How every person on your hiring team can use a talent CRM

In today’s candidate-driven market, recruiting teams have to bring their A-game to make their business stand out to qualified job seekers. Sure, there are multiple elements that go into making a great impression on your prospects, like cultivating a strong talent brand and crafting memorable email outreach messages. But behind the scenes, there’s another important component for taking your recruitment strategy to the next level: a world-class candidate relationship management (CRM) system.

A talent CRM helps recruiting teams build databases of qualified talent, engage them, track talent interactions, and analyze recruitment results. The best CRMs not only track information on applicants, but also help recruiters build long-term relationships (and nurture new ones). When done right, a talent CRM becomes the go-to-place that recruiters use when they need to find qualified candidates for their open roles. These platforms allow your team to collaborate with one another, automate tedious and repetitive tasks, and support a personalized recruitment experience for each and every candidate.

Talent CRMs are the best way to increase your team’s efficiency in finding talent, optimize budgets, and consolidate communication while improving the candidate experience. And they aren’t just for recruiters, either. Each member of your hiring team will benefit from the features and capabilities of a modern talent CRM like Gem.

Why do you need a talent CRM?

Talent teams spend long hours scouring the internet for the perfect qualified candidates. For niche and specialized roles, there are only so many qualified candidates out there. Starting from scrach every time you have an open req for one of these roles is an efficient use of time and resources. Just like sales teams keep organized target accounts in a CRM, recruiting teams need to organize talent in talent CRMs so they can keep track of the latest developments and easily tap into their own databases before opting to spend budget on agencies or job boards, or engaging in cold outrach. Here’s how every member of your hiring team can use a talent CRM:

Sourcers: talent discovery and outreach

Sourcers are tasked with engaging passive talent in the hopes of encouraging them to apply. However, with such stiff competition for qualified candidates, sourcers have to find creative ways to build personal connections in their outreach, leveraging a candidate’s experience, existing relationships with people at your organization, personal details, and past communication history. Keeping so many different candidates’ experiences, personal details, and outreach campaigns straight is time-consuming, detail-oriented work. A talent CRM can greatly streamline these responsibilities.

Gem’s Talent Sourcing and Outreach helps sourcers stay organized and automates their long-term outreach campaigns. Gem offers one central hub from which recruiters can manage and send all candidate communications instead of constantly checking LinkedIn, Indeed, email, and texts. They can set-and-forget entire outreach sequences that reach prospective candidates over multiple channels (sending the first message via email and the second via text, for example). They can also put candidates who are interested but not yet ready to make a move into automated nurture sequences that routinely check in and share information about the company. These features enable them to keep talent warm for future positions without a significant time investment.

Recruiters: full-funnel insights and hiring manager collaboration

As the project managers of the hiring process, recruiters need a simple way to visualize what stage each candidate is in and an easy method of collaborating with stakeholders and candidates. They’ve got their hands full reviewing applications, scheduling interviews, and writing job offers—plus liaising with internal managers and the candidates themselves.

Gem’s Talent Pipeline gives recruiters visibility into their entire pipeline for every open role. “Needs attention” notifications quickly alert them to which candidates they have outstanding tasks for, like scheduling an interview or submitting feedback. Candidates can be moved to the next stage, rejected and sent a templated email, or messaged, all in one click. Those changes are then automatically synced to your applicant tracking system (ATS). Recruiters can even set automated updates via email, Slack, or a web link to hiring managers or other stakeholders. That frees them up for more important tasks—like crafting the perfect offer letter.

Hiring managers: resume reviews and timeline visibility

Hiring managers want to be able to review prospective applicants and choose which candidates to interview. Then, they want visibility into where each candidate is at in the recruiting timeline so they can report back to their team.

Gem allows for seamless collaboration between hiring managers and recruiters. The Resume Review tool sends the hiring manager candidate CVs to review. The hiring manager can accept, reject, or star the resumes and even leave notes to give the recruiter additional context. This collaborative process gives the recruiter a more accurate picture of what experiences or skill sets the manager most values for the role. 

Gem also gives hiring managers full visibility into candidates at every stage of the hiring process. Updates sent by recruiters happen with whatever regularity the manager prefers—for example, receiving alerts when a candidate’s stage changes or whenever there’s a new resume to review.

