Why You Should Care About Your Recruitment CRM Best Practices

When it comes to recruitment, relationships are everything. Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database is your control centre for managing those critical relationships with clients and candidates. In this blog, we’re diving into why you should care about your CRM and why using CRM best practices to manage that relationship data is so important for recruitment businesses.

Recruitment agencies are among the most prolific data users and creators of any industry. If you’ve been operating for even just a few years, it’s likely you’ve amassed thousands of client and candidate contacts – it’s not uncommon for some of our clients to have 100k+ contacts!

However, these contacts can quickly become dormant as you chase the next new contact. And when that happens you often spend time and money to acquire customers that likely already exist in your database. In fact, when we review placement data, we’ve found that around 75-85% of placed candidates that were acquired from job boards or LinkedIn already existed in the database.

Let that sink in.

Following CRM best practices isn’t simply feeding new data into your database; it’s about keeping your existing contacts healthy, warm, and engaged, so you don’t waste your resources.

4 Things Your CRM Can Do for You

Let’s start with the four biggest reasons a CRM is a crucial tool for recruiters:

1. 1. As a Centralised Engine for Consultant Networks

      Your consultants manage most of your client and candidate relationships, but as driven and organised as they might be, mistakes can still happen! Imagine scattered information, mix-ups, and missed chances. That’s where your CRM comes in. A CRM brings everything together in one place, making sure data is accurate and everyone’s on the same page.

      Because of this your CRM can take a lot of the pressure off your consultants and free up their time to concentrate on value-add activities. It also makes life easier for new recruits. With a CRM, they quickly understand client relationships, which means they can bill faster. It’s like having a solid hub that keeps everything organised, minimises risks, and helps everyone work smoothly.

      So why don’t your consultant’s use your CRM? Often, it’s because your CRM is unhealthy, full of old, incomplete, or poor data. When that’s true it’s easier for your consultants to look elsewhere, to LinkedIn or their own contacts. If you keep the data in your CRM clean and engaged, your consultants are more likely to go there.

   2. ​Providing Sales Reports and Analytics for Informed Decision-Making

      A properly supported CRM can be a powerhouse for informed decision-making and heightened productivity. By generating detailed sales reports and analytics, your CRM provides insights that guide strategic decisions, making the sales process more effective and streamlined.

      Imagine getting real-time reports about your business performance down to desk level – all the nitty-gritty details about clients, candidates, and placements you need. This includes insights on consultant performance and information that helps you manage your job pipeline more efficiently. You can see the status of each job, track the progress, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

   3. Nurturing Contacts for Ongoing Business Development

      Your CRM has an important role to play in the continued growth of your business because candidate and client engagement and continuous relationship building is such a vital part of ongoing business development and talent pool expansion.

      Using automation, a healthy CRM enables you to systematically nurture candidates and clients through personalised communication, timely follow-ups, and targeted content distribution. This not only helps with relationship-building efforts but makes sure that your agency stays top-of-mind for both candidates and clients.

      Moreover, your CRM makes you a more efficient recruiter. Providing you with advanced tools to quickly identify, source and connect with potential candidates. This accelerated process means you provide your clients with top-quality talent quickly, giving you a distinct advantage, allowing you to outperform competitors and secure valuable placements.

   4. ​Improving Customer Information, Segmentation, and Reach

      Because your CRM gives you a comprehensive understanding of client preferences, behaviours, and engagement history you can segment them into precise groups, each with a tailored marketing strategy that fits their needs The result? Targeted marketing that resonates with clients and candidates, building stronger connections and increasing the likelihood of successful engagements.

      Your CRM doesn’t stop there; with better segmentation you can expand your digital marketing reach through personalised and strategic digital campaigns that always reach the right audience at the right time.

Why Should You Invest in Recruitment CRM Best Practices?

Now you understand the role your CRM can play in supporting and improving your day-to-day client management and overall marketing strategy, let’s look at some of the reasons to focus on and invest in CRM best practices:

1. 1. • Business Development and Revenue Growth

        If you’re aiming for robust development and revenue growth (who isn’t!) the statistics speak volumes; acquiring a new customer can cost anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. This underscores the significance of CRM in not only identifying and nurturing leads but also in the strategic retention of valued clients.

        A well-optimised CRM system becomes the compass for scalability, efficiently managing leads and transforming them into lasting relationships. By streamlining lead generation and improving customer retention strategies, you’ll not only save significantly but encourage sustained growth because every client is not just acquired but nurtured for long-term success.

        See how Thrive supported this healthcare recruiter in warming up their cold CRM to engage candidates and generate leads through marketing automation.

      • Future Valuation of the Company

        Even if a future sale isn’t in your business plan right now, you should also be considering how CRM best practices can support any future recruitment company valuation. Reportedly, investors expect 60% of your database to be regularly engaged with for them to consider you a strong prospect. Yet the industry average is a mere 10-15% engagement. A well-kept CRM, supported by regular marketing automation boosts how much your company is worth by showing strong customer connections.

        Keeping your CRM healthy is like a promise for long-term success. It proves you care about customers, making them stick around. Plus, as your business grows and changes, a solid CRM is like a secret weapon, making sure you stay valuable and adaptable in the long run.

How CRM Best Practices Can Improve Your Marketing Automation

Adopting CRM best practices doesn’t just improve how you handle those key client and candidate relationships, but it also teams up with your marketing automations for a digital marketing boost. Marketing automation is the superhero sidekick to a well-optimised CRM, cutting down repetitive tasks and making things run smoother. Together they provide you with a documented marketing strategy – and businesses with a marketing plan in place are 313% more likely to report success.

Looking for more examples of how Thrive has helped our clients achieve successful recruitment marketing campaigns through CRM automation? Explore our success stories.