Are you trying to make your talent acquisition process more efficient? With the overcrowded job market of today, staying organized when screening applicants and scheduling interviews can be a challenge. Implementing candidate relationship management (CRM) software could be the answer.
Candidate relationship management is an essential tool for recruiters who want to stay on top of their recruitment efforts. It allows them to communicate with, track and manage prospects throughout their application journey in one central place
But with so many options out there, how do you pick the best one?
Are you trying to make your talent acquisition process more efficient? With the overcrowded job market of today, staying organized when screening applicants and scheduling interviews can be a challenge. Implementing candidate relationship management (CRM) software could be the answer.
Candidate relationship management is an essential tool for recruiters who want to stay on top of their recruitment efforts. It allows them to communicate with, track and manage prospects throughout their application journey in one central place
But with so many options out there, how do you pick the best one?
What is a recruitment CRM?
A recruitment CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a type of software that helps companies manage their relationships with potential and current candidates. It helps recruiters organize, track, and analyze candidate information from initial contact to hire and beyond.
Recruitment CRMs have seen a lot of innovation over the years. Many features that assist recruiters and hiring managers in streamlining the hiring process, such as resume parsing and email nurture, have become automated. As a result, talent acquisition teams can focus more on candidate experience and prevent dropoff in their process.
Recruiting CRMs: key features
Applicant tracking: The ability to track and manage candidate information, including resumes, cover letters, job applications, and any other relevant documents.
Communication tools: The ability to communicate with candidates, including email and messaging functionality, as well as the ability to schedule and conduct interviews.
Resume management: The ability to automatically extract relevant information from resumes and store it in a central database.
Job posting: The ability to post job openings on various job boards and social media platforms.
Collaborative hiring: The ability for multiple team members to collaborate and share information about candidates, including notes and feedback.
Reporting and Analytics: The ability to track and analyze key metrics, such as the number of candidates in the pipeline, time to hire, and the success rate of hires.
Integration with other systems: The ability to integrate with other HR systems, such as applicant tracking systems, talent management systems, and learning and development platforms.
What are the advantages of using a CRM for recruiting?
Some of the key benefits of using a recruitment CRM include:
A source of truth: A candidate CRM helps to streamline the recruitment process by providing a central location to store and manage all candidate information and communication. This helps you save time and improve efficiency by eliminating the need to search through multiple systems or folders for candidate info.
An improved candidate experience: Recruitment CRMs can help improve the overall candidate experience by ensuring that candidates receive timely follow-ups and communication throughout the process. Plus, they can easily track their application status and communicate with recruiters, which can reduce frustration and improve their overall perception of the company. And since 6 in 10 candidates say the worst part of applying for jobs is never hearing back, the improvement can be significant: at Dover, customers who used our automated scheduling feature saw 30% less dropoff in their hiring process.
Better decision-making: Recruitment CRMs can provide a wealth of data and analytics that can help you make more informed hiring decisions, or prepare reports for leadership. For example, on Dover's platform, you can integrate with your ATS to track deep funnel metrics around diversity, passthrough rates, and dropoff. On most CRMs, you can also track the success rate of different recruitment sources or identify trends in the types of candidate outreach that's most resonating with candidates.
Increased productivity: By automating many of the manual tasks involved in the recruitment process, a candidate CRM can help you save time and increase productivity. This allows your team to focus on more strategic tasks, such as sourcing and engaging with top candidates.
Cost savings: A recruitment CRM can also help companies save money by streamlining the recruitment process and reducing the time and resources needed. Having a tool that adds additional support to your recruiting team often prevents companies in high growth from needing to add headcount to their talent acquisition team before they can afford it.
How are recruitment CRMs different from an ATS?
Though many Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS platforms like Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby) have taken on CRM capabilities, the functions of each are uniquely important in their own right. Put simply, a CRM handles everything before a candidate applies, and an ATS handles (mostly) everything after. Let's dive into what we mean by that.
Recruitment CRMs are broader and more comprehensive in their approach to helping companies manage the candidate relations life cycle from attraction through onboarding. They provide features such as automating tasks related to communication, tracking activities, organizational charts, and pipelines, notes and contact log planning, tagging, search ranking of candidates, outreach campaigns, and distributing jobs.
