Best Recruiting CRMs - 2023

The Best Candidate Relationship Management Software, Benefits, Pitfalls, ROI calculations and more!

Phil Strazzulla
HR Tech Expert, Harvard MBA, Software Enthusiast

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Building & Defining Recruiting Operations at Clear Street

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We spend all day researching the best HR software so you don’t have to.  We never take money from vendors during our research phase and rely heavily on experts to refine our recommendations.  We may earn a fee if you click on vendor links on this page. Learn more about SelectSoftware Reviews

The Best Recruiting CRM Software

Hand picked by our HR Technology experts after product testing, user research, and much debate - enjoy!

From multi-channel job ads to career site building, automated campaigns and more, SmartDreamers has all the features you need for your recruitment marketing efforts.
Not only does Manatal cover most of the features you’d expect from a budget-friendly ATS, the platform tops that off with CRM features, including email campaigns and revenue tracking dashboards.
Eightfold's recruiting software allows you to manage your job postings, applications and resumes in one place and provides deep insights into potential candidates' profiles. It can also automatically match qualified candidates with roles that fit them.
Avature packs sourcing and advanced online marketing capabilities in a single solution, so that finding and engaging critical talent can be done easily and at scale.
Unlike most other vendors in the recruitment solutions space, TalentLyft combines customer applicant tracking, recruitment marketing, sourcing, and talent CRM solutions into one tool, enabling users to have the needed context for informed hiring decisions.
Symphony Talent's SmashFlyX is a powerful platform that combines CRM, career sites, and programmatic advertising for smart recruitment marketing and campaigning.
Phenom is a comprehensive tool that lets you manage all the stages of the talent experience into a single platform.
Many HR professionals gladly use Yello to hire with more effectiveness, sourcing, engaging, and advancing candidates in a single platform.
Beamery's Talent CRM is a nice-looking tool with notable features such as one-click sourcing, automated workflows, and nurture pools.
With Loxo, you can set your recruitment marketing to autopilot by pre-building emails, SMS, phone calls, and LinkedIn activity.

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Introduction to Recruiting CRMs

Recruiting teams that use a best in class recruiting CRM can save time, money, and get the best talent in the door. Companies are not just sourcing talent anymore — instead, they’re using marketing tactics to build relationships with candidates, grow talent pipelines, and meet their hiring goals faster. It’s no surprise  that recruitment marketing software has become a must-have for many hiring teams.

Why? These days, candidates have more control over the job process, deciding which companies and roles interest them the most. So when the market is more candidate-driven than ever, you have to work extra hard to find — and convince — top talent to work for your company. You’re now a recruiter and a marketer with a five-step hiring funnel that includes finding, attracting, engaging, nurturing and converting high quality candidates.

Recruitment marketing software is designed to help you move candidates more efficiently through each step of this funnel so you can create awareness and drive conversions. By focusing your recruiting efforts on candidates that have already expressed interest, you can hire in less time and for less money. But which platform is right for your company?

To help you make the right investment, we put together this guide on all things recruitment marketing software. You’ll find a list of the top software platforms, pricing guidelines, questions to ask on demos and more.

Our criteria: How we chose the best vendors

We take research seriously. To make sure we’re offering our readers the very best solutions in a given software category, we are methodical, rigorous, and expansive in our research. We consult with HR professionals, vendors, and industry experts. We cut through the noise to bring you a carefully curated list of vendors, along with other essential information, to help you find the right software platform for your business. 

Here’s how we chose who makes the cut: 

Product: We believe in gaining a comprehensive understanding of a product before we recommend it, so we start by getting to know the software. Whenever possible, we meet with a senior executive (CEO or Head of Product) for a demo and Q&A. We also test the product ourselves to make sure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best-in-class offering. 

User feedback: We go straight to the source and compile feedback on user experience. Real-world input supports our commitment to diligence in our software evaluation methods and the products we recommend. Keeping up with the everyday experience of HR pros also puts new vendors on our radar, and it keeps us close to our community so we can better connect the right products to the right people.

Financial metrics: We are certified finance nerds, so we use all the data we can get our hands on to make selections for our guides. We comb through data for concrete statistics like retention rates, growth, profitability, and scalability. We evaluate the bottom line of each product because we know making a software purchase can put your reputation on the line. 

