The best CRM tools in the market

For every open job role, recruiters deal with thousands of resumes. If they not on top of their game, good talent often slips through the cracks during the press of handling resumes, scheduling interviews, or choosing candidates. This is where a candidate relationship management (CRM) software helps provide a structure for handling job candidates in a company’s talent pipeline.

Just like sales organizations use customer relationship management (also CRM) suites to manage prospects and customers, recruiters use candidate relationship management software to manage potential candidates, job applicants, and potential hires to be given offers. According to OfficeVibe, 46% recruiters see “recruiting becoming more like marketing.”

Functions of a CRM system:

• Build talent communities and talent pipelines (Over 75% of professionals are passive candidates!)
• Communicate with candidates to generate interest in job openings
• Prospect for new sources of candidates
• Build and generate potential candidates as leads

CRM vs ATS vs TAS

Legacy applicant tracking systems (ATS) are designed to track job applicants, and they do not adequately help in the management and nurturing of potential candidates in a pipeline or talent pool.

An ATS is a database for applicants and manages the application process, whereas a CRM system drives the sourcing team, helps create talent pools, and enables nurturing of relationships with passive candidates.

In other words, an ATS is a workflow and compliance tool that manages job applicants, whereas a CRM is an ecosystem of active and passive candidates, plus candidates who have previously applied to the company at any time.

A Talent Acquisition Suite (TAS) includes both ATS and CRM systems, along with other modules like new hire onboarding, internal mobility, AI, programmatic job advertising, and centralized job board management.

If you’re a recruiter who’s hiring for leadership and STEM roles, it is necessary to build a pipeline of prospective candidates and nurture relationships with them. A CRM system is ideal for this purpose as it helps the recruiter build a pool of non-applicants that fits your available job roles and Employer Brand.

Best CRM tools in the market

According to Ideal, some of the best recruitment CRMs are SmashFly, Yello, Avature, Talemetry, and Beamery.

Let’s explore each one of them:

SmashFly CRM

Source: G2

SmashFly is an AI-driven, cloud-based recruitment marketing platform which offers candidate management, recruiting event management, pipeline analytics, and branded career sites. It helps streamline the process of candidate discovery, communication, and nurturing for applicants and hiring teams.

Backed by OpenView Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, SmashFly was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in the United States.

The CRM allows users to sort, filter, and rate candidates to build talent pipelines. Users can also create custom nurturing emails using the drag-and-drop email template builder. Benchmarking abilities are available to judge the performance of various campaigns over time.

Typical users of SmashFly are small businesses and mid-sized businesses.

Features:

• Uses candidate scoring and algorithms to identify the most engaged candidates in the database
• Automatic segmentation of candidates to be nurtured into talent pipelines
• Saves searches to enable quick access to warm lead lists
• Drag-and-drop content management system
• Email editor

“Must have” features:

• Career site SEO
• Candidate experience
• Recruitment automation

Pricing:

• Prices start from the US $10,000 per license.

Shortcomings:

• Moving candidates through steps may seem clunky.
• Some recruiters are hesitant to use the platform because they feel they’re putting in the double effort.

Popular alternatives:

RECRUITview, The Resumator

Yello CRM

Source: Yello

Yello is a recruitment marketing and operations platform which was founded in 2008 in the United States. It can integrate with HRIS and ATS to manage the full candidate lifecycle. It has a centralized platform which is easy to use and enables recruiters to attract and engage quality talent and collaborate.

Yello offers data-driven insights into key recruiting metrics to help recruiters make informed decisions. It is suitable for start-ups, small businesses, medium businesses, and large enterprises.

Over 110 Fortune 500 companies use Yello.

Features:

• Job requisition
• Resume parsing
• Internal HR
• Interview management
• Onboarding
• Assessments
• Employee referrals

“Must have” features:

• It helps streamline the recruitment process and event management at large recruitment events.
• All employees can work in one place simultaneously.

Pricing:

Pricing is available only on request.

Shortcomings:

• It is considered more expensive than similar software with comparable features.
• It allows only a super admin to merge duplicates—every user does not have equal rights.
• It does not have a task sheet or an option to see reminders.
• The dashboard design could be bettered for ease of use.

Popular alternatives:

Recruiterbox, Freshteam

Avature CRM

Source: Avature

Founded in 2005 by Dimitri Boylan, who also co-founded HotJobs.com, Avature CRM is the leading CRM provider in the world. It has headquarters in the United States and various other offices in Singapore, Shenzhen, Munich, London, Madrid, and Melbourne. It is suitable for enterprise companies and is flexible enough to be used by recruiters, sourcers, onboarding specialists, and so on. It is a great tool to house all sourced candidates in one place until further action takes place.

