By Taylor Thompson
With Glassdoor reporting that the average job opening attracts 250 resumes, it’s hard to believe that 65 percent of recruiters, according to Jobvite, report their biggest challenge in hiring as a shortage of available talent. So why are talent acquisition teams struggling to manage candidates? Many applicants may just be unqualified. However, when it comes to filling open positions within their organizations, talent acquisition and recruitment marketing teams often fail to access an entire hub of data readily available to them: their past applicants.
Beamery, a candidate-relationship software company, claims that the key to hiring candidates is not just forwarding available jobs, but building valuable employer-candidate relationships prior to the application process. That’s why with the launch of their company in 2014, their offices are already expanding to three major European and American cities and their clientele includes big-name companies like Facebook and VMWare. Beamery is truly taking the recruitment software industry by storm.
But what exactly has helped Beamery stand-out amongst similar businesses in their field? While most organizations continue leveraging applicant tracking systems (ATSs) in their recruitment efforts, Beamery is providing a customer relationship management (CRM) tool focused on building that candidate relationship, and has shifted the focus of their program in ways the industry hasn’t seen before, earning them a first-place win in the 2017 HRO Today Forum EMEA iTalent Competition.
With a growing focus on the candidate experience and applicants expecting a customer-centric approach, updates had to be made to the design of a CRM tool, which is implemented by organizations looking to stay connected to customers, streamline process, and improve profitability. Throughout their research efforts, Beamery had found that most traditional CRM software systems only established applicant/employer relationships after the application process had concluded.
So what was needed?
According to Ben Slater, vice president of growth for Beamery London, the industry needed a technology “that allowed recruiters to build relationships with applicants before the interview process even began.”
“Beamery gives recruiters a bunch of different avenues to source, attract and engage these passive candidates. From the most powerful chrome extension on the market, to events and landing pages, it’s easy to start building a pipeline. The platform helps recruiters approach building relationships with candidates with the same level of sophistication that top marketing teams employ to build customer funnels. Recruiters can then leverage sophisticated marketing automation campaigns to deliver communication to candidates based on their information, activity, and jobs they’re interested in. All this makes it easy to build relationships and turn passive candidates into applicants.”
Beamery’s CRM tool has become a place where recruiters are able to manage every relationship -past, present, and future -through data collection. It allows users to find any candidate in seconds due to consistent updates occurring in their log of information. From there, marketing then becomes a system of engagement in which compiled data allows users to personalize their recruitment efforts even on a large scale. Their new page-builder system also provides organizations with customizable landing pages for targeted initiatives around things like diversity or hard-to-fill roles. Through this effort, Beamery software is able to attract and convert specific candidates, including those that may not even be applying right now.
In order to differentiate themselves from competitors, it’s crucial to Beamery that their CRM system covers areas that others in the market previously hadn’t. “Differentiation is really important to us,” says Slater. “The problem with traditional CRMs is that they very quickly become just another silo of data, and half of that information isn’t even being accessed because applicant tracking isn’t set up to manage relationships. We wanted to change that.”
The main problem Slater and his team found was that the data encased in ATSs or other CRM systems was simply going out of date very quickly. “You add a whole load of candidates, and six months later those profiles are no longer relevant,” explains Slater. “The candidates have been developing new skills, they’ve been doing new things, they’ve moved companies, and suddenly, you have the same issue with stale data that you had with your ATS.” To combat this, Beamery made sure that their program was constantly refreshing the data already on file, making it very easy to prioritize candidates and instantly fill open roles.
They’ve also made sure to set themselves apart via their use of automation. In the modern workplace, recruiters are asked to do a lot of additional tasks on top of their already full workload, which results in them not having the proper time to focus on their marketing efforts.
According to Slater, Beamery is “leveraging a whole bunch of really smart automations that act in the background and are automatically dropped into the automated workflow space upon being added to the CRM. Some of our customers use automation to trigger custom content to high priority candidates that sign up on landing pages or at events and alert members of their team whenever these candidates come through. Beamery scans their information to see whether they’re a priority candidate (based on customized conditions) and automatically adds them to the correct talent pool and campaign. All of this runs on autopilot in the background.”
Beamery’s final differentiation point lies around reporting, and when and how information is gathered. “The CRM and recruitment process marketing is focused on everything that happens before the application, yet the metrics that most teams use to measure success are applicant metrics that don’t occur until later in the process.” They’ve developed a reporting suite completely geared around the pre-applicant stage so recruiters can see the actual impact of sourcing and specific branding campaigns on their pipeline. On the branding side, organizations will be able to understand which events are creating quality candidates, the conversion rate of different types of content, and the sources that are producing the best candidates.
That data is then converted into hard return on investment data, including which sources are getting the most responses, have the best acceptance rate, and are generating the best quality candidates. This can be taken to the C-Suite for executive decision-making. “They can see which sources are most effective for different roles and have a clear idea where to invest future resources,” says Slater.
Using this system, organizations are finding success in ways previously unattainable. For Facebook, their use of Beamery’s CRM has become a talent intelligence hub, of sorts, and is helping to effectively plan and pipeline candidates for future roles with their organization, says Slater.
For VMWare, Slater recalls how they “came to us while spending a lot of money on recruitment and advertising with little return. They were looking to optimize the conversion of their website, and through a combination of Beamery pages and engagement with candidates, were able to keep their name on applicants’ minds for the marketing of future roles.” Ultimately, Beamery’s efforts and available recruiting techniques have allowed their clients to completely build and customize a recruitment plan that works in conjunction with their specific organizational needs; helping to fill an industry need related to managing candidates.
What’s next?
“For us, we fully expect the CRM to become the main or principal system that a recruiting team uses,” says Slater. “In terms of a specific roadmap, we’re focusing a lot of energy on helping companies map out their candidate journey and leveraging our automation features to take a company’s candidates on a customized, very personalized journey in securing a position.”
