Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Recruitment agencies face a unique set of challenges. Balancing the needs of clients and candidates, maintaining efficient communication, and staying ahead of the competition requires not just skill but also the right tools, such as a good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
Whether you're a small boutique agency or a large-scale recruiter, understanding the nuances of different CRM platforms is crucial. It will help you streamline your workflow process on both the client and candidate side and collaborate with your team seamlessly.
In this blog, we’ll look into the difference between a recruiter and a recruitment agency, unpack the features you need to look out for in a CRM as an agency and the best CRMs.
Why do recruitment agencies need a CRM?
A good CRM platform can help an agency source candidates, manage interactions and help them take candidates through their client’s different hiring process. It can also help recruitment agencies monitor their sales cycle and client project statuses.
If you’ve seen our blog on the best CRMs for recruiters, you might be wondering what the difference is between a recruiter and a recruitment agency. The main difference lies between their scope and structure.
It goes without saying that this means they’ll need to look out for a different set of features in their CRM.
Top 7 features recruitment agencies should look for in a CRM
Look out for these features to get a helping hand with client and candidate management.
Pipeline management: Choose a CRM that accelerates deal closures and can help you stay on track with your revenue goals, adapting to your sales cycle. Features should include automatic pipeline creation for efficiency, contact enrichment to quickly complete missing details, and tools for easy team collaboration.
Candidate and client management: Central to any CRM, this feature organizes tracking of candidates throughout your client's hiring process.
Sourcing: Sourcing candidates is time-consuming.To avoid having to manually input candidate information, a proficient CRM should capture candidate details quickly and effortlessly. Look out for the ability to import from your favourite tools and help with importing search lists in moments.
Contact sync: If you want to keep all your candidate and client details in one place, including contact information, preferences, and past interactions. Look for a CRM that will provide access to integrations that can import all these contact details into the platform seamlessly.
Team collaboration features: Prevent overlap in candidate sourcing with a CRM that offers auto-deduplication and straightforward user addition, facilitating seamless team collaboration on client projects.
Email marketing: A good CRM can help you streamline your communication by letting you create your emails, newsletters, or reminders in one platform. This includes everything from follow-up messages to candidates and clients, interview reminders and promotional content.
User experience: A good CRM should allow you to harness its full potential from day one without facing a cumbersome interface, steep learning curve or clunky experience.
A comparison of the best CRMs for recruitment agencies
Let’s take a look at some of the best CRMs out there for recruitment agencies, and review what makes each of them so good.
folk
folk is an easy-to-use, all-in-one CRM loved for its Notion-like design that makes it easy to use.
Pipeline management
folk offers a visual representation of potential clients at various stages of the sales process. Team members can be assigned for client follow-ups and collaborate on notes, ensuring tasks are not duplicated.
Candidate and client management
You can use folk to create candidate lists and client lists so that everything is in one place. There is an option to tag and group vetted candidates for future reference. It also supports a customizable hiring pipeline and sales dashboard, with list or Kanban-board views for easy categorization in the client hiring process.
Sourcing
For those who frequently use LinkedIn for talent and client acquisition, folk's Chrome extension, folkX, streamlines the process of importing Sales Navigator search lists or individual profiles from various web sources, including social media, directly into the CRM.
Contact sync
If you're dealing with scattered client and candidate details across platforms, folk's contact sync feature consolidates all information into one system, supporting imports from LinkedIn, Gmail, Outlook, and more.
Team collaboration features
You can use folk as a solo-user or invite a team-member. Adding new team members is relatively straightforward, enabling shared contact list creation and management, consolidated client notes, and collaborative follow-up reminders. You can also use the notes section as a collaborative score card on candidates you interview.
User experience
folk's intuitive, Notion-like interface makes it user-friendly from the start. It features AI suppor through 'Magic Field', useful for sending personalized emails to multiple recipients, offers various viewing options for client lists, and centralizes notes, all without a complex learning curve.
Email marketing
Send personalized bulk emails from folk, assisted by the AI 'Magic Field'. A library of email templates is available to help save you time, along with detailed analytics on email performance, including delivery rates and engagement metrics.