Applicant tracking systems are focused on managing job applications throughout the process — like the administrative aspects involved with scheduling, follow-ups, and onboarding. It focuses primarily on steps such as posting jobs online/job boards, receiving applications through digital channels (like email or social networks), sorting applicants into organized groups by skillset/profile, making it easy to track applicants during different stages of the application process (interviews, etc.), and finally choosing which applicant is suitable based on criteria set by employers or recruiters.
6 best recruiting CRMs for 2023
1. Tracker - Best for teams just starting to build a hiring process
Tracker is a web-based, integrated recruitment ATS and CRM designed for recruiting and staffing firms. Their platform can manage entire recruitment workflows, from candidate sourcing and placement to employee onboarding. What's unique about Tracker is that it can be used to manage sales, CRM, recruiting, marketing, and operations in addition to recruiting, so it's basically an all-in-one customer and candidate management tool for mid-to-large size teams.
Cost: $
Key features:
Responsive and helpful support team and online resources: With the multitude of tools at your disposal, it's important to select one where customer support stands out, especially since these tools will often need to go through complex integrations, and accurately track data. We mention their support team and courses here because they're mentioned in a significant amount of online reviews as being world-class.
Sales, marketing, and recruiting data all in one place: Tracker is unique in that you can track all candidateand client data in the same platform, based on which plan you select. You can track the sales cycle from lead to a close to an invoice on the client side, and candidates from application through placement on the talent side.
Fully customizable to your team's needs: Similar to other CRMs (like Salesforce, or Hubspot), Tracker gives you tons of flexibility with how you implement and integrate Tracker for your team's needs while still allowing organizational value through ease of data input and queries.
Our grade: B-
While Tracker is extremely robust, we feel like it only makes sense for companies who havenoorganizational or tracking system in place. It's incredibly cost-effective for early-stage companies looking to enter into hypergrowth, but it still doesn't offer the level of integration and customization that larger sales and marketing CRMs do. This means that we view it as a great starter tool to get you and your team organized and efficient, but not a permanent solution as you expand.
2. RecruiterBox - Best for teams with an existing recruiting tech stack
A cloud-based software that is scalable and customizable and can effectively manage the hiring process to attract desired applicants. It arranges resumes, provides integration features, builds candidate profiles, and encourages collaboration between teams. Their tools feature an ATS, task scheduling, reporting capabilities, offer controlling, and even a career page setup.
Cost: $
Key features:
Stay compliant: Ensure that your hiring process is compliant with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Lots of integration: Integrates with job search engines so users can post job openings with one click. Syncs with your organization’s social accounts so anyone can share job postings from within the app. Integrates with other HR and onboarding platforms, such as Namely, BambooHR, Slack, Checkr, QuickBooks, Trakstar, Reviewsnap, PandaDoc, G Suite, and Outlook.
Automatic candidate profile creation:The software automatically creates a candidate profile when you upload a resume, and you can search for candidates or resumes with the advanced search functionality.
Our grade: A-
While Recruiterflow provides tons of integration, it's not always reliable according to online product reviews. However, if you have a larger recruiting team with a big tech stack, it's the most all-encompassing we could find. And if you're planning to scale quickly (or you have a robust pipeline already), the automated persona creation is a game-changer.
3. Beamery - Best for larger teams with tons of candidate data
Beamery’s talent CRM aims to enable talent teams to reach diversity targets, identify and engage potential high performers, optimize the end to end talent experience, and identify the skills and capabilities they need.
Cost: $$
Key features:
Candidate pooling: Beamery allows you to group candidates into vacancies, as well as create pools to source from & revisit. This can be incredibly beneficial for roles that you're consistently hiring for.
Highly customizable candidate profiles: The interface allows you to add any field or tag to any candidate persona. New fields are immediately searchable and automatically turn into a variable field you can use in your email campaigns, so you can personalize your outreach further for different segments.
Access management: Grant access to select data, features, objects, etc. based on the users, user role, groups, etc.
Our grade: C
Beamery is a great tool to curate candidate data and communicate with those people If your challenge is tracking your communications and progress with you people you are pursuing to become candidates. However, outside of that, nothing about Beamery strikes us as revolutionary or stands out from other options in similar price ranges. If you have a large remote hiring team and need to be able to track user permissions and customize profiles, this is the tool for you.
Quick note: some people will want this to be an ATS. It isn't. This is a tool that will help you scale your communications with potential candidates and nurture them along the way.
4. RecruiterFlow - Best for agencies
Recruiterflow delivers an all-in-one applicant tracking system (ATS), customer relationship management (CRM), and automation solution for executive search firms and recruiting agencies.