Best for a use case: Software is never a one-size-fits-all product. Sometimes the best solution is free or cheap. Other times it’s the one that is best for global companies or the one that’s sized right for early-stage startups. Keeping this in mind, we include solutions across the spectrum so our readers can find the best fit for their unique needs.

Here's more detail if you want to read more about how we research vendors. Our dedicated staff writers rely on hard data, impartial experts, and user feedback to ensure our reviews are helpful, truthful, and hopefully a pleasure to read!

Top Recruitment CRMs

We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best Recruiting CRMs per our research and expert council as of 2023.

SmartDreamers

Review:

SmartDreamers is an end-to-end recruitment marketing automation platform with a UI that’s very user-friendly. Fast-growing companies as well as enterprises can use it to launch powerful campaigns that enhance their employer branding, all while attracting quality job seekers.

SmartDreamers

Pricing:

There are three pricing plans

  • Essential features social media ads, analytics, landing and career pages, ATS integration, and a detailed Academy.
  • Professional adds job board automation, advanced analytics, Google Analytics integration, A/B testing, custom forms, and multiple teams.
  • Enterprise adds niche website automation, ATS reports integration, custom reporting, CV import automation, custom career pages, and a dedicated account team.

There are three pricing plans

  • Essential features social media ads, analytics, landing and career pages, ATS integration, and a detailed Academy.
  • Professional adds job board automation, advanced analytics, Google Analytics integration, A/B testing, custom forms, and multiple teams.
  • Enterprise adds niche website automation, ATS reports integration, custom reporting, CV import automation, custom career pages, and a dedicated account team.

Best For

SmartDreamers is best suited for fast-growing companies and enterprises.

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Manatal

Review:

Manatal is a budget-friendly ATS that’s got candidate/customer relationship management (CRM) features built-in. It allows companies to customize pipelines that track the progress made with prospects, from initial contact to contract. It also offers a LinkedIn chrome extension to quickly connect with and save prospects’ contact info, and email integration for communication with those prospects, as well as sending them automated responses and mass campaigns. 

To track the performance of your CRM efforts, Manatal offers detailed candidate placement and revenue tracking dashboards, letting you know how many candidates were successfully hired and how much money is coming in from clients.

Manatal

Pricing:

Manatal has two plans with fixed pricing. When Billed annually, they cost as follows:

  • Professional: This plan costs $15 per user per month for up to 15 jobs per account and 10,000 candidates. Customers on this plan can add unlimited guests.
  • Enterprise: This plan costs $35 per user per month for unlimited jobs per account, as well as unlimited  candidates and guests.

Note:

  • “Users” refers to the individuals with full unrestricted access to Manatal’s platform and its features such as recruiters and HR professionals who actively use the software.
  • “Guests” refers to individuals who are invited to collaborate on the platform through a dedicated portal such as hiring managers and decision-makers. These guests can access the platform free of charge and do not count towards the billable number of users.

Manatal has two plans with fixed pricing. When Billed annually, they cost as follows:

  • Professional: This plan costs $15 per user per month for up to 15 jobs per account and 10,000 candidates. Customers on this plan can add unlimited guests.
  • Enterprise: This plan costs $35 per user per month for unlimited jobs per account, as well as unlimited  candidates and guests.

Note:

  • “Users” refers to the individuals with full unrestricted access to Manatal’s platform and its features such as recruiters and HR professionals who actively use the software.
  • “Guests” refers to individuals who are invited to collaborate on the platform through a dedicated portal such as hiring managers and decision-makers. Thes

Best For

Manatal is used by organizations of all sizes across different industries, but it’s worth noting that the ball-park of their customers are SMEs.

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eightfold

Review:

Eightfold’s Personalized Candidate Relationship Management is more than just a recruiting CRM. It allows you to schedule and deliver targeted campaigns to a segmented portion of your talent pool, so you can communicate with the right candidates whenever you want. The built-in CRM also offers the ability to identify the best candidates for any given message through artificial intelligence – a unique power that only a few talent CRMs offer. Or you can manually segment candidates based on their location, experience level, diversity classes, and more.

eightfold

Pricing:

Eightfold's pricing plans are not disclosed on its website. Contact their Sales team for a custom quote.

