CRM and ATS Selection Strategies for Recruitment Agencies

Trouble, Trouble! While selecting the one when you need both CRM and ATS at a time, We Got You!

CRM and ATS are two vital systems that agencies ought to include when handling customers and applicants. But it’s a strategic decision. In this guide, you will find CRM and ATS selection strategies for recruitment agencies. These systems are central tools that can aid in simplifying procedures, increasing efficiency, and saving time.

A study by the Aberdeen Group found that companies utilizing CRM and ATS solutions see a 50% reduction in time-to-hire. CRM and ATS have traditionally been separate systems, but agencies often have to choose one or both. The promising news is that there is now a single viable solution – RecruitBPM. 

RecruitBPM effortlessly unifies and merges CRM and ATS functions on one platform. Agencies can now manage both customer and candidate relationships without having trouble learning various interfaces.

The RecruitBPM CRM and ATS, powered by features such as automatic job posting, built-in reporting, and drag-and-drop management, tackles inefficiencies and expedites the hiring process by decreasing time-to-hire and saving recruiters about 20 hours per week.

What is Recruitment CRM? 

A company uses a CRM (customer relationship management) platform to control and maintain its business relationships and communications. Imagine a dedicated repository that acts as a central point where every customer’s profile is stored in full detail and supplemented with their activities, notes, reminders, etc.

Combining all of this information in one location facilitates joint work between the departments and enables the company to ensure that the customers remain content.

Solidify the picture of a customer who could have encountered the office a few times or at least 1000 times. The client might come across the campaign on the way home, meet with consultants, and immediately join the business.

There can be endless notes about their order information and preferences as soon as they become customers. Invoices also need to be kept in proper records. Let’s take a closer look at CRM’s features.

Features of CRM

• Contact and Lead Management
• Sales and Opportunity Management
• Marketing Automation
• Customer Service and Support
• Analytics and Reporting

Functions of CRM in creating customer connections.

Capturing Customer Data 

CRM software allows data from different customer interactions, such as the website, social media, e-mails, and phone calls, to be retrieved and stored. Besides this, the data allows businesses to understand customers better.

Segmentation and Targeting

Customer relationship management built-in segmentation programs help understand customer characteristics, including demographics, behavior, preferences, and purchase history. Thus, they can adapt their marketing and communication capacities to the specific customer group.

Personalization and Customization

CRM systems help organizations effectively cater to the personalized requirements of their customers. They are vital, as they know how to segment for targeted campaigns, offer products based on interests, and provide relevant content to customers.

Automation and Workflow Management

With the help of such automation, CRM tools convert repetitive procedures, workflows, and processes into something that can be done automatically while maintaining consistency. The secondary benefits are time savings, error reduction, and allocation of resources to more meaningful tasks.

Collaboration and Communication

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems help teams in many organizational departments communicate and cooperate better. They create a single place for sharing customers’ histories of interaction, transaction data, and insights to provide a common framework for dealing with clients.

Customer Retention and Loyalty 

CRM strategies aim to create stronger bonds with customers, increase customer satisfaction, and increase customer loyalty. By identifying upsells and cross-sells and providing convenient support, businesses can build long-term relationships with customers and grow their customer base.

The Benefits of CRM

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a powerful tool that enables businesses to manage customer interactions effectively and quickly, boosting sales and streamlining customer management processes. Adopting CRM is something other than that delivers on-the-spot outcomes.

Still, it is a process that defends customer relations, sparks workspace efficiency, and develops a robust data analysis framework. This part will describe the benefits of using a CRM system for customer issue selection.

1. Enhanced Customer Engagement

A CRM tool stands out because it allows your business to take your customer engagement to a new level. A CRM system is centralized to acquire customer data among companies, which enhances their ability to get an end-to-end view of all customers’ desires, interactions, and purchase records.

Finally, it allows them to personalize client interactions, develop recommended offers, and run customized ad campaigns as the data is readily available. Businesses can earn customers’ loyalty by increasing customer satisfaction through customized and more centered communication.

2. Improved Sales Performance

An efficient CRM system can significantly enhance sales team cooperation through convenient customer information, including addresses, sales history, and correspondence history, which are crucial to their activities.

Going in-depth into deal history gives sales reps the means to engage prospects and existing customers more personally, referencing past interactions and molding the sales strategy around such interactions.

