CRM For Recruitment Agencies: Finding the Right Candidate at the Right Time

Nimble CRM For Recruitment Agencies

CRMs for recruitment agencies are a weapon that can enhance pretty much every major KPI for a head-hunter: offer acceptance rate, pipeline velocity, days to offer, average candidate experience, fill rate, win rate, and more.

In the era where job-hunting is a home chore and the best talent comes at a 200% markup of the mean salary, the recruitment process is the foundational element of the success of any business. Once you have the top talent at the best price at the right time, chances are, you will be the leader in any niche.

Nimble CRM has been at the top of the charts of pretty much every independent software review authority, like Capterra, GetApp, G2Crowd as one of the best CRM solutions for small and medium businesses.

Being a SaaS business, we need a lot of technical and marketing talent who know how to create and sell top-notch software. 

Faced with tough competition, we use Nimble to hunt the best talent for our company too. This is how we know how to use the client relationship management system for staffing. Read on to find out some of the tips and tricks from the industry insider.

The importance of using CRM as part of the Recruitment agency tech stack

Grow your team efficiency and satisfaction

As Business Magnate Richard Branson wisely noted, “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of clients”.

There may be a range of opinions of his flamboyant personality, but there’s little dispute possible that he is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our times.

Nimble CRM for Recruiters saves 90 minutes a day on average to over 140 thousand professionals across all industries, inclusive of those who head-hunt for a living. If you do your math, that’s nearly a day worth of saved time in a working week.

Time is money, specifically in recruitment; the more candidates you convert the more your commission is. It’s easy to deduce that using a CRM makes you richer as a recruiting agent.

There are so many processes that can be automated, simplified, or otherwise optimized with the help of this multi-functional tool that your team will instantly feel the boost across many working routine processes.

Decrease time to offer KPI

There are a few ways that can improve time to offer [AKA days to offer] – a corner-stone KPI for bigger agencies, where newly-opened daily vacancies are in dozens. 

You can incentivize your agents with an extra commission for quicker closing, organize a perfectly automated pipeline, create educational email drip campaigns to persuade your candidates, or send free cabs to interview the best talent after office hours in person.

But one of the easiest ways to streamline the workflow from the initial contact of the candidate with the vacancy to receiving an offer is through the use of CRM software for recruitment agencies.

Not only can you template all the messaging with A/B tested copywriting for best conversion, but you can also group-email shortlisted contacts inviting them to book a window in your online calendar, for example.

Increase candidate experience indicator

Candidate experience is more vital for some job openings and then it’s pretty irrelevant for others.

The more experienced a candidate is, the pricier and harder-to-get they are. On the other hand, there is no guarantee of quality that comes with experience. Finding the right balance between the client requirements and market saturation is vital to hit the golden medium.

Having a system of tags assigned to the contact field will help your team navigate this aspect better: create special tags for candidate experience in contact profile and mark specific client requirements in deal management.

Monitor pipeline velocity

Pipeline velocity is the marker of a healthy future. The more vacancies you have in each stage of the conversion funnel the better.

Reviewing your pipeline by the agent and channel will help spot the weaker periods timely and take preventative and/or corrective measures.

Expand your client pool

Clients of recruitment agencies are hardly ever loyal. They don’t care who gets the right talent through their door. Exclusive contracts are not an everyday practice, many companies will send a vacancy and receive candidates on a first-come-first-served basis.

This makes client acquisition and loyalty nurturing even more important.

Recruitment CRM is a perfect cure for this issue. Not only does it allow to actively prospect with full immersion into social media activities; it also helps boost loyalty by sustaining personalized communication, automating work-flow with task management, and scheduling events with a calendar module.

Best practices of using CRM for Recruitment agencies

Each vacancy costs $500 a day on average in lost efficiencies and unfulfilled tasks. Every job offer attracts as many as 250 resumes. Employee attrition rate exceeds 13% globally. That’s a lot of work for head-hunters. And a lot of money.

Statista global attrition rates 2013-2019

On the other end of the spectrum, the industry itself is highly competitive, as WFH mode turned many HR managers into individual entrepreneurs who are happy to work as hard for a fraction of the company commission.

