Hello again, Rally Community!
In my first New to Recruitment Marketing blog post, How to Create a Recruitment Marketing Role at Your Organization, I mentioned that I’d share the process we took at Appian to find the “perfect” Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) platform for our new Recruitment Marketing function. So, here goes!
First things first, I want to focus on the word “perfect” for a moment. If there is one thing that I have learned from this process is that there will never be a platform that is absolutely “perfect.” However, after all of your research, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I promise! In the end, you will find the right platform for your team. Now, let’s get started on how to do just that!
List out your needs and wants
Before you toggle over to ol’ faithful Google and start researching the platforms that are out there, I highly suggest sitting down with whoever will be involved in utilizing the new CRM first (e.g., Recruitment Marketers, Recruiters, Sourcers, etc.). Use this time to list out everything your Talent Acquisition (TA) team would need this tool to accomplish to be successful.
From there, create two buckets. Your first bucket should be filled with non-negotiables. What can your team absolutely not live without? The second bucket will be dedicated to the items that you do not necessarily need to have right away. In other words, your team can still operate as the rockstar TA team without having the items from bucket two from the get-go.
Here’s an example bucket breakdown to get your creative juices flowing:
Need to have:
- Event landing page capabilities
- Clean User Interface
- Dashboard and reporting
- Talent Community
- ATS integration
Nice to have:
- Careers site
- Content management
Once this step is complete, your next strategic move is to map out every step within your recruitment process where you will want to capitalize on your new CRM’s functionality. This is where the fun begins. Checkmate!
Map out your candidate journey
If you haven’t sat down and reviewed your candidate journey lately, do it! Having a good understanding of this is essential. It will help you find areas where your team can finesse and improve.
I would suggest sitting down with at least one recruiter per department (i.e., a Sales Recruiter, an Engineering Recruiter, a Campus Recruiter), and go through each of their processes. Ask questions such as:
- What tools are you currently using to source candidates and how do you stay organized?
- What type of content are you sending to candidates after your initial phone screen?
- How do you keep in touch with candidates who may not be ready to leave their current company, but want to keep in touch for future opportunities?
- How are you keeping candidates warm after their on-site interview?
Open-ended questions like the above should help you to understand where you and the team can best leverage the new CRM platform.
Do some CRM vendor research
The good news is there are a lot of vendors out there. The not-so-great news is that it can be just a tad overwhelming.
However, if you do the first two steps of identifying needs and wants, and uncovering your candidate journey, you should be able to dwindle down to a few vendors fairly quickly. A Google search will do you good, but don’t forget to reach out and leverage your network! What you hopefully picked up from my last blog post is that people are willing to candidly share their experiences: all you have to do is reach out and ask!
After some research, I created a shortlist of five vendors that I wanted to have demos with. After those initial calls, we were able to knock out two. One platform was a little bit too robust for our needs at this time, and one did not have quite enough to fulfill our “need to have” list. After some further discussions within my network, we knocked out one more and there we had it. Our two finalists.
Receive input from your team
Once we identified the two platforms that could meet our needs, we scheduled final demonstrations.
On Appian’s end, we had close to ten people that dialed in. With that many people on the call, it was important that I prepped both vendors and my team with an agenda so we could get the most out of our 60 minutes. This is where the needs and wants list, as well as the candidate experience research came back in to play.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to get your teams’ input when selecting a new CRM. If your team is similar to mine, and has not leveraged this type of platform before, be sure to remind them to keep an open mind.
Current workflows may require adjustments when introducing this novel tool to your team, but change can be great! With this outlook front and center, we walked away from both demos with a clear perspective on which CRM was right for us.
I hope my approach to whittling down the options helps you on your journey if your 2019 plans involve implementing a new CRM.
We recently began our implementation process with our new platform, so I don’t have much more to share just yet in terms of outcomes. I do, however, have some exciting updates to share next time about another initiative: we just launched our company’s very first influencer program… and it was awesome. More to come soon! See you next time!
