If you’re thinking about investing in a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) system, you might be asking: “Do I really need this when I already have an ATS?”
The short answer: yes. Your ATS is vital for tracking applicants, but it can feel like a black hole – candidates go in, but aren’t easily resurfaced down the line. To truly engage, nurture, and convert talent, you need a system designed to foster and cultivate relationships.
A recruitment CRM flicks the switch on your hiring process, from reactive to proactive by enhancing your entire tech stack. From AI-powered sourcing and smart workflows to candidate engagement and targeted outreach, it’s technology designed to make hiring faster, smarter, and more strategic.
Your ATS alone is not enough
Applicant tracking systems have long been the backbone of recruitment tech. They help organisationsorganizations manage candidates once they apply. But as top talent becomes harder to find, relying on an ATS alone only gives you half the picture.
To win the best candidates, you need a strategy for reaching people before they apply. Job boards are expensive, engagement is declining, and quality candidates increasingly rely on networks rather than faceless job ads. PageUp research shows it takes just four applications from your talent community to make a hire, a huge improvement over the 74 applications per hire from job boards.
This is where a CRM becomes essential – helping you connect with great candidates early, nurture those relationships, and keep your talent pipelines warm. It helps teams target specific talent segments, maintain ongoing engagement, and ensure opportunities don’t slip through the cracks.
With a recruitment CRM, your team can focus on the human side of hiring: nurturing a connected, qualified candidate pool, ready when you need them.
Hiring from your talent community is 18x more effective than job boards – needing only 4 applications vs 74 applications to make a hire.
Why CRM adoption matters now
The Aptitude Research CRM Index Report highlights a massive gap in CRM adoption: 61% of organisationsorganizations spend more on CRM than their ATS, yet only 14% have fully adopted it. The report identifies a clear reason: CRMs fail to deliver when they’re disconnected from ATS systems and career sites.
PageUp addresses these gaps with a fully integrated suite: ATS, CRM, Recruitment Marketing, Career Sites, and Onboarding. This integrated approach ensures your investment drives real results, transforming CRM from “shelfware” into a strategic lever for talent acquisition.
Key features to look for in a candidate relationship management system
Not all CRMs are created equal. When evaluating options, make sure the platform includes the right tools to impact your hiring process:
Talent pipeline management
Build and manage talent pipelines so you’re always ready with a pool of qualified candidates. Segment by skills, experience, or preferences, and deliver the right message at the right time, at scale.
Automated candidate engagement
Nurturing relationships with candidates is essential, but time-consuming. Automated campaigns, AI-powered content delivery, and targeted job alerts keep your talent engaged without extra effort.
AI and automation
Modern CRMs use AI and automation to eliminate repetitive work and uncover deeper insights. Look for a system that can:
- Enhance job ad and communication quality through intelligent content suggestions.
- Analyze engagement data to send messages when candidates are most likely to respond.
- Proactively surface strong-fit candidates from your existing database.
- Turn recruitment data into insights that guide smarter sourcing and engagement decisions.
The goal isn’t to replace the recruiter, it’s to make every interaction more targeted, timely, and effective with purposeful AI.
Engagement scoring
PrioritisePrioritize your efforts with a CRM that tracks and scores candidate engagement. Analyze email opens, clicks, and application updates to focus on the most engaged candidates and increase conversion rates.
Smart candidate workflows
Automate repetitive tasks like tagging, sharing, and candidate follow-ups. With AI supporting workflows, your processes adapt based on candidate behavior, ensuring no opportunity is missed.
Recruitment dashboards and analytics
Use dashboards to monitor engagement and sourcing performance in real time. PageUp Clinch’s dashboards give you insights at a glance, helping you make smarter, data-driven decisions across your recruitment lifecycle.
Broad integration capabilities
A CRM should never operate in isolation. Integration with ATS, career sites, LinkedIn, and job boards centralisescentralizes data, streamlines workflows, and ensures a consistent experience across the candidate journey.
Your sourcing power-duo: PageUp Clinch LinkedIn CRM integration
Our LinkedIn CRM Connect integration allows recruiters to effortlessly bring candidate data from LinkedIn directly into their CRM. This simplifies the process of building and managing talent pipelines and enables recruiters to nurture relationships with candidates, without switching platforms. It means recruiters can harness LinkedIn’s extensive network while benefiting from the comprehensive engagement and workflow management that a candidate CRM provides. It’s the definition of win-win.
Case study: Golden Hippo’s success with PageUp Clinch CRM
Golden Hippo is a direct-to-consumer company with a portfolio of over 20 brands in the health and wellness, beauty, and pet food sectors. Faced with rapid growth, the recruitment team was struggling to meet their hiring targets. But, after implementing the PageUp Clinch recruitment marketing suite, Golden Hippo was able to build an engaged talent community using their recruitment CRM. The result? A steady supply of engaged candidates, familiar with the brand, and ready to hit ‘apply’.
The Golden Hippo team saw:
- A 37% reduction in time-to-hire
- 5 hours per week saved per recruiter on sourcing and outreach
- 16% of total hires from proactive sourcing
- 25% faster closure of hard-to-fill roles
Want to read more about the Golden Hippo story? Dive in here.
When assessing your CRM strategy, focus on tools that let you build talent pipelines, engage candidates automatically, surface insights with AI, and integrate seamlessly. The right CRM turns data into action – helping you connect with the best talent faster, and more strategically.
The ultimate tool for proactive recruitment
With PageUp Clinch, you can turn every candidate interaction into an opportunity to connect, engage, and hire better. Request a demo to see how you can build a connected candidate experience.
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