cycles. Every company has a unique set of steps in their recruitment journey. However, to attract and retain quality candidates through a great candidate experience - you need to pre-define the complete hiring timeline for your recruitment process.

Talent acquisition is not a straightforward process, but recruiters must inform candidates well in advance about the recruitment process and the timeline to set their expectations right. Also, ensure that you mostly stick to the timeline and not just share with candidates for the sake of it.

#2 Ensure Clear & Consistent Communication

Over 96% of job applicants expect atleast a confirmation email once they apply for a job - but only 8% get this. Even some of the basic requirements of candidates have been long ignored but as times are changing, recruiters need to tweak our strategies too.

Right from the beginning, stay consistent with your engagement and communication activities -

Inform candidates about each step of your recruitment process
Share updates and regular reminders related to their recruitment progress
Be transparent and let each candidate know about their results (yes, even rejected ones) as soon as the outcomes are in your hand
Execute multiple nurture campaigns for passive talent pool

#3 Review Fast and Respond Faster

Not only has the attention span of consumers dropped significantly – but candidates too, now expect recruiting cycles to be shorter and faster. Hence you need to cater to these requirements and review applications quickly to move candidates toward the interview stages faster.

On the other hand, make sure you respond to candidates within a few hours in case they have any queries or want to know the updates on recruitment rounds. The pace at which you push candidates throughout the hiring funnel directly impacts the candidate experience and hence your recruitment.

#4 Regular Feedback

The most underrated element of recruitment – is feedback. Not only does it give a brief overview of a candidate’s performance, but it also helps recruitment teams evaluate their efficiency. In order to serve a prolific candidate experience, seek regular feedback on the different rounds of interviews, guidance, support, and convenience offered to candidates along the way.

Not to forget – give consistent feedback to all candidates for their performance during screening, evaluation, interview rounds, and other interactive touchpoints. It will further boost candidate experience.

#5 Level Up with Automated CRM Software

Handling all the recruitment – sourcing, engagement, and pipeline management tasks manually can be easily overwhelming for your recruiting team. It also harms their productivity.

The optimal way through is to use a reliable automated solution for streamlining your candidate relationship experience management. From adding profiles to the talent pool to running different nurture campaigns and engaging with talent consistently - sophisticated CRM software takes care of your entire recruitment pipeline.

Supercharge Your Candidate Experience & Engagement with Nurturebox

Why settle for high efforts and mediocre results when you can get the best results wih minimal recruitment efforts? Nurturebox is an end-to-end talent sourcing and engagement platform that enables you and your recruitment teams to scale up their hiring seamlessly.

With a one-stop platform for sourcing profiles from LinkedIn, reaching out to candidates via multiple channels, engaging them with multiple campaigns, and analyzing your candidate engagement performance – Nurturebox is the comprehensive automated CRM tool you need.

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

Build positive brand awareness
Make your audience stick around for longer
Get better traction on social media
Gain more trust of your audience than ever
Generate qualified leads
Improve conversion rates
Boost business visibility with SEO
Position your brand as an authority
Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly. ‍
Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
Types of content to be created
Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.‍
Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.‍
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
Continous publishing and distributing content
Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

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Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
Where do they look for a new job?
What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.

Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.

Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.

Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.

About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
Include and optimize all content for SEO
Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
Why should candidates apply for the position?
Highlight the growth opportunities
State the company vision and mission
Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

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Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.