Price and plans
folk's subscriptions start at $18 per user per month (annual plan) for unlimited contacts, bulk emailing, and AI features. More advanced options, like migration services and priority support, are available at $29 per user per month. Monthly payment options are provided for all plans, and custom pricing is available for specialized needs.
Recruiterflow
Recruiterflow serves as both an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and a CRM platform, tailored for recruitment and staffing agencies. Be mindful that they often use these terms interchangeably. In their context, 'CRM' typically refers to the client management aspect of your recruiting business, while 'ATS' usually pertains to the recruitment process itself.
Pipeline management
Like folk, Recruiterflow can help with the creation of custom deal pipelines, providing a visual representation of won deals through a Kanban-board style layout. This feature is enhanced by automation tools designed to reduce the administrative workload in sales, offering a streamlined and efficient approach to managing sales pipelines.
Candidate and client management
Recruiterflow features a client portal, facilitating a seamless presentation of candidates to clients. Additionally, its ATS can help with managing candidate pipelines, offering a structured and organized approach to tracking candidate progress through various stages of the hiring process.
Sourcing
Similarly to folk, Recruiterflow has a handy Chrome extension that can help. But instead of saving candidate information into the CRM, this goes straight to your inbox.
Contact sync
Recruiterflow allows for the synchronization of contacts across different platforms through third-party applications, boasting a comprehensive library of integrations. This includes compatibility with platforms like Google, Microsoft Teams, and Zapier, enhancing its connectivity and data management capabilities.
Team collaboration features
The platform supports collaborative work on various assignments, featuring advanced access controls. These controls allow for detailed management of different fields and the creation of custom roles, facilitating a tailored approach to team collaboration and data access.
User experience
Recruiterflow is more of an ATS with some CRM features. It focuses on the client management side of business operations. It lacks the extensive flexibility of a full CRM even though some of their features are impressive. Expect a steep learning curve.
Email marketing
Recruiterflow's email marketing is anchored in its 'email sequences' feature, which automates the follow-up process. Additionally, it offers customizable send limits and provides analytics, empowering users to optimize their email campaigns effectively.
Price and plans
Recruiterflow's pricing is relatively high. The basic plan starts at $99 per user per month, escalating to $109 and $129 per user per month for the pro and advanced plans, respectively. The basic plan includes limited features like 5 custom fields, pipeline reporting, and a selection of integrations. More advanced features such as email sequences, Zapier integration, and advanced access control are only available from the pro plan.
Crelate
Crelate is an end-to-end staffing and recruiting software system designed by recruiters. It encompasses several products such as Crelate Omni (it’s full-suite package), Crelate Recruit, Crelate Sales and Crelate Deliver. Our focus here will be on Crelate Recruit.
Pipeline management
Crelate's CRM is specifically tailored for managing a recruiting pipeline, but its design might feel somewhat cumbersome. It presents a lengthy list of recent contacts, requiring you to visit each profile individually for a detailed summary and interaction timeline. This setup makes it challenging to get an overview at a glance, unless you manually establish a specific workflow.
Candidate and client management
Crelate offers insight into your potential business and revenue from client-side projects so that you can customize the stages of your sales with your recruiting team. It also features an applicant tracking system to oversee the entire applicant lifecycle and offers a searchable candidate database.
Sourcing
For candidate sourcing, Crelate allows the addition of a custom job board to your website for lead generation, though the setup might be complex. Additionally, a Chrome extension is available to facilitate the import of candidates into your database while researching online.
Contact sync
Crelate enables contact information import from spreadsheets, either to update existing data or add new entries. It also supports third-party applications for importing contacts from Google or Office 365.
Team collaboration features
Crelate supports collaborative efforts in both the sales and candidate management aspects of your business.
User experience
Crelate’s platform may seem outdated and clunky, with a significant learning curve required to master their CRM and ATS products. The interface, divided into different tabs, can be overwhelming and makes it difficult to quickly obtain an overview without extensive navigation.
