Building relationships: growing and nurturing your talent pool

Congratulations on successfully moving through all the stages of the recruitment funnel and hiring a great candidate. You’ve done an excellent job collecting data, analyzing the entire process, and identifying areas for improvement for the next hiring process.

While this is a significant accomplishment, there is still a major opportunity to make your life easier in the future. You can do this by growing and nurturing your own talent pool.

Candidate relationship management 101

For every candidate you successfully hire, you probably have dozens of others who didn’t end up joining your team. This long list could include people you sourced through your outbound recruiting campaigns who declined your opportunity, as well as otherwise excellent candidates who applied to your job post but weren’t a good fit for the position at the time.

Once you have their permission to stay in touch, nurture these leads by building a professional relationship with them and keeping them updated on your company’s latest news and job opportunities. In this way, you can build your own network of top talent with each recruiting project, an investment that can pay dividends every time you need to fill a new position in the future.

Again, this process closely resembles the daily work of salespeople and marketers. Just as we recruiters have prospects who don’t end up joining our company, our colleagues in sales and marketing have prospects who don’t end up making a purchase but still want to stay connected. By keeping these leads warm and engaged, salespeople and marketers can translate their nurturing efforts into a significant impact on the company’s bottom line.

CRM tech basics

At a basic level, a well-organized spreadsheet or email automation software may get the job done. However, the higher your recruiting volume, the more difficult staying on top of all these relationships becomes. That’s why today, with the spread of outbound recruitment, we’re also seeing the rise of the candidate relationship management software.

Sounds like sales tech?

If all this sounds a lot like customer relationship management (CRM) systems for sales teams like Salesforce or Hubspot, it is. CRM systems evolved from contact management databases in the 1980s and moved to the cloud in the 2000s with the introduction of Salesforce, followed by Hubspot, which focused on inbound marketing and sales. Sales teams have long had to manage thousands of customer relationships, and now recruiting teams have similar needs. As a result, recruiters’ technology stacks are becoming increasingly similar to those of sales and marketing.

CRM software typically includes features that allow users to:

• Store and organize information about your prospects and candidates easily. This may include your sourced prospects, candidates in your pipeline and candidates from previous hiring processes.

• Automate email or SMS messaging with prospects and candidates, such as sending them personalized job opportunities or updates on new positions at your company. This may also allow you to abandon your existing email automation software.

• Provide an overview of the recruitment pipeline and the status of each candidate, making it easier to manage and follow up with them.

• Collaborate with recruiters and hiring managers by sharing candidate contact information, providing feedback on their profiles, and making decisions about which candidates to move forward with.

• Collect data on the recruitment process to reveal bottlenecks and improve efficiency.

Whether you choose to use CRM software or manually manage and update your talent pool, investing time in building your talent pool today will yield significant returns in the future. We strongly recommend not skipping this important step.

Congrats on making it to the end! We hope you found this guide helpful. We’re updating it regularly, so be sure to check back for new sections.

We’d love to hear from you, too! What recruitment tactics have worked for you? Do you have any other tips and tricks you’d like us to share in the guide? Let us know at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions.

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