Cost: $$
Key features:
Intuitive UI: Nearly every review mentions the simplicity and ease of use when it comes to RecruiterFlow's UI. Of note is their drag-and-drop functionality which allows teams to quickly move candidates through their process. Campaigns for different roles (or types of outreach) are called Recipes and can be modified to send select segments unique pitches.
Automation:RecruiterFlow allows you to automate different aspects of the candidate nurture and hiring process, including rejection emails, phone screen scheduling, email confirmations on submittal, and follow-ups.
Collaborative client portal: If you recruit on behalf of clients, or you have a remote team that needs help collaborating with hiring managers, RecruiterFlow's candidate portal is really useful. It's compliant, helps you control what information you present to clients and when, and helps everyone stay on the same page during the hiring process.
Our grade: A
RecruiterFlow gets massive bonus points for its ease of use and reliability. Compared to other tools on this list, customers stated that the speed and ease of use make the app intuitive, and allow others to ramp onto it quickly. That being said, unless you have a large recruiting team or hire on behalf of clients at an agency, the features related to automation and client relationship management are less relevant.
5. TalentLyft - Best for early-stage startups
TalentLyft is a full-stack recruitment software that includes an ATS, sourcing, and CRM solution under one platform, allowing you to segment your talent pool, organize data, and save time on manual tasks.
Cost: $
Key features:
Create a no-code career site:TalentLyft has premade templates that all you to brand and design a career site without an engineer or designer, making it perfect for smaller teams just getting started.
Automated campaigns: Automatically log emails, calls, evaluations, disqualifications, or any other activities made with candidates.
Rich candidate profiles:TalentLyft's in-app candidate profiles are some of the best we've seen. They not only list all relevant public profiles, but they allow you to visualize every touchpoint, interaction, and segment with individual analytics to help you can better engage top candidates.
Our grade: B+
6. Dover - Best for teams of all sizes who are scaling quickly
Dover gives you actionable data, automates your team’s workflows across the entire hiring process, and enables you to engage talent with deeply integrated automation.
Cost: $
Key features:
Autogenerated and customizable outreach with personalization: If you're familiar with ChatGPT, Dover similarly autogenerates an email with personalization based on a candidate's profile. It's white-labeled (aka it looks like it comes from your team), so you can customize the output and A/B test campaigns to perfect your pitch across segments.
Outsource phone screens (if you choose): Regardless of company size, it's impossible to screen every single qualified candidate who applies. You likely create a shortlist, screen those, and generate a general image of who the ideal candidate should be. This results in missing out on the best-fit candidate or having a skewed sense of what quality looks like. Dover allows you to optionally turn on our Interviewer feature for any open role. When you do, you let our expert team of interviewers (some with over 3,000+ hours of interview experience) screen candidates on your behalf. We work closely with your team to collaborate on a rubric and set of questions, and only pass applicants along who would be a perfect fit.
Automation: Dover automates any part of your recruiting process. We can automatically generate a job description, post across hundreds of job boards (and recycle postings so that you show up in listings more often), autogenerate outreach, automate follow-ups and rejections, schedule across multiple calendars and timezones, and integrate with your ATS (to name just a few things).
Our grade: A
We might be biased, but we think we do a pretty good job of helping teams make their next great hire. Unlike other platforms on this list, we not only automate the manual administrative work required in recruiting, but also help you understand what good looks like. Even if you don't end up using the autogenerated content (or job descriptions, too!), you can at least have an outline so you're not starting from scratch.
What is a recruitment CRM?
A recruitment CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a type of software that helps companies manage their relationships with potential and current candidates. It helps recruiters organize, track, and analyze candidate information from initial contact to hire and beyond.
Recruitment CRMs have seen a lot of innovation over the years. Many features that assist recruiters and hiring managers in streamlining the hiring process, such as resume parsing and email nurture, have become automated. As a result, talent acquisition teams can focus more on candidate experience and prevent dropoff in their process.
Recruiting CRMs: key features
Applicant tracking: The ability to track and manage candidate information, including resumes, cover letters, job applications, and any other relevant documents.
Communication tools: The ability to communicate with candidates, including email and messaging functionality, as well as the ability to schedule and conduct interviews.
Resume management: The ability to automatically extract relevant information from resumes and store it in a central database.
Job posting: The ability to post job openings on various job boards and social media platforms.
Collaborative hiring: The ability for multiple team members to collaborate and share information about candidates, including notes and feedback.