Eightfold's pricing plans are not disclosed on its website. Contact their Sales team for a custom quote.

Best For

Eightfold is best suited for large companies and enterprises hiring more than 100 candidates a year.

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Avature

Review:

Avature combines ATS and CRM capabilities into one powerful platform that is used by KPMG, IBM, Pepsi and over 600 other companies. One of the most powerful aspects of this solution is the ability to customize workflows for both recruiters and candidates that meet the needs of different functions and geographies.

Avature

Pricing:

As with most enterprise-level solutions, pricing is not provided upfront by the vendor.

The pricing of Avature’s plans isn’t disclosed upfront. Contact an Avature sales representative to get a custom price quote based on the size and needs of your business.

Best For

As you probably assumed from their stats, Avature is best-suited for organizations with more than 5000 employees.

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Talentlyft

Review:

TalentLyft is a one-in-all candidate relationship management solution. The software seeks to satisfy all recruitment pain points; finding, attracting, engaging, and choosing the best talent, from one location. 

You can start recruiting by building a new vacancy. It’s just a matter of typing in basic information and creating a customized application form. On the forms, you can choose which fields are optional or mandatory, request the applicant's resume and cover letter, and even include screen questions. TalentLyft also allows you to place triggers for automatic disqualification on close-ended questions. 

TalentLyft also permits you to automate workflows, set triggers for each phase of the recruitment, and actions to highlight and follow. Some other CRM capabilities include adding assessments to the recruitment process. 

TalentLyft offers a career site editor that allows you to create personalized websites to capture talents. You can use the editor without having coding knowledge. It comes with a drag-and-drop editor and text fields that allow you to design your website easily. 

The editor, unlike other recruitment site builders, doesn't just let you build a single page. Rather, you can create a complete website with multiple pages, blog, job ad page, etc. To access the editor, click the Convert module, then Edit Career Site.

Talentlyft

Pricing:

TalentLyft offers a subscription model with 2 plans: Starter Plan & Pro Plan. The plans are differentiated by the number of active positions your business is hiring for per time.

  • Starter Plan: This starts at $40 per month for 2 active jobs and includes features like job board syndication, interview kits, scorecards, reporting, branded career pages, unlimited users and pools, chrome sourcing extension, and employee referral program. 
  • Pro Plan: This starts at $82 per month for 2 active jobs and includes everything on the starter package plus workflow automation, a custom domain for your careers site, custom fields, multiple recruiting pipelines, and a dedicated account manager. 

Users are allowed to change their plans based on their present needs and preferences. TalentLyft also offer a 14-day free trial.

TalentLyft offers a subscription model with 2 plans: Starter Plan & Pro Plan. The plans are differentiated by the number of active positions your business is hiring for per time.

  • Starter Plan: This starts at $40 per month for 2 active jobs and includes features like job board syndication, interview kits, scorecards, reporting, branded career pages, unlimited users and pools, chrome sourcing extension, and employee referral program. 
  • Pro Plan: This starts at $82 per month for 2 active jobs and includes everything on the starter package plus workflow automation, a custom domain for your careers site, custom fields, multiple recruiting pipelines, and a dedicated account manager. 

Users are allowed to change their plans based on their present needs and preferences. TalentLyft also offer a 14-day free trial.

Best For

TalentLyft is best for mid-sized companies in the information-technology sector with a workforce of 50 to 500 people, worldwide.

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Symphony Talent

Review:

SmashFlyX was one of the pioneers in the recruitment marketing category. At one point, their solution powered 25% of the Fortune 500 including S&P, Rio Tino, and Ticketmaster with dynamic career sites, CRM, chatbots, and more. Now owned by Symphony Talent, they've expounded on the successful recruitment marketing software with referrals, internal mobility pathways, and no-code approach to workflows.

Symphony Talent

Pricing:

Pricing is undisclosed.

Best For

SmashflyX has been designed to work with businesses of all sizes and in practically any part of the world. It is especially convenient for recruitment teams whose strategy relies heavily on digital advertising.

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PhenomPeople

Review:

Phenom is best known for their dynamic career sites which will serve different content to job seekers based on their behavior, and resume/LinkedIn (if uploaded). We love that this is taking a page directly out of the best practices of eCommerce to drive more conversions.  Also worth checking out is their HR chatbot, recruiting CRM and AI driven analytics.

