When we first started building our recruiting candidate relationship manager (CRM), we were faced with a surprisingly tough question: What do we call it?
I know, I know. It’s a CRM. Just call it that, right?
Plus, it’s three letters that every talent leader understands. I mean, they use one everyday. It’s a CRM!
But on the other hand… talent leaders don’t really like their CRMs. They want to, but the way they’re built makes it hard — traditionally they’re bloated, clunky, and offer bad experiences to everyone who goes near them.
So instead of building that, we focused on building a piece of tech that just made the candidate experience as good as possible from pre-apply to post-apply. And sure, we called it a CRM — mostly because that’s what people know. But we added a very important word in front of it: conversational. Because our CRM is conversational, and vastly different from CRM’s of the past:
- Its AI functionality automates recruiting work through candidate conversations
- It personalizes interactions towards individual candidates
- It requires less day-to-day investment from recruiters
So yeah, it might be called a CRM, but we like to think that we built ours a little differently than you might be used to. Because we didn’t focus on things that CRMs already did.
We focused on the things we believe CRMs should do. These things:
Make it easy to join.
As CRMs became widespread, companies started trying to get every piece of candidate information possible. But their methods — forced logins and mandatory forms — didn’t make candidates more likely to join. It actually drove them away.
Because if entering into a CRM feels like extra work, candidates aren’t going to enter.
What a CRM should be is intentional, and funnel in candidates quickly and painlessly. Our CRM makes signing up a one word process: a text. If a candidate wants to apply to be an engineer, but you don’t have any engineering roles available, they automatically receive this message from a conversational AI assistant:
All they have to say is yes. And they’re just entered into your talent community, seamlessly.
No forms, no passwords, no friction.
Deliver the right messages at the right time.
Candidates know when they’re not receiving an experience that today’s technology is capable of giving. And your CRM is no different.
If I applied for a job a month ago and just got the rejection message today, I’m going to have a negative association with the establishment whose tech seemingly went out of its way to create dissonance. At scale, that could equal a ton of lost revenue for an organization.
Delivering a message at the right time is almost more important than the message itself.
What does that mean for the CRM? Well, to start, everything should make sense. Am I waiting to hear about openings for a new marketing role? Don’t send me messages about manufacturing. Was I already hired? Please stop sending me job alerts.
When intentionality is applied to every message, the experience becomes exponentially better. Because candidates won’t feel like they’re being spammed. They’ll feel as though their needs are being cared for.
Increase adoption through a simple UI.
CRMs have become bloated with an overwhelming amount of unnecessary features. And when your recruiters are overwhelmed, they’ll start taking shortcuts that your IT team wouldn’t be happy to hear about.
Your CRM should be proud of its adoption rate.
So how did we get recruiters to adopt the Conversational CRM? Well, we made it simple.
That’s not to say that we’ve made it less capable. In fact, we made our CRM smarter than ever by taking a lot of those features that bog down adoption rates (and recruiters’ calendars) and automating them with conversational AI. Now the recruiters’ relationship with the CRM is streamlined. Get in, get out. And trust that AI is working for you in the background to do the rest.
It’s sort of a paradox, right? By making the CRM simpler, we increase its ease of use amongst recruiters. And by making it smarter, we reduce the need for recruiters to actually use it.
Which makes those same recruiters better at their jobs. Let’s talk about why.
Automate recruiters’ needs with AI.
Without the need to perform administrative work inside the CRM, your recruiters can focus on what they’re best at: convincing candidates to work for you.
There’s a whole slew of recruiting activities (employer branding opportunities, 1:1 nurture) that have fallen to the wayside as manual work began to build up inside the CRM. Because while the aforementioned activities were nice-to-have needle-movers, things like filing I-9s and sending out offer comms were necessities. But once we automate those administrative necessities, recruiters are free to do their job better than ever before.
Of course, they’re not going to be working on completely separate things — the Conversational CRM augments them in their recruitment efforts.
For example, say you’re expanding, and need a healthy pipeline of candidates in multiple different geographic regions. Or maybe you need to hire a large number of hard-to-come-by experts. In either scenario, an AI assistant can proactively accelerate the right candidates through the application process.
So the recruiter’s first step won’t be sourcing anyone. It will just be, you know, recruiting.
Integrate seamlessly with your other technology.
Recruiters want to understand candidates holistically, but we often hear that their CRM, ATS, and career site don’t talk to each other. So to get a full picture of a particular candidate, they need to go through an arduous process featuring two screens, three browsers, and at least one headache.
Our product team has always been guided by the principle of interoperability: Our tech makes other tech better. Under that principle, our Conversational CRM feeds and exchanges information with all of your recruiting tools. And I’m not just talking about providing a cohesive experience with our own product suite, either. We know that not every client has all of our offerings. So if you’re on another piece of software, you can use the browser extension to still get an understanding into your candidates.
All of the insights, all in one place. Synchrony at your fingertips.
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When a recruiting CRM works, it’s an incredibly valuable resource: It optimizes your hiring efforts and spend, builds a bench of warm, qualified candidates, and helps fill jobs faster.
The problem is that they rarely do work.
But if you take a step back and think about what your CRM should do and not what it can do, you'll start to see the vision for a new type of CRM. A better type of CRM.
A Conversational CRM.
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