Hiring is a multi-step journey where each stage requires different workflows from recruiters and distinct experiences for candidates. From initial candidate engagement to start date preparation, the hiring process comes with several unique challenges and demands. This complexity means hiring companies and their recruiting teams need an all-encompassing solution to seamlessly manage the entire process. Enter the modern Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) platform.
A CRM brings every recruiting and hiring-related activity into a single, unified platform. This empowers hiring companies to build better candidate relationships by providing frequent communication and consistent experiences throughout the talent journey. Even more, it enhances productivity and collaboration among the recruiting team through a full suite of AI-powered features and centralized access to all candidate and job-related data.
All in all, a CRM leads to positive outcomes for everyone involved in hiring. Candidates enjoy better experiences, recruiters work smarter and more efficiently, and hiring companies fill critical, revenue-generating positions faster than ever before.
Recruiting teams often rely on a variety of platforms and tools to manage different aspects of the hiring process. The Applicant Tracking System (ATS) has long been the foundation of the recruiting tech stack but separate platforms for communicating with candidates and scheduling interviews have become necessary over the years.
But the reality is adding new tools doesn’t always make life easier for busy recruiters. More often than not, it makes things more complicated. Having a fragment tech stack has several unintended consequences, including:
A powerful Candidate Relationship Management platform brings all recruiting activities into a centralized solution. This resolves the pitfalls of a fragmented tech stack highlighted in the previous section and drives numerous other benefits, including:
These collective benefits lead to high-priority roles quickly getting filled with top talent. Hiring continues to be challenging and organizations with ambitious recruiting goals must take advantage of modern technology to stay ahead of the competition.
With that in mind, let’s really get into it and explore everything that a Candidate Relationship Management platform can do.
An effective recruiting strategy requires efficient workflows for the people in charge of executing it. Recruiters need to easily navigate between all their open jobs and various candidates under consideration.
A Candidate Relationship Management platform comes with an intuitive interface that simplifies job and candidate management, and powerful search functionality for easily finding the information you need.
Recruiters are often tasked with hiring for multiple roles across various teams. And each role requires a unique set of tasks on any given day.
A CRM provides an at-glance overview of all open positions. Recruiters can drill down into each role to access detailed information, including job descriptions, requirements, pending tasks, and candidates under consideration. Visibility into open roles and their statuses helps recruiters manage priorities and keep their collective hiring efforts moving forward.
A CRM excels in talent engagement. We’ll cover this theme a lot throughout this blog post but let’s start with candidate management and talent pools.
The candidate management section enables recruiters to view and interact with every candidate in the database. Within each individual candidate’s profile, you can see their status, the jobs they’re associated with, and their stage in the hiring process.
Additionally, the talent pool feature groups similar candidates together, allowing recruiters to engage entire pools with relevant, yet personalized messaging. For example, when a new role comes across your desk, you can instantly share it with the right talent pool. This ensures you always have a steady pipeline of passive talent as new opportunities become available.
With multiple open jobs and hundreds or even thousands of candidates, recruiters need to locate information quickly and easily. A CRM includes powerful search functionality, enabling you to filter and sort candidates based on specific criteria.
This makes it easy to find the most suitable candidates—or even just locate important information associated with a specific candidate. A CRM with advanced search capabilities is essential for enterprise organizations with extensive databases of thousands of candidates.
Sourcing is difficult for any hiring company. Some recruiting teams struggle to attract enough candidates but others have a slightly different sourcing challenge: They generate plenty of applicants but need an efficient way to identify the most qualified ones.
With a Candidate Relationship Management platform, you can use AI to match, score, and rank candidates, ensuring that top talent is prioritized for each role.
Candidate Matching uses advanced algorithms to analyze candidate profiles against job requirements. This means it can evaluate skills, experience, education, and location without any human involvement required.
Recruiters can customize the weight of each criterion to focus on the most relevant qualifications for a specific role. For example, if a certain skill is essential but the years of experience requirement is more flexible, that adjustment can be made within the CRM. Candidate Matching helps you quickly zero in on highly qualified candidates worth proceeding with.
Candidate Scoring expands on Candidate Matching and quantifies how qualified a candidate is by assigning them a score between 0 and 100. A score above 80 indicates they’re a strong match, helping you know exactly who is a top candidate.
The scoring method is designed to perfectly align with job requirements, saving you significant time and resources during the evaluation process.