PhenomPeople

Pricing:

Pricing for Phenom is undisclosed. This may be due to the fact that they're geared mainly towards large and enterprise-level organizations, but also since they have many different products within the platform.

Pricing for Phenom is undisclosed. This may be due to the fact that they're geared mainly towards large and enterprise-level organizations, but also since they have many different products within the platform.

Best For

Large organizations and enterprises looking to manage all stages of their talent's experience in the same robust platform.

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Yello

Review:

Yello’s talent acquisition software started with events-based recruiting and has since moved into candidate relationship management, video interviews, sourcing, scheduling, and much more. We keep hearing great things from practitioners about this software!

Yello

Pricing:

Pricing for Yello is not disclosed upfront, but will vary depending on user count and other requirements.

Pricing for Yello is not disclosed upfront, but will vary depending on user count and other requirements.

Best For

Yello is used by all kinds of companies, from those with 50 employees to enterprise clients with over a thousand. It's also used in multiple countries and multiple languages.  

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Beamery

Review:

Beamery is one of the newer entrants into this market, and has one of the slickest solutions out there. It’s almost as if a sophisticated marketing team built your recruiting software - from career sites to candidate nurturing, there is a lot to like in this recruiting platform.

One such thing is how they enable recruiting teams to proactively build pipelines of candidates ahead of demand. Their software can automatically surface qualified talent in response to a new job opening up, for instance.

Beamery

Pricing:

Beamery's pricing is undisclosed because it will vary in accordance to each company's needs.

Beamery's pricing is undisclosed because it will vary in accordance to each company's needs.

Best For

Beamery is certainly designed with big enterprises in mind with ongoing recruitment needs.

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Loxo

Review:

Loxo's platform is built around making your recruiting team more efficient. What makes Loxo unique from other CRMs, is that they have an up-to-date database of 530 million people with their personal contact information. Their technology helps recruiters to build lists of candidates, outreach through automated sequences of texts/emails/calls/Linkedln, and manage every part of the hiring process through their CRM.

Loxo

Pricing:

Loxo has only two pricing plans, free and premium. The free plan is for a single user, which would only work for independent recruiters or a one-person HR department. The premium plan, on the other hand, has no user limits, but the final pricing will vary depending on user count and company size. You can request a demo to get custom pricing based on your needs.

  • Free: This plan can only be used by a single user and provides access to a fair amount of Loxo's baseline features.
  • Premium: This plan has custom pricing, no user limit and provides its users with access to all features the platform has to offer.

Best For

From their client list, you may gather that Loxo is suitable for several sizes of company and all sorts of industries. While that is true, it is worth mentioning that their product is made with individual consultants and smaller teams in mind.

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Why Use a Recruiting CRM

A recruiting CRM helps streamline the entire recruiting process for both you the recruiter AND your potential candidates (not to mention your colleagues who will be part of the interview and evaluation processes).

At the end of the day, it humanizes the process. With a recruitment marketing platform, candidates aren’t just looking at job listings and submitting a resume — they’re interacting with compelling content that will inspire them to either apply, ask a question in real-time, or move on. All in all, there are many reasons to use a recruitment marketing platform. Here are a few of them:

  • Engage people who have already expressed an interest: Like ads served to you based on past internet searches, the cornerstone of digital marketing, a recruiting CRM lets you target candidates that have engaged your company, career site, or job ads in some way. Instead of paying to find new candidates each time, you can prioritize this segment. Since it's an arguably high-intent group, at least in some percentage, you can save time and money. For instance, after Activision implemented Eightfold, 41% of their 2021 hires were rediscovery candidates, meaning, employees hired for a role different to the one they first applied to.
  • Convince more career site visitors to apply: You can build a better career site to tell your employer branding story. This ultimately allows candidates to learn more about who your company is — not just what your company does. You can even create separate landing pages/microsites for key roles, giving you the opportunity to provide more than the standard job description and requirements.
  • Build talent communities: Nurture passive candidates via talent communities. If you meet someone who would be a great fit for your company but you don’t have the right opportunity for them now, you can log their information until the right job becomes available. These talent communities will live in the built-in CRM, which will also let you keep track of active candidates, recruiter tasks, candidate feedback, and more.
  • Make a great first impression on potential candidates: Use built-in HR Chatbots to answer job seeker questions in real-time. Interacting with candidates while they’re researching your company gives you more direct access to “warm leads” you might otherwise miss. It also shows them that you’re interested in them, which could be the reason they submit an application in the first place.