Email marketing
You can send emails directly from Crelate’s platform manually or from their text messaging function. It syncs with your calendar through a third-party application and can track conversations. However, it does not have any automation capabilities or AI support that can help you do the heavy lifting.
Price and plans
Crelate's pricing is among the highest in this category, with costs quickly accumulating for additional features typically included in basic CRMs. The business plan starts at $99 per user per month (billed annually), increasing to $144 per user per month for the business plus plan, and offers custom pricing for enterprises. Premium client portals are exclusive to the business pro plan. Additional features like email marketing, contact enrichment, or text messaging incur extra charges, ranging from $28 monthly to $600 annually for contact enrichment.
Recruit CRM
Recruit CRM is recruitment software that has a CRM and ATS rolled into one product.
Pipeline management
Recruit CRM offers a customizable sales pipeline that can help with sales forecasting. It also comes with invoice management so that you can generate and send customized invoices to clients.
Candidate and client management
Similarly to folk, Recruit CRM can give you an overview on the communications your team is sending out to candidates and clients. As long as they tag you in the contact’s profile. To help with client management, you can receive client feedback on candidates through their built-in system.
Sourcing
Recruit CRM’s applicant tracking system helps with sourcing candidates by automating the whole hiring process. It can help you scan CVs for keywords and sort candidates. However, you may also want to manually look at CVs as this might be limiting and you might miss out on key talent.
Contact sync
Recruit CRM supports integration with third-party applications, enabling synchronization of email accounts and contacts into the platform.
Team collaboration features
The platform's ATS can be utilized collaboratively with clients and colleagues, enhancing team efficiency in recruitment processes.
User experience
Recruit CRM has an impressive ATS system. But their CRM system isn’t what you’d expect from a traditional CRM. Instead, It is tailored more towards administrative workflows, offering functionalities like appointment scheduling, tracking past call logs, client management, and invoice tracking, which makes it come across more as a project management solution.
Email marketing
Recruit CRM's email marketing includes a library of templates and features more aligned with enhancing candidate experience, such as automated email sequences and tracking email opens.
Price and plans
Recruit CRM's pricing is on the higher side. The pro plan begins at $95 per user per month, the business plan at $134 per user per month, and the enterprise plan starts at $185 per user per month. Features like automated email sequencing, resume formatting, and multiple hiring pipelines, which you can easily get from a good CRM is only available with their business plan subscription.
Teamtailor
Teamtailor is an ATS and CRM tool built in one.
Pipeline management
Teamtailor allows you to create and manage customized pipelines for multiple recruitment processes if you manually assign ‘stage types’. You can get a clear overview of where each candidate stands in the hiring process.
Candidate and client management
Teamtailor is candidate-led. You can use it to track interactions and job matching with its ATS. It's helpful for maintaining detailed records and preferences. There isn’t anything for client management as it is more for internal recruiters.
Sourcing
Sourcing with Teamtailor is focused on employer branding and building a careers page to build a talent pool. There is also a function called ‘Connect’ that lets candidates interested in a company subscribe to new job openings.
Contact sync
Similarly to folk, Teamtailor has a browser extension that can help you source candidates from anywhere.
Team collaboration features
There are collaborative and restrictive features that allow you to determine who gets what access to candidate information. You can also tag team members, add external recruiters and create a hiring team.
User experience
Teamtailor has a user-friendly interface, but as it is more of an ATS platform, it lacks some features you might expect to find in a CRM.
Email marketing
Teamtailor has email marketing tools to engage with candidates, including personalized emails and automated campaigns.
Price and plans
Teamtailor’s price and plans are unavailable, suggesting it might require a steep investment.
Conclusion
Embarking on a search for an ATS with CRM-like features often leads to costly options where contact management and collaboration aren't the primary focus. For recruitment agencies seeking a CRM adept at managing both client and candidate experiences, folk emerges as a standout choice. It combines key CRM functionalities like contact enrichment and email marketing with advanced features like AI support to efficiently streamline your workload.
