This is a Q&A between HR and workplace anthropologist, Jessica Miller-Merrell and Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, the CEO of TalentCircles. The paper discusses the history of candidate relationship management technology not to be confused with customer relationship management tech. Recruiting is moving from a reactive one to a proactive one where companies and recruiting teams are focusing their efforts on building solid relationships with candidates long before they are considered for a position at their company. This is what makes a CRM powerful. Recruiters are able to keep detailed notes but candidates are also able to interface with the company in a more interactive way that goes beyond the typical customer relationship models. The candidate experience is a two way relationship that grows and evolves. This is the future of recruiting.

1. This document is the property of TalentCircles 2015©. All rights reserved
1
Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)
A new framework and a new mindset that older technologies can't address
This white paper summarizes a podcast conversation between Jessica Miller-Merrell, CEO and founder of
Workology, the Art and Science of work as well as Blogging4Jobs and Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, CEO and
co-founder of TalentCircles that took place in December 2014.
Jessica A 2014 Aberdeen report on talent acquisition found that 60% of best in class
recruiting teams are taking a proactive approach to their talent acquisition and
hiring efforts vs. 44% surveyed in 2013. Aberdeen’s research is showing a regression
of talent acquisition practices. I, personally am beginning to feel a shift in certain
industries and companies who are experiencing extreme competition for best in
class candidates
One such proactive recruiting strategy I’m seeing is companies adding a CRM or
candidate relationship management technology. When we speak of CRM, what are
we talking about? How similar or dissimilar are Candidate Relationship Management
and Customer Relationship Management?
Marylene Candidate Relationship Management and Customer Relationship Management have the
same purpose: a focused communication with people in order to make sure that they
maintain their interest in you.
A mediocre candidate
experience can
discourage job seekers
from buying your
products and services...
The key difference is that for an HR CRM, you start with far fewer goods
to sell. The number of jobs that can be offered is rarely, if ever,
comparable to the number of products you sell. So when you have one
job to fill, you must touch the hearts and minds of 50 to 100 people, but
at the same time you must make sure that the people who did not get
the job will not feel disenfranchised, and therefore you must offer an
exceptional candidate experience. A 2010 study by Alexander Mann
Solutions, found that "more than half (52%) of [candidates] across the
world said a negative interview experience would likely impact their
buying of products or services from that organization in the future."
So, one of the critical functions of an HR CRM is to ensure that candidates become and
remain fans of your company whether or not you have a job for them. In HR CRMs, you
have to take the notion of relationship very seriously, even more seriously than for sales
and marketing CRMs because your HR CRM is also a sales CRM even though the reverse is
not necessarily true.
Jessica Did these two types of CRM appear at the same time?
Marylene No, not really. Relationship building was part of HR way before sales and marketing. Then
it almost disappeared from HR and came back after it appeared in sales and marketing...
Digital rolodexes and direct marketing databases appeared in the 1980's. In 1986, ACT!
introduced contact management software. The company's name stood for "Activity Control
Technology," and later spoke a "CRM." Tom Siebel is usually credited for creating this
acronym for Customer Relationship Management around 1996.
Relationship-based
recruiting used to be the
way to recruit until it
disappeared...
HR had a parallel history. Recruiters were always into relationship
management and rolodexes. Until the advent of transactional
databases, mostly in the early 1990's, recruiting was relationship-based,
far more than what sales and marketing ever were. Recruiting was not
about resumes. A lot of people learned on the job or were even self-
taught.

2. This document is the property of TalentCircles 2015©. All rights reserved
2
Relationship-based recruiting used to be what recruiting was about until it disappeared...
and until our industry rediscovered it through marketing CRM. Alice Snell may be one of
the first professionals to speak of "CRM" in early 2002 when she was suggesting to
organizations that they build "A careers website that addresses a segmented candidate
stream [that] will capture valuable candidates more efficiently, and bring them into a fully
functioning candidate relationship management database, where true personalization and
targeting of recruiting communication can begin."