This is really just a taste of what recruitment marketing software can do for your recruiting efforts. Keep reading to learn more about the platforms and features you can expect to get from them.

Pro Tips on Best Recruiting CRM Software

Benefits and ROI From Candidate Relationship Management Software

When you use a CRM for recruiting, you are increasing your overall recruiting and hiring efficiency.

  • More candidates: You’re attracting more of the right candidates, faster.
  • Faster time to fill roles: You’re filling key roles, faster.
  • Higher recruiter productivity: And you’re increasing your company’s productivity, faster.
  • Better analytics: You know what works best — and what’s not worth your time (or budget)

But these aren’t necessarily tangible benefits. To help you calculate your return on investment, check out our ROI calculator for recruitment marketing software.  A lot of the value  with a recruitment marketing platform is getting more people into your recruiting funnel through a better career site, and talent communities.  So, this model contemplates increasing the views to applies conversion rate in row 13 - and the financial implications of this increase.

Recruitment CRM Software Pricing

Each platform charges differently. In general, the pricing models are either per seat, per employee or per hire — and for the most part, pricing depends on the size of your company. For example, 100 person companies might pay around $5,000 per year (although this software is really for large companies) while large enterprises might pay up to seven figures. When you reach out to request a demo, don’t forget to ask about how pricing works for a company of your size.

Pricing models depend on who you partner with.  Per seat, per employee, and per hire are all quite common.  The bottom line is that the larger your company, the more you’ll pay.

Pro Tip: This is enterprise software, and so be on the lookout for ways to negotiate: signing a contract early, taking out implementation fees, leverage from multi year contracts (you’ll almost certainly use this software for several years, even if it’s not

Key Features: What You Can Expect from a recruiting CRM

As we previously mentioned, recruitment marketing software can help you find more of the right talent at a fraction of the time and cost it takes using traditional methods (like combing LinkedIn or using a recruiting firm, for example).

In today’s job market, you need to take a strategic approach to your recruitment marketing so that job seekers are inspired to apply and, if offered a job, excited to accept. Recruitment marketing software helps you round out this strategy by offering some or all of these features:

  • Optimized Career Sites: Build a more interactive career site to tell your employer branding story and attract candidates. To convince people to apply for (and then accept) roles, you need a dynamic site that shows relevant content to each person (for example, tech-related info for engineers, diversity initiatives, company culture-related activities, etc.).
  • Talent Communities: Nurture passive candidates so you have a pool of potential job-seekers when the right opportunity opens up at your company. Maybe you find someone who would be a great fit for your company AND they’re interested in working there, but you don’t have the right role for them at the moment. Keeping their information on file and building a relationship with them now will pay off in the long run when the right opp finally comes along.
  • HR Chatbots: Communicate with job-seekers in real-time as they are on your career site and considering applying. If they have questions, they can ask them in real-time, ultimately preventing candidate drop-off and increasing their chances of submitting that application.
  • CRM Tracking: Keep track of candidates, feedback, recruiter tasks, etc. with Candidate Relationship Management. You’ll be more organized with tracking, reporting, following up, etc. which means your overall productivity will increase.
  • Landing Pages & Microsites for Key Roles: Sometimes, a standard job description and job requirements aren’t enough to sell a role. Build individualized pages for key roles that require more information, stats, etc. Again, the goal is to inform candidates so they have fewer questions and are more likely to apply.
  • Centralized Content: House all your recruiting content in one place and transmit it seamlessly across email, social media, and more. This will save you time in the long run as you’ll no longer have to post the same content on all of your channels individually — and you’ll have tracking for all these posts in one place so you can more easily see which channel is more effective at bringing in applications.
  • Campaigns & Tracking: Create, send and track recruiting campaigns from one place. See who is responding to them and who needs follow-ups, run A/B tests to see what kind of selling points get the most attention and applications, etc.
  • Recruitment Events: Ditch the clipboards at your next recruiting event. Instead, go digital and keep better track of who stopped by your table/booth. Most recruitment marketing platforms let you do mobile check-ins, send more streamlined communication before and after, and more.
  • Candidate Screening & Evaluations: Find candidates that are the right fit for your company and run necessary background checks. At the same time, keep track of the feedback you and your colleagues have so you can make hiring decisions faster and prevent candidate dropoff.
  • Interview Scheduling: With built-in and easy-to-use scheduling, candidates can self-select the times that work best for their phone screens and in-person interviews. This eliminates the tedious back-and-forth of email scheduling that can sometimes cause a candidate to slip through the cracks.
  • Video Interviews: If a promising candidate isn’t in your immediate area, you don’t have to fly them in for an interview. Instead, conduct live video interviews from anywhere or have candidates pre-record their interviews to share with your team.
  • Analytics & ROI: Not sure if that last email campaign to your candidate database was successful? Are those company stats on your career site the right ones to hook candidates? With built-in analytics and tracking, you can make more informed decisions about what strategies are working best — and which ones aren’t.

