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A well-executed candidate relationship management (CRM) strategy is essential for building lasting connections with talent and staying ahead in a competitive job market. By fostering strong relationships with candidates, recruiting teams can attract top talent, nurture long-term interest, and keep prospects engaged throughout the hiring process.
However, building and maintaining these relationships can be challenging. Many recruiting teams, especially those relying on traditional methods and legacy applicant tracking systems (ATS), struggle to effectively tap into and manage their talent pools, often losing out on opportunities to engage with both active and passive candidates.
While modern tools can certainly enhance CRM, the heart of the process lies in the strategies used to connect with candidates, build trust, and maintain consistent, personalized engagement. In this post, we’ll discuss how a thoughtful CRM approach—focused on communication and candidate experience—can help your talent acquisition team improve your hiring outcomes.
What is candidate relationship management?
Candidate relationship management is the process of identifying qualified talent, engaging them to fill open roles, and maintaining long-term connections with them to create a full-cycle recruiting process.
With an optimized CRM approach and tools, you can stay in touch and top of mind with the best-fit candidates for your roles.
Why does candidate relationship management matter?
An effective CRM approach doesn’t just impact your immediate hiring efforts. An improved strategy can also help you:
- Adapt to market fluctuations. The job market can fluctuate greatly due to external factors, such as economic shifts or global events. For example, during the Great Resignation, nearly 100 million people left their jobs over the course of two years, creating significant hiring challenges. Managing your candidate relationships helps you adapt to these fluctuations and proactively secure top talent.
- Engage with a pre-qualified talent pool. Maintaining a positive relationship with your existing talent pool allows you to stay engaged with individuals who have already shown interest in your company. This provides a valuable advantage, as these candidates are familiar with your business and culture, giving you a hiring head start in times of high competition for talent.
- Strengthen your employer brand. Consistently engaging with candidates and offering them a positive, professional experience leaves a lasting impression and improves your reputation. Even if a candidate doesn’t join your team, they’ll think highly of your company and may consider applying again in the future or referring others.
- Create a competitive advantage. In a competitive hiring environment, maintaining relationships with candidates gives you an edge over businesses that only engage with candidates at an initial touchpoint. By nurturing these relationships, you can convert more prospects into hires when the right opportunity arises.
- Build long-term talent pipelines. CRM nurtures relationships over time, ensuring you have a strong, diverse pool of candidates ready when a role opens. This proactive approach reduces hiring time and helps you avoid scrambling for talent during critical moments.
6 candidate relationship management strategies for success
You can’t build a strong, future-proofed CRM strategy without a coordinated plan that helps you engage candidates in the recruiting lifecycle.
Keep these best practices in mind as you brainstorm, execute, and iterate on your CRM tactics:
1. Invest in a recruitment CRM platform with critical capabilities
Sales and Marketing professionals use customer relationship management software to improve how, when, and where they engage potential buyers in the sales funnel.
So, why shouldn’t you have a similar solution to help you engage and convert talent? But you need more than a database to track and store applicants and sourced prospects. You need robust CRM software with functionalities that help you source, nurture, interview, and hire talent in a streamlined, standardized manner.
More specifically, you need talent acquisition technology that helps you:
- Automate most (though not all) of your messaging to early-stage prospects
- Receive notifications when candidates of interest engage with your communications
- Move candidates through your recruitment funnel
- Make decisions about talent quickly and efficiently
- Organize talent with tags in case you want to revisit them for future roles
- Identify ideal fits for open roles in a matter of seconds
Research features and schedule product demos to ensure your chosen solution is equipped to help you recruit and hire with confidence.
2. Communicate with prospects in a timely, personalized manner
Communication comes into play at every stage of the relationship-building process.
However, impersonal, generic newsletters and emails can turn candidates off from your organization. Contacting candidates directly with 1:1 messaging is how you build genuine human connections with them. Unfortunately, personalizing each communication is time-consuming.
The best way to communicate with prospects at scale is by using talent-nurturing tech. For example, Lever expedites communication without compromising personalization by offering pre-made templates, which help recruiters:
- Build and test email programs to earn consistently better conversion rates
- Customize communications based on roles and departments
- Adjust the number of touchpoints in nurtures, the schedules for sending them, and the copy used to improve over time
Remember, the best CRM strategies recognize and leverage two-way communication. Your candidates may have questions, concerns, or comments about interviewing with you. Relay key hiring process information to talent while also providing them with channels they can leverage to provide feedback and ask questions. Allowing candidates to give feedback strengthens the bond they feel with your company and can help you improve your candidate experience.