Reporting and Analytics: The ability to track and analyze key metrics, such as the number of candidates in the pipeline, time to hire, and the success rate of hires.
Integration with other systems: The ability to integrate with other HR systems, such as applicant tracking systems, talent management systems, and learning and development platforms.
What are the advantages of using a CRM for recruiting?
Some of the key benefits of using a recruitment CRM include:
A source of truth: A candidate CRM helps to streamline the recruitment process by providing a central location to store and manage all candidate information and communication. This helps you save time and improve efficiency by eliminating the need to search through multiple systems or folders for candidate info.
An improved candidate experience: Recruitment CRMs can help improve the overall candidate experience by ensuring that candidates receive timely follow-ups and communication throughout the process. Plus, they can easily track their application status and communicate with recruiters, which can reduce frustration and improve their overall perception of the company. And since 6 in 10 candidates say the worst part of applying for jobs is never hearing back, the improvement can be significant: at Dover, customers who used our automated scheduling feature saw 30% less dropoff in their hiring process.
Better decision-making: Recruitment CRMs can provide a wealth of data and analytics that can help you make more informed hiring decisions, or prepare reports for leadership. For example, on Dover's platform, you can integrate with your ATS to track deep funnel metrics around diversity, passthrough rates, and dropoff. On most CRMs, you can also track the success rate of different recruitment sources or identify trends in the types of candidate outreach that's most resonating with candidates.
Increased productivity: By automating many of the manual tasks involved in the recruitment process, a candidate CRM can help you save time and increase productivity. This allows your team to focus on more strategic tasks, such as sourcing and engaging with top candidates.
Cost savings: A recruitment CRM can also help companies save money by streamlining the recruitment process and reducing the time and resources needed. Having a tool that adds additional support to your recruiting team often prevents companies in high growth from needing to add headcount to their talent acquisition team before they can afford it.
How are recruitment CRMs different from an ATS?
Though many Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS platforms like Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby) have taken on CRM capabilities, the functions of each are uniquely important in their own right. Put simply, a CRM handles everything before a candidate applies, and an ATS handles (mostly) everything after. Let's dive into what we mean by that.
Recruitment CRMs are broader and more comprehensive in their approach to helping companies manage the candidate relations life cycle from attraction through onboarding. They provide features such as automating tasks related to communication, tracking activities, organizational charts, and pipelines, notes and contact log planning, tagging, search ranking of candidates, outreach campaigns, and distributing jobs.
Applicant tracking systems are focused on managing job applications throughout the process — like the administrative aspects involved with scheduling, follow-ups, and onboarding. It focuses primarily on steps such as posting jobs online/job boards, receiving applications through digital channels (like email or social networks), sorting applicants into organized groups by skillset/profile, making it easy to track applicants during different stages of the application process (interviews, etc.), and finally choosing which applicant is suitable based on criteria set by employers or recruiters.
6 best recruiting CRMs for 2023
1. Tracker - Best for teams just starting to build a hiring process
Tracker is a web-based, integrated recruitment ATS and CRM designed for recruiting and staffing firms. Their platform can manage entire recruitment workflows, from candidate sourcing and placement to employee onboarding. What's unique about Tracker is that it can be used to manage sales, CRM, recruiting, marketing, and operations in addition to recruiting, so it's basically an all-in-one customer and candidate management tool for mid-to-large size teams.
Cost: $
Key features:
Responsive and helpful support team and online resources: With the multitude of tools at your disposal, it's important to select one where customer support stands out, especially since these tools will often need to go through complex integrations, and accurately track data. We mention their support team and courses here because they're mentioned in a significant amount of online reviews as being world-class.
Sales, marketing, and recruiting data all in one place: Tracker is unique in that you can track all candidateand client data in the same platform, based on which plan you select. You can track the sales cycle from lead to a close to an invoice on the client side, and candidates from application through placement on the talent side.
Fully customizable to your team's needs: Similar to other CRMs (like Salesforce, or Hubspot), Tracker gives you tons of flexibility with how you implement and integrate Tracker for your team's needs while still allowing organizational value through ease of data input and queries.
Our grade: B-
While Tracker is extremely robust, we feel like it only makes sense for companies who havenoorganizational or tracking system in place. It's incredibly cost-effective for early-stage companies looking to enter into hypergrowth, but it still doesn't offer the level of integration and customization that larger sales and marketing CRMs do. This means that we view it as a great starter tool to get you and your team organized and efficient, but not a permanent solution as you expand.