Preparing for Success: Common Mistakes HR Professionals Make During the Buying/Implementation Process — Plus, How to Avoid Them

If you’re new to recruitment marketing software, you may encounter a variety of roadblocks that make the buying and/or implementation process more difficult than it needs to be. To set yourself up for success from the start, check to see if your organization needs help in any of these key areas:

  • Content (i.e. no content strategy for your career site): Your career site is what you’ll use to tell your employer branding story. What story will you tell and what other information do you want to include? As a start, compile your company’s core values, any employer-related awards (like Inc’s Best Places to Work), company stats, employee testimonials, and benefits.
  • Engagement (i.e. no email strategy for talent communities): How do you plan on engaging your various talent communities — and how are you segmenting them? Will you send regular email campaigns? What information will you send in each campaign? These are all questions to think about as part of your recruitment marketing strategy.
  • CRM (i.e. lack of CRM training): This is a no-brainer, but you’ll need to know how to use your CRM to its fullest potential. Most platforms offer onboarding/training help, so make sure to take them up on it!
  • Cross-Functionality (i.e. not leveraging your marketing team as a strategic advisor): It’s always a good idea to engage your marketing team — especially when it comes to your content and email strategies. After all, your marketing team ultimately creates your company’s story, voice and talking points — and they’ve tried and tested what works to attract customers. To make sure you’re consistent and on-message (not to mention poised for success), use your marketing team as a strategic advisor.
  • Marketing Expertise (i.e. no one on recruiting/HR team has marketing DNA): As you’re building out your recruiting team, look for folks that have some marketing background. While your marketing team will be a helpful advisor, it’s even more advantageous to have someone with marketing experience helping with day-to-day recruiting.
  • Selective Usage (i.e. you don’t use all the functionality offered): When using a new software platform, many companies only leverage a portion of the features. When you’re not taking advantage of everything, you’re ultimately selling your efforts short. In most cases, the features are designed to be used together so you can more seamlessly and more efficiently find success. So if you’re paying for the full suite, use the full suite!

Demo Questions: What to Ask During Your Demo

Before selecting any software program, always request a demo and go into that demo with a game plan. At the end of the day, you want to be in control of it — that way, you’ll have a clear picture of how that particular platform can benefit your hiring efforts. To prepare, come up with a list of questions specific to your recruitment marketing needs and the use-cases you care about.

The following questions are always a good place to start, no matter what the software platform is:

  • How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack? What integrations do I need?
  • How will others in the organization use this solution?
  • What are the key features I want to ask about?
  • What are the things that would make me nervous about buying this sort of solution?
  • How does pricing work?
  • What implementation guidelines do they suggest?

When it comes to recruitment marketing software specifically, here are some sample questions to ask:

  • How is automation built into the product?
  • How does your system talk to the ATS? What are the advantages and disadvantages of hooking it up to it?
  • What is your 12-month product roadmap?
  • What changes in recruiter efficiency have you seen?
  • What changes do you see in the conversion rates across the various parts of the hiring funnel?
  • How long does it take to get a new career site up? Who supplies the content for this? What’s the overall design process?
  • How would the product work for a job fair or events?
  • Who's on the team behind AI and data? Does the company hold any patents?