3. Keep talent engaged through the entire recruitment lifecycle
Your company considers multiple prospective hires at any given moment, which can mean a lengthy waiting period for your hiring decision. Though this process may take time on your end, you still need to keep all candidates engaged. Many candidates have no shortage of job opportunities, so it’s vital to continually communicate with prospects and keep them updated on the status of your hiring process by:
- Setting clear expectations. Build trust by letting candidates know when they can expect to hear back from you, what’s expected of them throughout the process, and other important details.
- Communicating regularly and transparently. Even if the decision-making process takes longer than expected, regular communication ensures candidates don’t feel neglected or left in the dark about their application status.
- Building long-term relationships. Sometimes, the talent acquisition cycle doesn’t end when a candidate isn’t extended an offer. Maintain the connection to fill future job opportunities down the line by adding them to your passive talent outreach stream.
By engaging candidates and standardizing expectations, you demonstrate that your organization values their time and is committed to a respectful, transparent hiring process. This not only strengthens your talent acquisition efforts but also enhances your employer brand.
4. Focus on active and passive candidate relationship management
For roles that are hard to fill, one of your best chances of finding qualified hires is to build a pool of passive candidates who are suited for these specialized positions.
Passive candidates are individuals who are not necessarily looking for a job right away. Try these strategies to access passive candidates:
- Employee referrals. To encourage participation, offer referring employees a small incentive if their recommendation gets hired, such as an extra paid day off or a free lunch.
- Passive recruitment marketing. Promote both specific roles and your employer brand to targeted audiences via paid search ads, social media campaigns, and more.
- Attend industry networking events. Unlike career fairs, events like conferences and workshops give talent acquisition pros access to a completely new audience. Even if they’re not actively job hunting, these events provide a chance for your team to engage with potential future hires in a low-pressure setting.
By paying attention to both active and passive prospective hires, you can keep interest in your organization high. Just ensure that you’re available to answer passive hires’ questions, as they might be less familiar with your brand than active prospects.
5. Demonstrate transparent and ethical hiring practices
Welcoming all applicants, regardless of their background, is crucial for building a diverse workforce and spurring innovation at your organization. Ethical hiring practices facilitate an accepting workplace by mitigating biases and other barriers. Consider implementing these best practices to improve your hiring process:
- Outline the hiring process upfront. Provide clear expectations about which materials to submit and what the hiring process involves.
- Share insight into company culture. Offer information about your workplace culture so the candidate understands what the day-to-day aspects of the job would look like and isn’t surprised on their first day.
- Adopt bias-blind hiring practices. Remove identifiable aspects of each candidate’s resume, such as their name and gender. This avoids the impacts of unconscious bias and helps you select candidates purely based on their qualifications.
- Publish accurate job descriptions. Posting precise job descriptions saves time for both your team and candidates by weeding out bad fits from the beginning.
- Encourage questions and open dialogue. Ensuring applicants feel comfortable and heard increases the likelihood that they’ll accept your offer if you extend one.
- Stick to a timeline. If you have to deviate from the outlined hiring timeline, be upfront with applicants, so they aren’t left on the hook.
Treating your candidates with respect has short- and long-term benefits for your organization: it increases the likelihood of them signing on to work with your company and staying loyal to your organization over time.
6. Improve candidate experience with data
Like any other process, you can enhance the candidate experience with actionable insights based on data. Here’s how you can use your CRM software to implement data-driven strategies:
- Leverage reporting and data collection features.
- Track relevant KPIs, such as candidate satisfaction score, application completion rate, time to fill, offer acceptance rate, and drop-off rate.
- Analyze quantitative feedback via surveys and exit interviews.
- Forecast which changes will be effective.
These strategies hinge on your team using a powerful CRM system. Pairing your chosen system with data hygiene best practices, such as regular audits and standardized formatting, helps you ensure a seamless, data-driven candidate experience.
By implementing structured communication, leveraging candidate feedback, and continuously nurturing relationships with both active and passive candidates, you’ll cultivate a more efficient and positive hiring process. To kick off your CRM enhancement, look to your tech stack. Explore your current system and determine how it can support the best practices in this guide. Then, as you implement these tips, collect relevant data that can help you refine your CRM strategy.