Using the scores, a CRM will generate a ranked list of the most qualified candidates that position the highest-scoring talent at the top.
Recruiters can pull this list up and immediately focus their outreach efforts on the most promising candidates, accelerating the hiring process and engaging top talent early on.
Candidates have long demanded better communication from hiring companies. And recruiters have always wanted to keep candidates informed but have never had the time to continuously engage every person under consideration for a role.
A Candidate Relationship Management platform includes numerous features for automating communication and reaching candidates on multiple channels. Recruiters can automatically send personalized and timely messages using journeys, texts, emails, and chatbots so candidates always know where they stand in the hiring process.
Using automated journeys, you can create step-by-step touchpoints that nurture candidates throughout the hiring process. Messages are triggered as candidates take certain actions, advance to the next stage, or after a certain number of pre-defined days have passed.
Additionally, messages are delivered through a variety of channels, including text messages, email, and conversational AI chatbots. Omnichannel communication enhances the talent experience since candidates receive updates or reminders on the appropriate medium depending on their preferences and where they’re at in their journey. And when these messages are part of a complete automated journey, you provide candidates with the consistent communication they expect without needing to monitor their progress and craft new messages from scratch.
Recruiting text messaging has quickly become a top channel for engaging candidates. However, recruiters cannot be expected to manage conversations with different candidates from a single phone.
A CRM enables you to send personalized text messages to candidates directly from the platform. You can create one-off messages for individual candidates or use templates with placeholders that populate with relevant details, such as names, job titles, and locations. You can also preview candidate profiles and resumes within the messaging interface, so you have the context you need when crafting a message.
Even more, recruiters can send bulk messages to share open roles with multiple candidates at once. Again, these are personalized so each message feels as if it was written specifically for the individual candidate who receives it. And with tags and filters, you can segment the audience so the role you’re sourcing for is shared with the right talent pool.
In a day of age where everyone has their mobile phone within arm’s reach, personalized text messaging is one of the most effective ways to get a candidate’s attention and boost response rates.
In addition to supporting text messaging, a CRM also offers robust email capabilities. Emails (like text messages) can be sent directly from the platform as one-off messages to individuals, templated messages, or bulk sends to groups of candidates.
While text messaging is great for quick updates and reminders, building automated candidate journeys with multiple emails is one of the most powerful features within a CRM. Email communication is particularly useful for sending detailed information, such as job descriptions, offer letters, or post-interview feedback, making it an essential part of an omnichannel candidate engagement strategy.
AI recruiting chatbots are a groundbreaking communication channel for engaging candidates in real-time without any human involvement. Within a CRM, AI chatbots not only instantly communicate with candidates—they completely automate the initial stages of the hiring process.
They can share relevant roles with candidates, answer their questions, collect application details, pre-screen them against role requirements, and schedule interviews. Additionally, AI chatbots will provide instant updates when candidates check in about their status.
AI chatbots can be integrated into your career site to greet job seekers when they land on the page. They can also instantly respond to text messages and engage candidates in a conversational, human-like way.
AI chatbots significantly speed up the sourcing, screening, and interview scheduling stages of the hiring process which delights candidates and drastically reduces time-to-fill.
Keeping candidates informed about their status in the hiring process goes a long way in maintaining their interest and preventing drop-off.
A CRM enables recruiters to update candidate statuses with a few clicks and automatically notify the individual when they’ve advanced in the hiring process.
Most recruiters do their best to keep candidates in the loop, but continuously updating every candidate under consideration isn’t feasible. Status updates do the heavy lifting—keeping candidates informed and reducing their anxiety during their job search.
The interview scheduling stage is a notorious bottleneck in the hiring process. Collecting availability from every interviewer and coordinating with the candidate is time-consuming and often requires multiple phone calls or emails. A Candidate Relationship Management platform simplifies this process with automated interview scheduling tools, seamless calendar integration, and customizable templates—ensuring candidates meet the hiring team sooner than later.
A CRM offers advanced scheduling features that bring efficiency to the interview scheduling process. The platform supports both self-scheduling by candidates and manual bookings by recruiters.
But self-scheduling is the capability worth exploring. As the candidate converses with the AI chatbot, it will present them with available interview dates and times they can select from. A CRM even handles complex scheduling scenarios, such as panel or sequential interviews, and accommodates and automates rescheduling requests from candidates.
Automated interview scheduling eliminates the back-and-forth email or phone exchanges that slow down the hiring process, resulting in roles being filled faster and an improved candidate experience.
