Talent Relationship Management, Explained: A Guide for Recruiters
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Perfection may be the ‘enemy of good.’ However, that shouldn’t stop you from constantly improving your recruitment process and your team’s hiring quality, speed, and effectiveness.
In fact, there are many talent acquisition tasks you should regularly put under the microscope:
- The sources (and source origins) you turn to most often to find potential candidates
- The copy (e.g., job description, brand messaging) used in your company’s job postings
- The method you use to review applicants (i.e., manually or in an automated fashion)
- The applicant tracking system (or other recruiting platform) your talent team utilizes
- The way you you advance prospects in your talent pool and conduct interviews
In short, it’s a good idea to continually elevate your output with these activities, at the team and individual-recruiter level, to identify hiring issues and optimize your recruitment strategy.
The good news? You can augment your recruitment process — and enhance your TA performance — by following a few helpful best practices embraced by leading talent orgs today.
3 recruitment-process changes that can help you hire smarter and improve operational efficiency
Here are three ways you can strengthen your talent team’s recruitment process.
1) Invest in a unified, centralized recruiting solution your entire team can use.
Speaking with SHRM, PERKS VP of People and Culture Eileen Lee said it’s vital for TA teams to work from the same centralized recruiting database to execute their recruitment plan.
“That way, you can ensure that all of the information regarding your candidates lives in one place and is accessible during all stages of the pipeline,” Eileen explained to the publication.
The issue facing many hiring teams today is onboarding the optimal recruiting databases.
- Traditional ATS are the go-to choice for many talent orgs. But the tides are changing.
Countless talent acquisition leaders are now turning to more advanced TA solutions that don’t just act as a repository for basic candidate details and recruiters’ notes.
More specifically, they’re implementing ‘unified’ platforms with both powerful ATS features and robust candidate relationship management (CRM) functionality.
Consider Lever customer TUNE. Prior to investing in our ATS + CRM, the company had already experienced significant headcount growth. But its ability to make those hires in a streamlined, scalable manner was tough, largely due to its dated ATS solution.
- Fast-forward to when TUNE invested in LeverTRM.
Our platform now helps the enterprise scale more easily and efficiently while keeping all relevant stakeholders on the same page regarding short-term tasks and long-term needs.
“Lever is the most intuitive and real-time recruiting technology … especially for companies going through growth and looking to add structure to their hiring process,” TUNE Recruiting Director Sabrina Oldham shared in our case study.
2) Understand the constantly evolving jobs market — and what workers want.
Aside from securing a single source of hiring truth to bolster your team’s recruitment process, you must also focus on external factors and forces that affect your headcount goals.
Notably, it’s worth paying attention to the ebbs and flows of the jobs market. In particular:
- What job seekers are looking for in prospective employers and new positions today (i.e., what job applicants and sourced candidates tell you about their wants and needs in the interview process)
- What recruiting agencies that work with you hear from candidates in their own outreach and interviews as it relates to things like salary demands, preferred perks/benefits, remote work, and DEI
- What the latest international, national, regional, and local hiring numbers indicate (e.g., if hiring is up or down in markets where you’re headquartered; what percentage of hires are fully remote)
Arguably the biggest employment trend today is the desire to work remotely.
“The freedom (often the imperative) to work remotely and to manage one’s own schedule has increased employees’ expectations that they can exert considerable control over the design of their jobs,” Gartner recently wrote for Harvard Business Review.
It’s certainly on your C-suite to determine if they want to embrace a remote/hybrid workforce.
That said, keeping your ear to the ground as it pertains to ‘WFH’ demands/requests from candidates and learning how other companies — including competitors — adapt their businesses to accommodate the remote-work push is certainly worth the time and energy.
Doing so could impact your recruitment process: where you source prospects, the messaging you share with them, and which archived candidates you engage/reengage for roles.
3) Identify issues with your recruitment process and ‘funnel flow’ to ameliorate.
You get a complete talent acquisition suite to aid your CRM strategy. You regularly assess employment figures and trends to keep up with changes in the hiring landscape.
- But what about the nitty-gritty details related to your TA org’s recruitment process?
Examining your team and individual talent specialists’ performance at a high level certainly helps with long-term goal-setting and planning to meet hiring quotas.
However, ‘investigating’ your recruiting activities at a granular level can lead to big improvements with daily processes — and better-quality hires. Assess how you can better:
- Liaise closely with human resources and hiring managers: That way, you can work with them to pinpoint persistent (and costly) communication problems (e.g., lack of automated reminders and notifications being sent to those stakeholders) you can then remedy.
- Keep candidate experience top of mind: Ensuring candidates move seamlessly through your funnel — from when you source them via job boards or social media (see: LinkedIn) to when they’re onboarded or archived — is essential to providing a best-in-class CX.
- Identify ‘slow’ stages of your hiring efforts: Perhaps it takes too long for HR to complete background checks. Or, maybe the interview process could use fixing (e.g., have all panelists join a single video interview as opposed to conducting many individual video calls).
There are plenty of areas to ‘hone in on’ to elevate your recruiting effectiveness.
The point is you can’t improve what you don’t analyze and take action on. So, dig deep into your recruitment process regularly to make sure your talent team is as productive as possible.
Download our talent relationship management eBook to learn how you and your recruiting org can elevate your hiring efforts with a TRM mindset and a complete talent acquisition suite.