2. RecruiterBox - Best for teams with an existing recruiting tech stack
A cloud-based software that is scalable and customizable and can effectively manage the hiring process to attract desired applicants. It arranges resumes, provides integration features, builds candidate profiles, and encourages collaboration between teams. Their tools feature an ATS, task scheduling, reporting capabilities, offer controlling, and even a career page setup.
Cost: $
Key features:
Stay compliant: Ensure that your hiring process is compliant with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Lots of integration: Integrates with job search engines so users can post job openings with one click. Syncs with your organization’s social accounts so anyone can share job postings from within the app. Integrates with other HR and onboarding platforms, such as Namely, BambooHR, Slack, Checkr, QuickBooks, Trakstar, Reviewsnap, PandaDoc, G Suite, and Outlook.
Automatic candidate profile creation:The software automatically creates a candidate profile when you upload a resume, and you can search for candidates or resumes with the advanced search functionality.
Our grade: A-
While Recruiterflow provides tons of integration, it's not always reliable according to online product reviews. However, if you have a larger recruiting team with a big tech stack, it's the most all-encompassing we could find. And if you're planning to scale quickly (or you have a robust pipeline already), the automated persona creation is a game-changer.
3. Beamery - Best for larger teams with tons of candidate data
Beamery’s talent CRM aims to enable talent teams to reach diversity targets, identify and engage potential high performers, optimize the end to end talent experience, and identify the skills and capabilities they need.
Cost: $$
Key features:
Candidate pooling: Beamery allows you to group candidates into vacancies, as well as create pools to source from & revisit. This can be incredibly beneficial for roles that you're consistently hiring for.
Highly customizable candidate profiles: The interface allows you to add any field or tag to any candidate persona. New fields are immediately searchable and automatically turn into a variable field you can use in your email campaigns, so you can personalize your outreach further for different segments.
Access management: Grant access to select data, features, objects, etc. based on the users, user role, groups, etc.
Our grade: C
Beamery is a great tool to curate candidate data and communicate with those people If your challenge is tracking your communications and progress with you people you are pursuing to become candidates. However, outside of that, nothing about Beamery strikes us as revolutionary or stands out from other options in similar price ranges. If you have a large remote hiring team and need to be able to track user permissions and customize profiles, this is the tool for you.
Quick note: some people will want this to be an ATS. It isn't. This is a tool that will help you scale your communications with potential candidates and nurture them along the way.
4. RecruiterFlow - Best for agencies
Recruiterflow delivers an all-in-one applicant tracking system (ATS), customer relationship management (CRM), and automation solution for executive search firms and recruiting agencies.
Cost: $$
Key features:
Intuitive UI: Nearly every review mentions the simplicity and ease of use when it comes to RecruiterFlow's UI. Of note is their drag-and-drop functionality which allows teams to quickly move candidates through their process. Campaigns for different roles (or types of outreach) are called Recipes and can be modified to send select segments unique pitches.
Automation:RecruiterFlow allows you to automate different aspects of the candidate nurture and hiring process, including rejection emails, phone screen scheduling, email confirmations on submittal, and follow-ups.
Collaborative client portal: If you recruit on behalf of clients, or you have a remote team that needs help collaborating with hiring managers, RecruiterFlow's candidate portal is really useful. It's compliant, helps you control what information you present to clients and when, and helps everyone stay on the same page during the hiring process.
Our grade: A
RecruiterFlow gets massive bonus points for its ease of use and reliability. Compared to other tools on this list, customers stated that the speed and ease of use make the app intuitive, and allow others to ramp onto it quickly. That being said, unless you have a large recruiting team or hire on behalf of clients at an agency, the features related to automation and client relationship management are less relevant.
5. TalentLyft - Best for early-stage startups
TalentLyft is a full-stack recruitment software that includes an ATS, sourcing, and CRM solution under one platform, allowing you to segment your talent pool, organize data, and save time on manual tasks.
Cost: $
Key features:
Create a no-code career site:TalentLyft has premade templates that all you to brand and design a career site without an engineer or designer, making it perfect for smaller teams just getting started.
Automated campaigns: Automatically log emails, calls, evaluations, disqualifications, or any other activities made with candidates.
Rich candidate profiles:TalentLyft's in-app candidate profiles are some of the best we've seen. They not only list all relevant public profiles, but they allow you to visualize every touchpoint, interaction, and segment with individual analytics to help you can better engage top candidates.
