Candidate Management

What is candidate management?

Candidate management is a strategic process wherein a recruiter will nurture potential candidates from application to starting their new role. It’s an important part of recruitment that ensures people interested in a role are engaged, active candidates.

A key aspect of managing candidates is understanding them beyond what you see on paper, so that they can find roles that suit them. Personalities can play a big part in how well someone suits a new job role and successfully determining how a candidate will fit within a business is key for a recruiter.

Sourcing and Attracting Candidates

An important part of candidate management is sourcing and attracting top talent. You can find qualified candidates through posting job openings on job boards, social sites, career pages, career fairs, and through networking events. As a recruiter, your job is to utilise strategies to reach and engage with active candidates, passive candidates, and tip top candidates, in order to find individual candidates that have the relevant skills for your various job postings.

A way to speed up the time to hire is to have extensive talent pools for various roles that can help you find the best hire for a job posting quickly. Candidate management helps with talent acquisition by ensuring there is a positive candidate experience each and every time. One way to save time within this process and automate repetitive tasks is to utilise a candidate management system.

In order to maintain a robust talent pool, recruiters need to develop relationships with their candidates beyond the recruitment process, putting people first in their strategy. When recruiters and hiring managers use a relationship-first strategy, it transforms the process to ensure that the company brand remains protected, and when a candidate is looking for their next job, they’ll come to you first. Most qualified candidates will look to job boards first for their new role, but if you develop a robust talent pool, full of people who have a relationship with you individually, they’ll be much more likely to turn to you first.

Candidate Management Systems

A candidate management system (CMS) is a software solution that helps automate and speed up the hiring process. Utilising a candidate management system, also called a candidate management software, with key features such as:

A candidate management system helps provide relevant data to recruiters throughout the recruitment process to improve efficiency and improve the candidate experience. While there are lots of different examples of a candidate management system, the key features will remain similar. The Eclipse recruitment software suite contains all of these features and more, with the opportunity for hiring teams to do interview scheduling, build candidate profiles, Boolean search, extensive automation, and more.

Learn more about Eclipse recruitment software.

Benefits of a CMS

A candidate management system is a valuable tool within the recruitment process to speed up tasks and build out a streamlined, efficient recruitment strategy. Some of the benefits include:

Time savings:

Utilising automation within a CMS will help speed up the time to hire, not only can it send out automated follow-up email communication, but it can also build comprehensive candidate profiles to provide valuable insights quickly.

Improve the candidate experience:

Candidate relationship management with a Candidate Management System, gives candidates a speedy and efficient recruiting process, a smoother onboarding, and a clear, concise application form.

Compliance management:

A candidate management system can automate compliance requests and will track candidate data to ensure it is GDPR compliant.

Data security:

Secure storage of candidate data is key for any recruitment agency to be GDPR compliant. Utilising a CMS allows agencies to have access to a robust security system that will protect their candidates.

Improve the quality of hire:

Being able to efficiently screen for the most qualified candidates is a key tool for recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers to have. With resume screening, applicant tracking, Boolean search, and the automation of manual tasks, candidate management systems can help identify the best hire for the role and ultimately improve the quality of hire.