Recruitment marketers: nurture long-term relationships and enhance employer brand

It’s on recruitment marketers to maintain relationships with pools of warm leads and passive candidates for evergreen roles and future job openings. Without a CRM, this can be a difficult task to perform: after capturing talent that’s interested in your organization at events or through career sites, those profiles often just go into a black hole: no one actions on them either because they don’t know how to, or because it’s too time-intensive to do so.

Gem makes it easy for teams to act on that interest and ensure everyone has a positive experience with their company brand. Recruitment marketers can not only easily capture the profiles of interested talent through Forms; they can also build and organize talent communities for nurturing through automated campaigns. These campaigns are a kind of virtuous circle, allowing you to attract even more talent by highlighting your employer brand across mediums. What’s more, Content Stats in Gem’s CRM help recruitment marketers know what kind of content drives the most engagement (which clicks into which URLs lead to the most interested replies?), so you can continue to offer the talent market what’s most compelling for them.

Interviewers: pipeline visibility and scorecard views

As non-recruiters, interviewers just want to know when candidate interviews are scheduled, how to find a candidate’s information before the interview, and how to submit their feedback afterwards.

Gem’s Talent Pipeline makes it easy to keep interviewers in the loop. Once a recruiter moves a candidate's status to “interviewing,” interviewers will be notified of the stage change so they can begin preparing for the interview. Since the platform keeps all candidate communication history and notes in one place, interviewers can quickly get up to speed on a candidate’s experience and history beforehand. As your single source of truth, Gem also pulls all candidate scorecards from your ATS, so the hiring team has an at-a-glance sense of the positive and negative reviews.

Talent leaders: analytics for optimization

Talent leaders are focused on optimizing Recruiting’s performance through training, education, and software. They need a straightforward way to pull metrics, track KPIs, and create reports that prove the department’s value to senior leadership. The CRM is the best place for recruiting analtyics because it unlocks data from the top-of-funnel and your ATS to give you full-funnel visibility and insights.

Gem’s recruiting health dashboard showcases the efficiencies, successes, and bottlenecks in your current hiring process. It shows talent leaders where their team’s time and resources are being spent, so they can draw conclusions about what’s working and what’s not. The recruiting health dashboard offers many insightful performance metrics, like total hires, time to hire per recruiter, and the amount of time each candidate spends in a specific stage. (Note this is only one of seven dashboard templates Gem offers in its Dashboard Library.)‍

Any current employees: referrals and passive talent pools

Referrals are critical to hiring, as the average company hires 20-40% of their employees from referrals. To keep in-house recommendations coming, you need a CRM that makes entering referral information quick and painless.

Gem offers a browser extension that makes referrals as easy as a single click. Say an employee is scanning a friend’s social media or LinkedIn and wants to refer them to a position. With the extension, the employee simply clicks “add” to auto-parse that person’s contact information directly from the site into the employee’s personal passive referral pool. The employee can even add notes, like how they know the person or why they think they’d be a good fit for the position. Sourcers can filter results in Gem to search passive referrals first, increasing the likelihood that this person will get a closer look. All of this activity can easily be tracked by the original referrer, and referral source reports can be pulled to ensure referral bonus payouts.

C-level executives: data dashboards and DEI

C-level executives need to understand how recruitment fits into the overall company strategy and how the recruiting department’s successes or failures impact the business as a whole. As leaders focused on the overall business image, C-level execs are likely to have a vested interest in tracking diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Gem’s Talent Compass offers executives all the recruiting insights they need: full-funnel visibility, hiring forecasts, performance metrics, executive reporting, and executive dashboards to guide strategy conversations. Talent Compass also provides unparalleled insights into diversity recruiting. Beginning at the top of the funnel, Gem reports on the gender, race, and ethnicity of their candidates in aggregate to ensure equity in the funnel. Tracking underrepresented groups (URGs) through the funnel shows where systemic bias may be at play based on at what stage certain demographics leave the process. Close monitoring of URG candidates ensures that DEI requirements are met and that you’re ultimately building a representative workforce.

Gem’s talent CRM benefits all your hiring teams

Investing in a talent CRM does so much more than free up your recruiters’ time; it gives every member of your team better collaboration and visibility to your hiring process while creating a positive and personalized experience for candidates. Gem’s CRM goes even further, creating efficiencies at every employee level and in every step of recruitment.

Get in touch with us today to see these powerful dashboards in action, or skip right to requesting a demo.