Our grade: B+
6. Dover - Best for teams of all sizes who are scaling quickly
Dover gives you actionable data, automates your team’s workflows across the entire hiring process, and enables you to engage talent with deeply integrated automation.
Cost: $
Key features:
Autogenerated and customizable outreach with personalization: If you're familiar with ChatGPT, Dover similarly autogenerates an email with personalization based on a candidate's profile. It's white-labeled (aka it looks like it comes from your team), so you can customize the output and A/B test campaigns to perfect your pitch across segments.
Outsource phone screens (if you choose): Regardless of company size, it's impossible to screen every single qualified candidate who applies. You likely create a shortlist, screen those, and generate a general image of who the ideal candidate should be. This results in missing out on the best-fit candidate or having a skewed sense of what quality looks like. Dover allows you to optionally turn on our Interviewer feature for any open role. When you do, you let our expert team of interviewers (some with over 3,000+ hours of interview experience) screen candidates on your behalf. We work closely with your team to collaborate on a rubric and set of questions, and only pass applicants along who would be a perfect fit.
Automation: Dover automates any part of your recruiting process. We can automatically generate a job description, post across hundreds of job boards (and recycle postings so that you show up in listings more often), autogenerate outreach, automate follow-ups and rejections, schedule across multiple calendars and timezones, and integrate with your ATS (to name just a few things).
Our grade: A
We might be biased, but we think we do a pretty good job of helping teams make their next great hire. Unlike other platforms on this list, we not only automate the manual administrative work required in recruiting, but also help you understand what good looks like. Even if you don't end up using the autogenerated content (or job descriptions, too!), you can at least have an outline so you're not starting from scratch.
What is a recruitment CRM?
A recruitment CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a type of software that helps companies manage their relationships with potential and current candidates. It helps recruiters organize, track, and analyze candidate information from initial contact to hire and beyond.
Recruitment CRMs have seen a lot of innovation over the years. Many features that assist recruiters and hiring managers in streamlining the hiring process, such as resume parsing and email nurture, have become automated. As a result, talent acquisition teams can focus more on candidate experience and prevent dropoff in their process.
Recruiting CRMs: key features
Applicant tracking: The ability to track and manage candidate information, including resumes, cover letters, job applications, and any other relevant documents.
Communication tools: The ability to communicate with candidates, including email and messaging functionality, as well as the ability to schedule and conduct interviews.
Resume management: The ability to automatically extract relevant information from resumes and store it in a central database.
Job posting: The ability to post job openings on various job boards and social media platforms.
Collaborative hiring: The ability for multiple team members to collaborate and share information about candidates, including notes and feedback.
Reporting and Analytics: The ability to track and analyze key metrics, such as the number of candidates in the pipeline, time to hire, and the success rate of hires.
Integration with other systems: The ability to integrate with other HR systems, such as applicant tracking systems, talent management systems, and learning and development platforms.
What are the advantages of using a CRM for recruiting?
Some of the key benefits of using a recruitment CRM include:
A source of truth: A candidate CRM helps to streamline the recruitment process by providing a central location to store and manage all candidate information and communication. This helps you save time and improve efficiency by eliminating the need to search through multiple systems or folders for candidate info.
An improved candidate experience: Recruitment CRMs can help improve the overall candidate experience by ensuring that candidates receive timely follow-ups and communication throughout the process. Plus, they can easily track their application status and communicate with recruiters, which can reduce frustration and improve their overall perception of the company. And since 6 in 10 candidates say the worst part of applying for jobs is never hearing back, the improvement can be significant: at Dover, customers who used our automated scheduling feature saw 30% less dropoff in their hiring process.
Better decision-making: Recruitment CRMs can provide a wealth of data and analytics that can help you make more informed hiring decisions, or prepare reports for leadership. For example, on Dover's platform, you can integrate with your ATS to track deep funnel metrics around diversity, passthrough rates, and dropoff. On most CRMs, you can also track the success rate of different recruitment sources or identify trends in the types of candidate outreach that's most resonating with candidates.
Increased productivity: By automating many of the manual tasks involved in the recruitment process, a candidate CRM can help you save time and increase productivity. This allows your team to focus on more strategic tasks, such as sourcing and engaging with top candidates.