In 2005, Michael Homula offered the expression "Talent Relationship Management" (TRM).
However, the notion of CRM was getting established as is clear from various articles by
Kevin Wheeler who listed "6 Ways To Make Your CRM Efforts Better" and included Building
channels, Doing local promotions, Buying an inexpensive contact manager, Using your
own employees, Using your alumni, Keeping track of old candidates.
Jessica If I understand well, today, we are basically reclaiming our own history... Yet, don't
you think that our idea of relationship has also evolved in the meantime and that
social media have created new expectations?
Marylene Yes, most recruiters realize again that building relationships is at the very heart of
recruiting. However, it's hard for them to execute on this because "relationship" in old-
style CRMs do not manage "relationships" as we understand them in real life and social
media. Most HR CRMs are actually behind sales and marketing CRMs, which now allow for
community building and live chat.
Traditional CRMs only manage one-sided relationships. Their primary purpose was to get
contact information for candidates and notify them when you have new jobs. Is that
enough in the 21
st
century? Obviously not:
Gen X hiring managers
have consistently
underestimated how
much Millennials prize
being part of a good
team and working on
exciting projects...
• We live in a social era. People want to connect. If you do not connect
back, people will unfollow you. Social media and real-life behaviors
and expectations are very similar.
• The current job market is more favorable to jobseekers and the
demographic change is even more important. Millennials account
for the majority of the workforce. As recent research sponsored by
Elance-oDesk and Millennial Branding shows, over the last few years
gen X hiring managers have consistently underestimated how much
they prize being part of a good team and working on exciting
projects.
Employers are not in the driver's seat and the technologies that recruiters have used for
the last 20 years are out of sync with our times. This means:
• One-sided relationships are over. You must truly engage. In a one-way relationship,
you ask candidates to interact with you and you assume that they will do it. They
won't. Or the ones who will are primarily the ones who are desperate for a job and
they represent a fraction, barely 20%, of the people you want to be connected with.
• Conversation is a must-have. CRMs Web 3.0 are venues fostering conversations with
both active and passive candidates. You have to make sure that candidates want to
hear from you, that they opt into your network.

3. This document is the property of TalentCircles 2015©. All rights reserved
3
Jessica How does a candidate relationship management platform facilitate in proactive
recruitment strategy?
Marylene Let's first assess the key difference between reactive and proactive recruiting.
• Reactive recruiting is this: you have a job to fill and you post it hoping to get
candidates. In other words you show interest in candidates only when you need them.
The end result is that in many cases, you "hope-n-pray" as you like to say...
• Proactive recruiting entails that you build talent pools or talent communities before
you have job openings or job positions to fill. So being proactive means:
o Attracting candidates with the right message where they are: in live environments
or on social networks.
o Tracking how your attraction strategy is faring and adapting your message to
attract the population you want to attract.
o Engaging your base by making candidates feel valuable, a part of your brand and
driving continuous engagement.
Engaging is not about
talking at people. It's
about talking to people...
You are not simply addressing an "audience." You address individuals
who voluntarily started a connection with you. So it's not enough to tell
them what your company is about in general. It's critical to show to
them what it is to work in your company. You must offer them
interesting and useful information. For example, you can offer targeted
documents to download, invite them to webinars or showcase videos of
existing employees who recount their day in the life of your company.
Being candidate-centric is all about creating content to which candidates can relate to as
individuals. Engaging is not about throwing global marketing slogans and talking at people.
It's about talking to people and offering a message that resonates with them.
Jessica What you are saying is that a modern CRM must be an engagement platform...
Marylene Exactly. If you want candidates to be interested in you, you must be interesting to them
and proactively nurture their interest in you. So your CRM must be:
• A destination that allows you to transform a follower or a connection into a contact
and a link into a relationship — just as in real life.
• A network that allows you to scale your engagement capabilities. We already know,
based on our experience with social networks, that engagement can only happen if
parties share a common space where they can interact.
