A few weeks ago, Salesforce (leading customer relationship management) acquired Radian6 (social media monitoring service) for $326 million. This acquisition shows the increasing value of social media to positively influence revenue generation. To me, it only makes sense that similar technology-based tools should be utilized when recruiting talent for an organization.
What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
Customer relationship management is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring refers to the tracking of various social media content such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, and user-generated content in general as a way for marketers to determine the volume and sentiment around a brand or topic in social media.
The Human Capital Disconnect
When reading through both of these definitions, there is clearly a heavy focus on meeting the needs of the sales, marketing, and customer service functions. In fact, it is rather shocking that talent management is not included within these solutions. This might be because of the clearer relationship between these activities and revenue generation. But, I would argue that talent acquisition is also a great area for these innovative new tools to be effectively utilized.
With this in mind perhaps, a new definition emerges: Candidate relationship management is an emerging strategy for managing a company’s interactions with prospective applicants, candidates, and current employees. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new employees, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former employees back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and advertising.
What do you think? Does candidate relationship management have the potential to play an important role in attraction, recruiting, and retention?
-Omowale Casselle (@mySenSay)
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About the Author: Omowale Casselle is the co-founder and CEO of mySenSay. We help top companies and future leaders make better employment decisions.
Hi Omowale,
Do we need Candidate Relationship Management? YES (upper case)
Is this the next big thing? No.
Candidate RM (CRM) has actually been there for quite a while now. Almost as soon as Salesforce.com started, there has been recruiters who used it as a CRM. Moreover, now almost all ATS are providing some functionalities around it. Some call it CRM, some call it communities, …. At the end of the day, this is the management of relationships with candidates within a pool (of candidates).
So I wouldn’t say it is next. It is already there.
Big? It could be bigger for sure.
Hi Romuald,
Thanks for your comment. I agree that there are definitely lots of ways to define it. But, at the end of the day it is all about the efficient and effective management of candidate relationships.
And, yes, there are certainly ways that companies could be using these tools better. I hadn’t heard of many companies utilizing this functionality so much appreciate you sharing insight from your experience.
Omowale Casselle
IMHO CRM SYSTEMS for recruiting are not necessarily a new thing if they’re already in use (which they are). However, having been in the recruiting CRM space for 3+ years now working with several Global 2000 companies, there IS clearly a wide array of perceptions as to what CRM actually means when put into practice. In other words, the CRM METHODOLOGY in recruiting is still in it’s infancy and is evolving from what some originally viewed as simply a passive sourcing data repository to designing and building a system to find, capture, segment, and engage with talent (the same methodology marketers use for customers and prospects). I would argue that CRM enables a shift from a requisition centric recruiting model to one that is talent centric and hence more strategically aligned with the business. Hiring managers don’t care about your cost-per-hire. But if you can tell them how many high-potentials you’ve engaged at their competitor you now have their ear (and respect).
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the comment. I definitely agree with the distinction you are making between availability of CRM tools/systems and actual implementation. There is still much ground to be gained in strategically aligning talent acquisition with the business. As the strategic methodology matures, we will begin to see ‘talent/candidate relationship management’ tools reach their full potential.
Omowale Casselle