Automated interview scheduling is supported by the CRM’s capability to seamlessly integrate with the hiring team’s calendars (whether that be Google Calendar, Outlook, or another calendar system). This feature synchronizes interview availabilities for everyone involved and generates logical dates and times to share with candidates.
Calendar integration and automated interview scheduling prevent conflicts and ensure that everyone on the interview team is aware of their commitment, leading to a more organized and efficient interview process.
Messaging templates can also be used during the interview scheduling process to provide every candidate with a consistent experience. Templates can be created for different types of interviews (e.g., screening, technical, panel) and populated with relevant details like the candidate’s name and the job they’re interviewing for.
Templated messages can be triggered to send at specific stages in the interview scheduling process so candidates receive the right message at the right time. These customizable interview scheduling templates are a small but helpful feature that further streamlines the interview scheduling process and keeps candidates updated as they work toward getting hired.
Savvy recruiting teams no longer rely solely on job boards to source candidates. They use a variety of channels to connect with job seekers where they are and build a strong talent pipeline to meet their workforce needs.
A Candidate Relationship Management platform comes with multiple features that drive sourcing efforts, including a Chrome extension for building talent pools, resume uploads that convert to candidate profiles, and customizable landing pages for collecting candidate information.
Using a Chrome extension, recruiters can import candidate profiles from LinkedIn or other websites directly into the CRM.
These profiles are converted to a standardized format and can quickly be added to relevant talent pools, allowing you to start the process of engaging the passive talent you discover. For example, you can continuously nurture these candidates with automated messaging, share relevant openings via mass text messaging campaigns, or simply reach out to them directly. A Chrome extension helps you streamline the passive talent sourcing process and efficiently bring the great candidates you discover into your CRM.
Resumes provide everything you need to know about a candidate, but getting this information into your recruiting systems has always been a challenge. With a CRM, you no longer have to manually input candidate information or upload resumes one by one. You can instead drag and drop multiple resumes into the platform at once and watch as the relevant details are converted into standardized candidate profiles within the platform.
You can also tag and categorize resumes so they’re easily retrievable at any time. Resume uploads bring another layer of efficiency to recruiter workflows and help maintain accurate data in the CRM.
From hiring events to employer branding content, innovative recruiters use different campaigns to connect with job seekers. However, successful campaigns require capturing candidate information.
Using a CRM, recruiters can easily create and launch landing pages and forms to support their different recruitment marketing initiatives. You can also define specific rules that route candidates who complete the form to the right recruiter or automated journey in the CRM.
Landing pages can be built and launched in minutes with an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Additionally, you can use templates that match the look and feel of your company’s overarching brand so candidates have a consistent experience across your website.
Conversational Voice AI is the next big thing in candidate engagement. Unlike text-based communication channels (e.g., chatbots and SMS), it provides a personal touch, allowing candidates to interact with a virtual recruiter who speaks and listens just like a real person. This creates a professional and approachable experience, building trust and confidence between the candidate and the hiring organization.
Voice AI isn’t limited to one part of the hiring process—it automates recruiting activities across multiple stages of the candidate journey. It can:
Voice AI drives a faster and more seamless process, reducing the need for recruiters to spend valuable time on manual, repetitive tasks.
Voice AI provides recruiters with complete transcripts and summaries of all candidate interactions that are automatically synced and made available within the CRM. These detailed records give recruiters full visibility into the candidate’s responses, qualifications, and interest in the job opportunity.
By having all this context readily available, recruiters can tailor their follow-ups, avoid redundant questions, and make more informed decisions. This feature ensures continuity and enhances recruiter efficiency without sacrificing the personalized touch that candidates appreciate.
Voice AI enhances accessibility by offering multi-language support so candidates can have conversations in their native language. Through intelligent language detection, the AI automatically adjusts to the candidate’s preferences, ensuring clear communication and a personalized experience. This feature is especially beneficial for organizations hiring across diverse regions or aiming to expand their global reach.
With branded calls, Voice AI strengthens trust and reinforces your organization’s professionalism. Incoming calls display your company’s verified name and phone number, ensuring candidates recognize the call as legitimate. The AI also states the purpose of the call—whether it’s to discuss job opportunities, conduct pre-screenings, or schedule an interview—keeping candidates informed and engaged throughout the process. This feature enhances your employer brand and builds credibility with every interaction.