Cost savings: A recruitment CRM can also help companies save money by streamlining the recruitment process and reducing the time and resources needed. Having a tool that adds additional support to your recruiting team often prevents companies in high growth from needing to add headcount to their talent acquisition team before they can afford it.
How are recruitment CRMs different from an ATS?
Though many Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS platforms like Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby) have taken on CRM capabilities, the functions of each are uniquely important in their own right. Put simply, a CRM handles everything before a candidate applies, and an ATS handles (mostly) everything after. Let's dive into what we mean by that.
Recruitment CRMs are broader and more comprehensive in their approach to helping companies manage the candidate relations life cycle from attraction through onboarding. They provide features such as automating tasks related to communication, tracking activities, organizational charts, and pipelines, notes and contact log planning, tagging, search ranking of candidates, outreach campaigns, and distributing jobs.
Applicant tracking systems are focused on managing job applications throughout the process — like the administrative aspects involved with scheduling, follow-ups, and onboarding. It focuses primarily on steps such as posting jobs online/job boards, receiving applications through digital channels (like email or social networks), sorting applicants into organized groups by skillset/profile, making it easy to track applicants during different stages of the application process (interviews, etc.), and finally choosing which applicant is suitable based on criteria set by employers or recruiters.
6 best recruiting CRMs for 2023
1. Tracker - Best for teams just starting to build a hiring process
Tracker is a web-based, integrated recruitment ATS and CRM designed for recruiting and staffing firms. Their platform can manage entire recruitment workflows, from candidate sourcing and placement to employee onboarding. What's unique about Tracker is that it can be used to manage sales, CRM, recruiting, marketing, and operations in addition to recruiting, so it's basically an all-in-one customer and candidate management tool for mid-to-large size teams.
Cost: $
Key features:
Responsive and helpful support team and online resources: With the multitude of tools at your disposal, it's important to select one where customer support stands out, especially since these tools will often need to go through complex integrations, and accurately track data. We mention their support team and courses here because they're mentioned in a significant amount of online reviews as being world-class.
Sales, marketing, and recruiting data all in one place: Tracker is unique in that you can track all candidateand client data in the same platform, based on which plan you select. You can track the sales cycle from lead to a close to an invoice on the client side, and candidates from application through placement on the talent side.
Fully customizable to your team's needs: Similar to other CRMs (like Salesforce, or Hubspot), Tracker gives you tons of flexibility with how you implement and integrate Tracker for your team's needs while still allowing organizational value through ease of data input and queries.
Our grade: B-
While Tracker is extremely robust, we feel like it only makes sense for companies who havenoorganizational or tracking system in place. It's incredibly cost-effective for early-stage companies looking to enter into hypergrowth, but it still doesn't offer the level of integration and customization that larger sales and marketing CRMs do. This means that we view it as a great starter tool to get you and your team organized and efficient, but not a permanent solution as you expand.
2. RecruiterBox - Best for teams with an existing recruiting tech stack
A cloud-based software that is scalable and customizable and can effectively manage the hiring process to attract desired applicants. It arranges resumes, provides integration features, builds candidate profiles, and encourages collaboration between teams. Their tools feature an ATS, task scheduling, reporting capabilities, offer controlling, and even a career page setup.
Cost: $
Key features:
Stay compliant: Ensure that your hiring process is compliant with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Lots of integration: Integrates with job search engines so users can post job openings with one click. Syncs with your organization’s social accounts so anyone can share job postings from within the app. Integrates with other HR and onboarding platforms, such as Namely, BambooHR, Slack, Checkr, QuickBooks, Trakstar, Reviewsnap, PandaDoc, G Suite, and Outlook.
Automatic candidate profile creation:The software automatically creates a candidate profile when you upload a resume, and you can search for candidates or resumes with the advanced search functionality.
Our grade: A-
While Recruiterflow provides tons of integration, it's not always reliable according to online product reviews. However, if you have a larger recruiting team with a big tech stack, it's the most all-encompassing we could find. And if you're planning to scale quickly (or you have a robust pipeline already), the automated persona creation is a game-changer.
3. Beamery - Best for larger teams with tons of candidate data
Beamery’s talent CRM aims to enable talent teams to reach diversity targets, identify and engage potential high performers, optimize the end to end talent experience, and identify the skills and capabilities they need.
Cost: $$
Key features:
Candidate pooling: Beamery allows you to group candidates into vacancies, as well as create pools to source from & revisit. This can be incredibly beneficial for roles that you're consistently hiring for.