Employment branding
must be pursued inside
your network, be
inspiring and immersive
at all times ...
Employment branding must be pursued inside your network, be
inspiring and immersive at all times — and create a bridge between the
public persona of your brand and your internal corporate identity.
That's what the social candidate experience is about and is powered by
what I like to call the 9 C's of social recruiting. Ultimately, look at your
engagement network as a live virtual meeting room with the ongoing
networking capabilities that showcases your company ... and showcases
the candidates too!
When we hire people, we hire them for their skills but also for their attitude. How can we
evaluate attitudes if we do not seriously interact with people? In his book Hire for Attitude,
Mark Murphy tracked 20,000 new hires: 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even
more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it
was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. A modern CRM is
finally the best way to reduce failed hires!

4. This document is the property of TalentCircles 2015©. All rights reserved
4
Jessica In the end, fresh data is critically important in the new CRM model of proactive
recruiting and hiring.
Marylene Absolutely. Frankly, how appealing is stale data in 2015? When, as a recruiter, you want to
relate to people you want to know the latest about them. It's so easy that not getting fresh
data about them simply undermines your credibility. As a result, giving the ability to your
candidates to update their profiles is just common sense. If they do not frequent your
network as often as you might like, something you can track easily, it's also very easy to
ask them to do that through a branded email. In fact, by measuring the activity within your
talent network, you can also check how your outreach strategy is actually working and
adjust it as needed.
Jessica Companies who are government contractors and are required to complete an
affirmative action plan or AAP are somewhat nervous at the idea of trying
something new. Can a new generation of CRM help them? By the same token, can it
also help enhance diversity recruiting efforts for companies who do not have AAP
requirements but feel that their diversity recruiting efforts are at a standstill
despite tons of good intentions?
Marylene A modern CRM makes both much easier. As mentioned in the US Department of Labor,
"For federal contractors and subcontractors, affirmative action must be taken by covered
employers to recruit and advance qualified minorities, women, persons with disabilities,
and covered veterans. Affirmative actions include training programs, outreach efforts, and
other positive steps." A lot of employers are scared by Affirmative Action Plans simply
because they look at it as a legal framework instead of considering its intent: prevent
discrimination, stereotypical thinking and biases.
A network-based CRM
makes it easy to deliver
on AAP and to deliver on
a diversity recruiting
strategy...
If you only use standard databases, chances are that you will be unable
to identify qualified minorities, women, persons with disabilities, or
veterans... Because traditional systems process resumes and do not
identify people. So your ATS or traditional CRM almost inevitably end up
discriminating unwillingly against a lot of people: For example, Veterans'
resumes do not read like standard resumes... You also end up
discriminating against visually impaired people only because your
website is not absolutely 100% ADA compliant. You end up
discriminating against anybody that doesn't fit the mould.
A network-based CRM allows you to have a deeper and wider knowledge of the people
who are interested in you. You cannot ask people personal details, but you can give them
the possibility to self-declare if they want to by creating circles to which they can subscribe.
The only way to know people is to enable them to say who they are if they wish to do so!
In the end a modern CRM does not simply facilitate the implementation of an AAP. It
makes it easy to pursue a real diversity strategy, a goal that most companies actually have
but consistently fail to implement because they do not have the right tools to do this. This
is a topic that I discussed in one of our posts (The art and science of diversity recruiting) on
the TalentCircles blog. The current talent acquisition process is a transactional playing
field designed to process resumes and not to hire people. And diversity hiring is all about
people! Building up a consistent diversity initiative requires the ability to create live talent
pools that enables you to:
• Decouple candidate attraction and engagement from specific jobs.
• Design diversity circles that provide candidates with the ability to declare themselves
as members of a given group (or multiple groups).
• Dialogue with your talent community.

5. This document is the property of TalentCircles 2015©. All rights reserved
5
Jessica Can you explain to us what the OFCCP considers as an Internet applicant?
