Just Out: The Ultimate Recruitment CRM Buyer's Guide

Gem's Ultimate Recruitment CRM Buyer’s Guide covers just about everything you need to know (and examine, and ask) about recruitment CRMs.

If you’re in talent acquisition, any number of circumstances in the industry are making your job more challenging right now—whether it’s talent shortages, sharp changes in the hiring market, heightened candidate expectations, competition from recruiting teams who are eyeing the same talent you are, or concern about continuing to prove the value and relevance of recruitment amidst temporary hiring decelerations. Nearly 70% of companies claim that “competing for talent across industries” is their top challenge. 62% of recruiters said their job was more difficult in 2018 than it was in 2017, and 67% said it was more difficult than in 2014. The moral of the story is that, year over year, recruitment is an even trickier endeavor—which explains why over 60% of companies say that improving the candidate experience is their top priority.

Candidate experience, after all, is directly correlated with hiring success. That will be the case regardless of what else shakes out of our current global circumstances. And at Gem, we’re fielding plenty of questions from folks in the talent industry right now about how to keep candidates “warm” and engaged until hiring picks up again, and how to best demonstrate the integrity of their respective companies when candidates can’t meet their teams live or step into the office to get a feel for what the organization values. Warmth, consistency of communication, the sense that your entire organization is run like a well-oiled machine: all of these are supported by a talent CRM, which manages communication with candidates throughout the entire recruitment process—from the top of the funnel all the way to hire.

Recruitment CRMs are no longer a luxury for talent acquisition teams. 75% of enterprise companies were either using or planning to use a recruitment CRM in 2019, and around 80% of recruitment agencies of all sizes have adopted it. As for SMBs, 80% of them are looking for solutions that will help improve the candidate experience, and nearly 50% plan on investing in pre-applicant capabilities this year. If you’re hiring, you’re not too small for a CRM. And given those numbers, you may soon be at a competitive disadvantage if you haven’t yet adopted one... but of course, you have to adopt the right one.

In the pre-applicant phase alone, good recruitment CRMs help TA teams manage outbound sourcing; build talent pools around criteria such as role and geo; engage those pools with targeted nurture campaigns; access analytics to observe how campaigns are doing, identify best outreach practices, and help recruiters manage their performance; and support talent teams in controlling the overall employer brand. They allow talent teams to see measurable gains in recruiter productivity, identify and replicate the best practices of their top performers, identify and correct for the bottlenecks in their hiring processes, diversify their talent pools, and decrease time-to-hire and cost-per-hire. At Gem, our customers have seen up to 10 hours saved per recruiter, per week; a 40% decrease in time-to-hire; a 3x increase in productivity-per-resource for the same cost to the company; and more.

It’s clear to us at Gem that business leaders are more and more recognizing the importance of talent acquisition to their organizations. This was the case prior to 2020; and it will be the case when we all return to our offices and hiring resumes in full-force. Leaders are empowering their TA teams to make strategic business decisions and rethink their technology stacks to drive hiring efficiency and offer better candidate experiences. This empowerment puts TA teams in a tremendous position: to get to choose which recruitment CRM they should use.

The Ultimate Recruitment CRM Buyer's GuideOf course, a lot goes into making decisions around any new technology solution; and we know that getting started can sometimes feel harrowing. So we wrote The Ultimate Recruitment CRM Buyer’s Guide, which covers just about everything you need to know (and examine, and ask) about recruitment CRMs. Our goal was to take as much of the complexity out of the process for you as possible. We recognize that every team is at a different place in its CRM journey; so the buyer’s guide is a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts. It answers these questions:

• What’s a recruitment CRM... and how is it different from the ATS I’m already using?

• I know what a recruitment CRM is; but what are its benefits?

• I know what a recruitment CRM is; but how do I know if my team needs one?

• How do I determine what features my org needs in a recruitment CRM?

• What are the most essential features of a recruitment CRM?

• What steps should I should take to choose my CRM provider?

• I’ve narrowed down my CRM providers; now what questions do I ask in the demos?

Wherever you are on that journey, we think you’ll find valuable information here to help you make the best investment for your team, your company, and your candidates. Dive in at the section that’s most relevant to you. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at gem.com. Answering questions is one of our favorite pastimes.