It helps companies source and import passive candidate profiles from job boards, the web, and databases. Avature says that it pioneered the use of CRM technology to engage passive candidates and enable recruitment marketing using fully branded mobile-optimized landing pages.

Features:

• Calendar/Reminder system
• Email marketing
• Internal chat integration
• Lead scoring
• Marketing automation integration
• Segmentation
• Task management

“Must have” features:

• Easy to train, highly customizable, and user-friendly
• Great support and training videos

Pricing:

The vendor does not release pricing information publicly. Free trials or freemiums are not available. There is no entry-level setup fee and premium consulting/integration services are available.

Shortcomings:

• While the customization is nice to have, it is also challenging. Some customers find it difficult to get a full menu of available services. In other words, it may be difficult to get started because there are so many options.
• The vendor continuously releases updates, which sometimes have negative effects.
• Slightly cumbersome to run reports

Popular alternatives:

iCIMS Talent Acquisition Software Suite, SmashFly, JobVite

Talemetry CRM

Source: TalentHero

Formerly known as Talent Technology Corporation, Talemetry is a cloud-based suite of solutions that can be used alone or in combination, and includes talent sourcing and CRM, candidate application solutions, career sites, agency, and job broadcasting. The platform integrates with the customer’s applicant tracking system and allows job posting, candidate sourcing, the building of talent pipelines, and managing candidate relationships.

Talemetry was founded in 1999 by Jade Bourelle as one of the first applicant tracking systems. It is headquartered in British Columbia, Canada. Its current recruitment marketing platform was launched in 2011, and in 2013, the company and its products were brought together under the Talemetry brand. In 2018, it was announced that Talemetry CRM, Talemetry Job Broadcast, and Talemetry Apply Express Global applications were available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. In February 2019, Talemetry was acquired by Jobvite for an undisclosed amount.

It is suitable for small, medium, and large-sized businesses. Companies like Juniper Networks, Paramount, Qualcomm, CBRE, and Corning use Talemetry.

Features:

• Combining candidate sources into one valuable talent pool
• Easily searchable external candidate sources
• Automating mass email campaigns
• Tracking and sharing of candidate history
• Building pipelines for future hiring needs
• Centralizes previous applicants and external candidates’ databases into a single, proprietary talent pool
• Engaging candidates and market jobs with targeted individual and mass email campaigns

“Must have” features:

• Mobile-friendly interface to track and engage best candidates
• Live source feature, which allows recruiters to view candidates who best meet requirements
• Auto-reminder emails to applicants who have abandoned the application process

Pricing:

Talemetry does not provide pricing details publicly. The vendor must be contacted for a quote.

Shortcomings:

• Does not have the function to contact candidates directly through the applicant tracking system with which it is integrated
• Not compatible with Firefox
• Slow to load

Popular alternatives:

Jibe, SmashFly, Avature

Beamery CRM

Source: Beamery

Founded in 2014, Beamery CRM cloud-based platform which is suitable for start-ups, SMEs, and agencies. It is headquartered in London and has offices in San Francisco and Austin.

Features:

• Ability to engage with passive candidates long ahead of application
• The building of talent pools that can be segmented into priority pipelines to fill specific roles
• Collaboration between team members with the unified data set to share candidates
• Capturing new talent with multi-channel sourcing, automation, and candidate list imports
• Tracking and measuring team performance with analytics and reporting capabilities
• Talent intelligence tools to log relationship touchpoints
• Task suggestions to identify priority actions to reach coveted candidates

“Must have” features:

• Email campaigns and email analytics
• Prospect tracking function

Pricing:

Beamery’s pricing is based on the number of users and the depth of feature functionality required to deliver business outcomes. The vendor must be contacted for a quote since pricing is not publicly available. A free trial is available.

Shortcomings:

• May be slow to load sometimes
• Number of clicks/steps needed to perform certain actions is more
• Integration capability with platforms could be improved

Popular alternatives:

BambooHR, ZohoRecruit, CEIPAL TalentHire

How best to use CRM software?

Depending on a company’s organizational structure, CRM software is used in the following ways:

• Distributing CRM and TAS responsibilities among recruiters
• Granting CRM access to non-HR personnel, such as event coordinators and marketers, to collaborate on candidate nurture programs and recruitment marketing campaigns
• Assigning talent community creation and management to recruiters

Conclusion:

Although recruiters have traditionally communicated with candidates via phone calls and emails, a dedicated candidate relationship management software can automate the relationship-building process, streamlining the aggregation of candidates from various sources, sort candidates for various job openings, learn a candidate’s level of interest, and improve the company’s overall candidate experience.

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