Attracting new and high-quality talent is one of the biggest challenges to the modern HR and procurement teams. That’s why the development of a talent acquisition strategy is absolutely essential for the success of your business.

While to many people talent acquisition may just sound like a fancy word for recruiting, talent acquisition strategies have significantly developed over the past few years and are now a crucial aspect when it comes to growing your business. Talent acquisition differs from recruiting in that it takes a long-term view of your business.

It doesn’t just look at the here and now, it looks at everything from skills, to company culture and even future development. It also takes into account the vast benefits that your business can realize from the ever-growing contingent workforce.

Talent acquisition uses various strategies and innovative tools for success, one of which is candidate relationship management (CRM).

What is candidate relationship management?

CRM is a strategic model that allows your company team to handle the candidate experience, and continuously attract and retain the best possible talent. Candidate relationship management will help your business to maintain a pool of passive candidates that can be brought into your organization at short notice, including contract workers.

In short, CRM helps to automate and shape the interactions you have with candidates and this in turn helps to shape the impressions they have of your business. Through a candidate relationship management strategy your business can create long-term relationships with candidates.

The emphasis of CRM has moved away from recruiting as and when it’s needed, to finding suitable talent before it is required. To do this CRM makes the most of strategies such as proactive sourcing, social media campaigns, internal and external talent pools and pipelines and recruitment marketing.

The goal of candidate relationship management is to increase the pool of talented and qualified workers and prepare them for instant hire when they’re needed.

How can CRM benefit your business?

Whether you are part of the HR or procurement team, CRM will help you to engage candidates on an ongoing. This long-term approach to hiring workers will help you to maintain interactions and communication with potential future workers.

What’s the importance of maintaining these connections? By keeping a talent pipeline for future positions or contract work that opens up, your business will have multiple channels for sourcing the talent you need.

Not only that, but you will also know which specific talent is right for the specific role you need to fill. Having already pre-screened and communicated with these candidates, you can fill roles faster and candidates will also trust you as an employer.

How does it work?

While a CRM strategy could essentially be done through manual processes such as phone calls and emails, candidate relationship management applications can automate the entire process.

Maintaining long-term relationships with candidates is difficult to juggle alongside full-time jobs for your HR or procurement departments. CRM tools will make it easier to build talent pipelines, know each candidate’s level of interest in working for your company, sort candidates for specific jobs and much more.

CRM tools could include:

• Set up reminders to interact with candidates.
• Schedule events, such as phone calls, emails or interviews for candidates.
• Manage recruitment and email marketing campaigns.
• Analyze and track recruiting data.
• Record notes about potential candidates and contingent workers.
• And much more.

If you want to learn more about transforming your talent acquisition strategy, contact HCMWorks today and our team of experts would be more than willing to discuss how our services could be a perfect for your business.