CRM systems have some elements, such as task assignment and pipeline monitoring, that help salespeople stay organized, set priorities, and easily track their commercial advances. With a higher mobility level and smoother processes, the visibility allows for a leakage-free sales cycle, faster revenue flow in no time.

3. Better Data Analysis

Another advantage of using CRM is its robust performance in collecting and analyzing rich customer data. Various methods are available for collecting data, including website visits, emails, and social media interactions. This data analysis can provide information about frequency, trend study, and data.

Utilizing this data enables businesses to conduct successful data-based decision-making and assist in developing targeted marketing strategies, which result in improved sales and marketing efforts.

Furthermore, CRM systems frequently contain reporting and analytical processing, allowing businesses access to performance indicators, campaign efficiency measurements, and areas for further enhancement.

Ultimately, companies may have many advantages by incorporating a CRM system into their enterprise. CRM systems could be both a customer engagement booster and a sales execution enhancer. Moreover, it is excellent for data retrieving purposes.

What is ATS?

ATS software (Applicant Tracking System) fully automates, organizes, and optimizes the entire recruitment and employment lifecycle from beginning to end.

These kinds of tools support activities such as posting job ads on social media, LinkedIn, and job boards; managing candidates’ applications; creating candidate profiles; resume analysis; skills test administration, hiring metrics reporting, interview scheduling, following up on communication; background checks; offer and contract issuing; onboarding new hires, and more.

With an ATS, recruiters could enhance candidate experience, save time, and place their undivided efforts on finding the best talent. Moreover, the automation of manual tasks keeps the entire process well-organized, ensures communication between the various parties involved, and maintains the requisite data for hiring the best talents.

Features of ATS

• Job posting and candidate sourcing
• Resume Parsing and Management
• Application Tracking and Workflow Management
• Candidate Screening and Assessment 
• Interview Scheduling and Communication
• Reporting and Analytics
• Integration with HR and CRM Systems

Benefits of ATS in Recruitment 

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software application that assists organizations in reducing the complexity of their hiring processes and filling employment positions most efficiently.

1. Streamlined Hiring Processes

ATS reduces and simplifies numerous manual procedures involved in recruitment, e.g., resume screening, job postings, interview schedules, and candidate communication.

It enables the manager to save all the information about a candidate, trace their progress, and communicate with other team members without delay. This eliminates extra steps of the recruitment process, thereby saving time and effort.

2. Improved Candidate Experience

The applicant tracking system is easy to use and allows applicants to go through the process quickly. It will enable them to do this search and apply for job openings, upload their resumes, and track their application areas with ease.

Online application systems would allow employers to provide automatic email notifications and personalized communication with candidates. Hence, they feel enlightened and part of the process, improving the candidate’s experience.

3. Increased Collaboration

ATS serves as a centralized and collaborative hub where recruiters interact with hiring managers and other stakeholders within the hiring process.

It offers a platform to them where they can post candidates’ information, submit feedback on candidates, and talk efficiently among themselves. A good result comes naturally when the right decision is made, and all team members are on the same page.

4. Improved Data Tracking and Reports 

An ATS, in turn, collects information relevant to candidates, job openings, and recruitment campaigns and stores it. In turn, recruiters can make informed data-driven decisions by analyzing this data and producing report normalization and other metrics.

Over time, they will accumulate and observe critical recruitment metrics such as time-to-fill, source effectiveness, and candidate quality to continuously refine their hiring strategy.

What is the difference between a recruitment CRM and ATS?

Several recruitment agencies now use CRM and ATS, which combine automated technology in their recruitment processes. This presents the benefit of reducing conventional paperwork handling within the organization and facilitating the retrieval of applicant details, including experience/qualification.

A recruitment CRM system can attract candidates for future positions by keeping your agency engaged with candidates, storing them in the system, and using the tracking feature.

ATS, or the applicant tracking system, is designed to ease the decision-making process of joining services and upward movements.

CRM vs ATS By automating what several routine admin jobs are and benefiting areas like the speed of hiring, budgets, and net hire scores, it has become easier for HR to do the job. However, it’s essential to distinguish between CRM vs ATS functionalities to optimize recruitment processes effectively.

CRM vs ATS: Choosing the Right Option

Determining your business’s needs before choosing CRM vs ATS is important. So, you must consider the following:

Identify your goals: Find out what your purpose for the system is. Are your workforce mainly concerned with speeding up recruiting processes or customer management?