Marylene The OFCCP rules are pretty simple and easy to read. An “Internet Applicant” is an individual
who satisfies all four of the following criteria:
• The individual submitted an expression of interest in employment through the
Internet or related electronic data technologies;
• The contractor considered the individual for employment in a particular position;
• The individual's expression of interest indicated that the individual possesses the basic
qualifications for the position; and
• The individual, at no point in the contractor's selection process prior to receiving an
offer of employment from the contractor, removed himself or herself from further
consideration or otherwise indicated that he/she was no longer interested in the
position.
Jessica When are members within your CRM or talent network considered a candidate
according to the OFCCP?
Marylene They are applicants if they express interest for a specific job posted in the network. Prior to
this, they are members of the network. They can check the jobs, see how their profile fares
against a job requirement, but if they do not apply, they should not be considered as
applicants. In fact, when candidates opt into your private talent network, you are no more
no less bound than when you are a recruiter on LinkedIn posting jobs and receive
applications via LinkedIn.
OFCCP is an acronym for Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and it doesn't
concern everybody. But again, it's important to remember that laws are intended to
protect from abusive practices.
Continue to accept paper
resumes and allow for
mobile if you do not want
to discriminate ...
So if anything you always want to make sure that you give a fair chance
to everybody and this is more a matter of corporate ethics. For example,
many companies have stopped accepting paper resumes. This could be
construed as being discriminatory. It's so simple to scan and parse
paper resumes and transform them into digital profiles that the vendors
who do not allow you to do this easily are preventing you from being
fair.
In the same fashion, some systems are only accessible via desktop computers. This too
could be construed as being discriminatory. More people have smart phones today. In
2014, platform independence and full responsive design should just be mainstream
because as a company, you want to allow candidates to reach out to you by any means.
Companies must keep records for one or two years depending on their size. This rule
can also protect you a lot and in a way, the more data you have, the more likely you are
protected if you happen to be in the situation to prove that you were acting in good
faith. How could a candidate complain that you eventually discriminated against him or
her if that candidate never showed any form of interest in your company compared to
dozens of others? Serious data analytics will be a huge protection for employers down
the road.

6. This document is the property of TalentCircles 2015©. All rights reserved
6
Great technology doesn't
only make compliance
easy: it makes it useful!
In the end, employers have a lot of freedom. What is key is consistency
in your business practices and your ability to relate to candidates with
an open mind. In certain countries and more specifically in Europe, it's
even critical to be able to comply with data privacy requirements
requested by candidates — and a modern CRM must accommodate for
this too. Great technology can make compliance easy, and spare
companies from many nightmares.
By leveraging the power of a talent network as your Candidate Relationship Management platform, you will
ensure a smooth candidate experience, continuous candidate engagement, and eliminate the shortcomings
associated with a fragmented process. Offering an exemplary candidate experience is not luxury or an act of
kindness. It’s a business mandate for any organization that wants to attract the best skills.
Additional resources:
TalentCircles Blog:
How a CRM Can Transform Your Recruitment Strategy: http://blog.talentcircles.com/2014/11/how-crm-can-
transform-your-recruitment.html
The Nine C's of social recruiting: http://blog.talentcircles.com/2013/09/you-do-social-sourcing-now-start-
your.html
4 Ways to Keep Candidate Data Fresh: http://blog.talentcircles.com/2013/03/4-ways-to-keep-candidate-data-
fresh.html
How to Capture the Power of Passive Recruiting: http://blog.talentcircles.com/2014/07/how-to-capture-power-
of-
passive.html?utm_content=buffere9ec0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaig
n=bufferhttp://
The Art and Science of Diversity Recruiting: http://blog.talentcircles.com/2014/11/the-art-and-science-of-
diversity.html
White Papers
http://www.talentcircles.com/resources.php
Others
To access the Aberdeen report mentioned page 1: http://v1.aberdeen.com/launch/report/benchmark/9301-RR-
talent-acquisition-2014.asp