Highly customizable candidate profiles: The interface allows you to add any field or tag to any candidate persona. New fields are immediately searchable and automatically turn into a variable field you can use in your email campaigns, so you can personalize your outreach further for different segments.
Access management: Grant access to select data, features, objects, etc. based on the users, user role, groups, etc.
Our grade: C
Beamery is a great tool to curate candidate data and communicate with those people If your challenge is tracking your communications and progress with you people you are pursuing to become candidates. However, outside of that, nothing about Beamery strikes us as revolutionary or stands out from other options in similar price ranges. If you have a large remote hiring team and need to be able to track user permissions and customize profiles, this is the tool for you.
Quick note: some people will want this to be an ATS. It isn't. This is a tool that will help you scale your communications with potential candidates and nurture them along the way.
4. RecruiterFlow - Best for agencies
Recruiterflow delivers an all-in-one applicant tracking system (ATS), customer relationship management (CRM), and automation solution for executive search firms and recruiting agencies.
Cost: $$
Key features:
Intuitive UI: Nearly every review mentions the simplicity and ease of use when it comes to RecruiterFlow's UI. Of note is their drag-and-drop functionality which allows teams to quickly move candidates through their process. Campaigns for different roles (or types of outreach) are called Recipes and can be modified to send select segments unique pitches.
Automation:RecruiterFlow allows you to automate different aspects of the candidate nurture and hiring process, including rejection emails, phone screen scheduling, email confirmations on submittal, and follow-ups.
Collaborative client portal: If you recruit on behalf of clients, or you have a remote team that needs help collaborating with hiring managers, RecruiterFlow's candidate portal is really useful. It's compliant, helps you control what information you present to clients and when, and helps everyone stay on the same page during the hiring process.
Our grade: A
RecruiterFlow gets massive bonus points for its ease of use and reliability. Compared to other tools on this list, customers stated that the speed and ease of use make the app intuitive, and allow others to ramp onto it quickly. That being said, unless you have a large recruiting team or hire on behalf of clients at an agency, the features related to automation and client relationship management are less relevant.
5. TalentLyft - Best for early-stage startups
TalentLyft is a full-stack recruitment software that includes an ATS, sourcing, and CRM solution under one platform, allowing you to segment your talent pool, organize data, and save time on manual tasks.
Cost: $
Key features:
Create a no-code career site:TalentLyft has premade templates that all you to brand and design a career site without an engineer or designer, making it perfect for smaller teams just getting started.
Automated campaigns: Automatically log emails, calls, evaluations, disqualifications, or any other activities made with candidates.
Rich candidate profiles:TalentLyft's in-app candidate profiles are some of the best we've seen. They not only list all relevant public profiles, but they allow you to visualize every touchpoint, interaction, and segment with individual analytics to help you can better engage top candidates.
Our grade: B+
6. Dover - Best for teams of all sizes who are scaling quickly
Dover gives you actionable data, automates your team’s workflows across the entire hiring process, and enables you to engage talent with deeply integrated automation.
Cost: $
Key features:
Autogenerated and customizable outreach with personalization: If you're familiar with ChatGPT, Dover similarly autogenerates an email with personalization based on a candidate's profile. It's white-labeled (aka it looks like it comes from your team), so you can customize the output and A/B test campaigns to perfect your pitch across segments.
Outsource phone screens (if you choose): Regardless of company size, it's impossible to screen every single qualified candidate who applies. You likely create a shortlist, screen those, and generate a general image of who the ideal candidate should be. This results in missing out on the best-fit candidate or having a skewed sense of what quality looks like. Dover allows you to optionally turn on our Interviewer feature for any open role. When you do, you let our expert team of interviewers (some with over 3,000+ hours of interview experience) screen candidates on your behalf. We work closely with your team to collaborate on a rubric and set of questions, and only pass applicants along who would be a perfect fit.
Automation: Dover automates any part of your recruiting process. We can automatically generate a job description, post across hundreds of job boards (and recycle postings so that you show up in listings more often), autogenerate outreach, automate follow-ups and rejections, schedule across multiple calendars and timezones, and integrate with your ATS (to name just a few things).
Our grade: A
We might be biased, but we think we do a pretty good job of helping teams make their next great hire. Unlike other platforms on this list, we not only automate the manual administrative work required in recruiting, but also help you understand what good looks like. Even if you don't end up using the autogenerated content (or job descriptions, too!), you can at least have an outline so you're not starting from scratch.
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