Additional to this, you can also ask if they can put you in touch with some of their current customers. If they do, you can ask first-hand about the type of results they've seen from the tool, how it has impacted their recruiting efforts, and how have they found the product to evolve over time. Shout out to Todd Raphael, Head of Content at Eightfold, for helping us put together some of these.

Implementing Candidate Relationship Management Software

As with most software platforms, there is no one-size-fits-all implementation process for the Recruiting Marketing Software solutions we’ve listed here. Implementation depends on a number of factors specific to your business, including the size of your company, the internal resources you have available for implementation, the amount and type of tech already in your stack, and more.

In general, small businesses can get up and running rather quickly, with the biggest hurdle being a new career site (i.e. creating content, getting sign-off from marketing, etc.). On the other hand, large enterprises may not be fully operational for over a year due to integrations with the ATS, organizational training, etc.

When you are diligencing the vendors we’ve listed, ask them on demos for their implementation plans, and then have an in depth conversation around how this will map to your organization’s idiosyncrasies.  Maybe you have design resources in house, or need to get another vendor to handle this.  Maybe your ATS doesn’t have an easy to apply integration with a given system - which isn’t a deal break, it just needs to be talked through.

Regardless of your business’ size, here are a few implementation best practices to help yours run as smoothly as possible:

  • Select a project manager: Appoint one person to oversee the implementation process and keep track of key stakeholders, timelines, communication (both internally and with the software provider), etc.  Without one person incentivized and empowered to own this project, it will drag.
  • Understand tech requirements: Find out what tech requirements and/or system integrations are necessary for this implementation upfront. To determine this, discuss with your tech and/or IT teams as well as the account rep at your vendor of choice.  Get as SPECIFIC as possible when you ask for what kind of integrations need to happen and how they will happen.
  • Stay focused: Create a well-defined scope to keep things on track, on time and on budget.  The functional lead who is running with this project (probably head of TA or CHRO/CPO) should have regular checkins with the project manager here.
  • Have regular check-ins: You’ll want to have regular touchpoints with your key stakeholders outside of the point person to make sure everything is running smoothly. Whether these happen daily, weekly or monthly depends on the scope of your implementation, where you are in the process, and the estimated timeline.
  • Business Goals: When things get slow, or various stakeholders are holding you up, simply go back to your ROI analysis and why this is important to your company as a way to get senior leaders to move the ball forward with whoever is stalling you.

Recruiting CRMs FAQs

What is a recruiting CRM?

Recruiting CRM (candidate relationship management) software is a system that allows recruiting teams to track relationships with job candidates and manage the recruiting funnel.

What’s the difference between a recruiting CRM and an ATS?

Recruiting CRMs and ATS’s are similar, but there are key differences. An ATS specifically manages applicants, while a recruiting CRM manages a wider pool of candidates, both active and passive. ATS’s are designed to make the hiring process more efficient. Recruiting CRMs are designed to nurture candidate relationships and boost sourcing efforts.

What are some recruiting CRM features?

Key features of recruiting CRMs include:

  • Career site
  • Talent communities
  • HR chatbots
  • CRM tracking
  • Landing pages and microsites for key roles
  • Centralized content
  • Candidate screening
  • Events
  • Video interviewing
  • Interview scheduling
  • Analytics

Why use a recruiting CRM?

A recruiting CRM provides multiple benefits to your company, including:

  • Stronger career site
  • Built out talent pool
  • Better first impressions with candidates
  • Faster time-to-fill
  • More powerful recruiting analytics

What To Do Next

As we’ve covered, a successful recruiting strategy would be nothing these days without a solid marketing component. But combining recruiting and marketing can be overwhelming. That’s why recruitment marketing software can be such an asset for recruiting teams.

With the right solution, you can take your recruitment marketing to the next level, drive more of the right candidates to your job applications, foster connections to passive candidates who might be a fit for future roles, and hire top talent faster. As a TA leader, your job just got easier. And your company, as a result, just got more productive.

As a next step, we recommend setting up a couple of demos with the vendors that interest you the most — you’ll get a better feel for their solutions and actually see how they’d fit into your overall recruiting and employer branding strategies. Then, when you’re ready to move forward, find someone on your staff with marketing DNA to lead the project and consult your marketing team for best practices. Until then, good luck!

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