How do you succeed in this globalized environment, where interviews happen on Skype and employees may never see their employer in person?

Technology is the magic piece of the puzzle. Here are just some of the ways you can boost your performance and hunt more smart heads quicker. 

Tag contacts for better segmentation

Each contact in Nimble has up to 40 fields that can be filled out accordingly and then used for sorting and filtering.

There are a few demographic parameters, like location, gender, role, company, etc. But there is also a feature that allows creating custom fields and tags. Both of these functionalities allow users from different economic segments to adopt the tool to suit their needs.

In fact, such a feature makes it possible to make CRM like recruitment software. 

For example, you can create simple tags, like “client”, “candidate”, “recruiter”, or add more complex ones with candidates’ skills, like “Ruby” or “GoLang”; or add experience in the role as a tag “rookie”, “5+ yrs” etc.

Keep your online reputation in top shape with a stream of reviews

Recruitment of all businesses can be successfully run from home from A to Z. With Zoom interviews and online tools, it even seems silly to return to the office for the entire team. Many consider scaling down and renting smaller offices for administration only.

The more digital the world gets, the more precious online reputation becomes.

Negative reviews can ruin your business much quicker than positive reviews can make your business.

This is why it should be top of every recruiter’s mind to keep positive reviews flooding every platform out there: Facebook page, Google Business Page, Clutch, Yelp, industry listing sites.

Clutch leader matrix of recruitment agencies in New York

Clutch leader matrix of recruitment agencies in New York

Create a task that is going to be attached to every candidate-side and client-side deal, that reminds an agent to send a templated email requesting a review. For better response:

  • A/B test email template for best conversions
  • Include direct links to review platforms
  • Include a few sample lines, that include keywords, that demonstrate what a review could look like
  • Send a reminder in a week if your email has been read but no review followed.

Research clients and candidates with ease

The Nimble Prospector browser extension is an absolute favorite for sales, marketing, and human resources departments among our clients. As a recruitment agent, you need to screen dozens of candidates, including some social media screening activities.

Nimble prospector allows you to pull dozens of publicly available data points from the internet reducing your manual work. You can use this prospecting tool anywhere on your desktop scraping info from email, social media, 3rd party sites.

Mass email for speed and control

Mass emailing is related to so many issues, like poor deliverability, GDPR, spam filters, looking ingenuine with general emails.

Nimble mass emails is a feature that allows you to send up to 100 personal emails per day. Not only do they look like they have been sent one to one, but they also can be tracked for open rates for best control.

Nimble mass email feature video

Nimble mass email feature video

Create a few custom pipelines:

While most of the best CRMs for the recruitment industry will have a standard pipeline, most will also have the ability to create a custom pipeline with its unique settings.

We recommend a business owner of a recruitment agency to think of a few pipelines, for example, to create separate pipelines for clients and candidates.

As an example, a candidate pipeline may have similar stages:

  • Assigned
  • Interviewed
  • Sent to client
  • Interviewed by client
  • Rejected
  • Offered
  • Placed

Why is Nimble CRM such a good fit for Recruiters: individual and agents alike?

Affordable: few lattes a month for heaps of useful features

Staffing agency software solutions cost anywhere from $50 per month for the most basic set of features with limited candidates. Nimble only costs $19 per user per month if billed annually.

Compatible with other systems

The system is fully customizable and can be integrated with your existing tech stack in a few clicks via Zapier, Piesync, or API.

Intuitive and user-friendly with lots of webinars

The system requires literally no learning curve due to its amazing UX. Usually, novice users click their way to mastery in no time. The system virtually builds itself for you when the contacts are in.

Social media integrated CRM for smooth recruiting

73% of millennials found their last position via a social media platform. This is why Nimble is so loved by the Human resources professionals world over. They can quickly screen candidates with this tool, comment on their tweets, and engage socially from inside the CRM for Recruiters.

Feel like giving Nimble a try?

It’s free for 2 weeks! Sign up to get access to the full features of this multi-functional system for bespoke contact and task management. Let’s open the real hunting season armed with the top gun in the hood, shall we?