Assess your team size and structure: How many users will use the system and their roles? Do you have this problem with your sales team, the HR department, or both?

Consider scalability: Decide on the expansion possibilities of your business. Can the system expand when your needs change in the future?

Review budget constraints: Realize your financial limitations. Evaluate the budget implications of establishing and operating your chosen system.

Consider CRM vs ATS or a combined solution carefully before taking a decision.

How do ATS and CRM work together to reduce time-to-hire and save recruiters several hours weekly?

To put it simply, an ATS is to locate and maintain applicants. The CRM system manages your customers, such as the clients that purchased the staffing agency, to help hire candidates.

The ATS assists you in establishing and retaining a talent pool that is always available at a tap away. This way, the worst-case scenario of handling the job opening on concise notice will include at least several good candidates to recommend in place of a sudden and desperate search for applicants.

A CRM system will help process hundreds of existing clients and handle the prospects who could become your clients. These key functions under one umbrella help boost your firm’s revenue by managing and locating the top caliber of your industry’s clients.

But the question is! Does that kind of software even exist? Because it’s considerably scalable for any software to work simultaneously as an ATS and CRM. The answer is yes, it exists. The name of that software is “RecruitBPM. Let’s find out the How.

RecruitBPM One-Stop for Your ATS and CRM Needs

RecruitBPM is a one-stop solution for all your ATS and CRM requirements. However, many managers consider ATS and CRM software as two different systems.

The hopping idea imprisons the essence of saving time and providing convenient platform access. Because of this, it makes sense to go for a service that can practice these activities together. However, it is even better for recruiters; the robust SaaS “RecruitBPM” now provides all CRM and ATS features within one application.

• CRM and ATS are already built into the system, meaning your team shouldn’t need to be trained again on separate features.

• Automated job boards and sourcing allow you to post an advertisement on thousands of sites from one place instead of manually posting on every platform.

• An easy drag-and-drop feature should be used to organize your candidates per listing, irrespective of which listing. Hence, with the drag-and-drop feature, you won’t have to go through the tedious process of managing multiple applicants’ statuses.

• An AI-powered candidate recommendation and search tool that ensures you do not miss an interview to acquire the stuff you need for the job.

• Non-stop drag-and-drop client management dashboard used to prioritize time between your existing clients and new prospects

• Consolidate your CRM and ATS reports on a single platform, streamlining your data analysis and saving you valuable time managing business insights.

Selecting the most appropriate systems (CRM and ATS) is essential for any business. This is why using the proper system like RecuitBPM to manage business contacts and personal data is critical.

However, what can be an even harder decision is to determine which of these CRM and ATS choices would be best for your specific requirements when, at once, you can control both functionalities.

FAQs About CRM and ATS Selection For Recruitment Agencies

What are ATS and CRM Systems in short?

CRM is a resource that provides valuable segmentation of human resources and, in turn, lays a foundation for employers to act on by nurturing talent and delivering an experience that is full and appealing for passive candidates and active job seekers.

The ATS is an applicant repository, software through which recruiters and hiring managers utilize scheduling and compliance tools.

Can a CRM and ATS in one system solve Recruitment challenges? 

If CRM and ATS are aggregated, recruiters can utilize candidate relationship data and application tracking to overcome critical recruitment challenges. Placing recruitment and engagement workflows in the same place enables recruiters to market products to candidates in multiple ways.

Do you need an ATS and a CRM?

Job applications are so much easier to store and manage. ATS is more about collecting resumes, whereas recruitment CRM concentrates more on relationships. Combining such functions is a trademark of recruiting software vendors that integrates an applicant tracking system and a recruiter’s interface into one product.

Is an applicant tracking system a CRM?

The CRM is a potent segmentation tool that captures passive candidates and actively interested job seekers and nurtures them, delivering an engaging experience. In contrast, the applicant tracking system (ATS) is a database used by recruiters and hiring managers to automate workflows and track compliance.

Should you integrate your CRM with an ATS?

ATS and CRM are the core technologies that help streamline the hiring process and keep the talent reservoir of prospective candidates; respectively, they are the most important in the recruiting technology arsenal.

Combining the advanced functions offered by the RecruitBPM tech pack into a single platform and automating the whole talent acquisition process allows employers to access their qualified pool and attract the most relevant candidates from outside.