According to a survey conducted by Sense and the CandE Benchmark Research Program, employee referrals are the top source of new hires. After all, employees have large networks of talented people and can provide firsthand insight into what it’s like to be part of your team.
However, many hiring companies struggle to implement a successful referral program. Referred candidates often fall through the cracks—never entering the ATS and leaving employees wondering if the person they referred is even being considered for the job.
A Candidate Relationship Management platform simplifies the referral process, making it easy for employees to refer candidates and for recruiters to track and manage these candidates throughout the recruiting process.
Many employees wonder how to go about referring a candidate in the first place. Do they send their resume to the hiring manager or recruiter? If the candidate just applies, will anyone know they have a connection at the company?
A CRM brings clarity to the referral process with custom application URLs. When a candidate completes the application, they’ll be labeled as a referral within the platform and associated with the employee who recommended them.
This employee-friendly process helps you unlock the power of referrals. It makes participation easy and encourages your happy employees to be active participants in your recruiting process.
After a referred candidate completes the custom application, a candidate profile will be created in the CRM. The employee can then access the platform at any time and see where their referral is at in the hiring process. This visibility gives them the peace of mind that the candidate they recommended is being fairly considered for the role.
Additionally, recruiters can view and manage all referred candidates from a centralized section of the CRM. Again, referrals are often one of the top sources of new hires so the ability to see all referrals in a single location helps you prioritize highly-motivated talent that is eager to join your team.
One of the most effective ways to reap the benefits of referrals is to incentivize participation. Smart recruiting teams reward employees for successful referrals and bring a gamification element to the process to encourage friendly competition among the workforce.
Let’s start with rewards. A CRM will automate reward payouts to employees when a candidate they referred is hired, and even generate the necessary tax forms they’ll need. No more connecting with the payroll department every time a referral reward is required.
When it comes to gamification, a CRM includes a referral leaderboard that lets employees see how they stack up among their colleagues. You can even give different rewards or prizes to employees who come out on top, making the referral process fun and exciting for everyone at the company.
Your career site is where you a make strong first impression to job seekers. You need to get their attention by summarizing everything great about working for your company and encourage them to take the critical action of applying.
A Candidate Relationship Management platform includes a simplified builder that anyone can use to create a sleek and modern career site, even if they have no design or coding knowledge.
Many companies lack a dedicated web designer, leaving the recruiting team with a basic career site, or in some cases, no career site at all. A CRM solves this problem with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and customizable templates, making it simple to design and launch a career site.
Any one of the pre-built templates provides a strong foundation for the site, which can then be customized to match your company’s brand and include the relevant content you want to highlight. In no time at all, you can build a professional-looking career site that provides insight into your company culture and encourages job seekers to apply.
It should come as no surprise that modern job seekers are looking for their next opportunity on their phones. A CRM-built career site is completely mobile-optimized, ensuring that candidates can search for open roles and apply while on the go.
A mobile-optimized career site is non-negotiable in today's digital age. With a CRM, you can provide a seamless career site experience, helping you attract candidates regardless of what device they’re on.
Your career site should not only showcase your organizational culture and unique employer value proposition but also reflect your company’s overall brand.
With the career site builder, you can effortlessly match the look and feel of your primary website. You can also use your company’s exact website domain so your career site becomes a seamless extension of your main site. As candidates navigate to the careers section to explore job opportunities, you can rest assured that they’re having a consistent web experience.
Many candidates won’t come directly to your website to explore your open jobs. They’ll instead start their job search on Google or another search engine and look for companies that are hiring for jobs that are relevant to them.
A CRM includes numerous SEO-friendly features that help you optimize your site for the keywords your ideal candidates are searching for. A career site that ranks highly in search results increases the visibility of your job openings and helps you attract more qualified candidates.
A platform like Sense CRM is a game-changer for managing the complex, multi-step hiring process today’s recruiters are expected to accomplish. It provides you with all the AI and automation features you need to deliver personalized hiring experiences at scale and accelerate the candidate journey. And by centralizing all recruiting activities in a single platform, Sense CRM drives efficiency and collaboration.
The end result is a superior experience for both candidates and recruiters. Candidates benefit from consistent, timely communication and a smooth hiring process, while recruiters save time and streamline workflows within a unified system. This leads to roles being filled faster and a more agile, productive recruiting team.
Ready to get a first-hand look at all the features Sense CRM offers? Get in touch with us today!
