Using candidate relationship management to hire top talent

July 28, 2025

 

Alex Oliver

10 min read

Technology connects you with talent worldwide, but it also floods your inbox with applications. Even with hundreds of candidates applying, each one expects personal, timely follow-ups.

This may seem impossible, but effective candidate relationship management (CRM) does just that. Great CRM goes beyond one-time recruiting to build lasting relationships with talent. Note that the software used to manage candidates is also known as CRM. In this case, we’re talking about the practice, not the tech.

Read on to learn candidate relationship management best practices that improve candidate experiences and create more strategic recruitment teams.

Truly understanding candidate relationship management

Similar to customer relationship management, candidate relationship management is a strategic approach to building lasting relationships with past, current, and future talent. Beyond keeping people engaged, it helps you source passive candidates and fill critical roles faster.

Studies back this up. A 2024 Gallup report shows that candidates who have exceptional experiences are three times more likely to be satisfied employees, a key factor in employee retention. Plus, 78% of candidates view their experience as a signal of how you’ll treat them as employees.

When you provide better candidate experiences, you’ll receive more accepted job offers.

Beyond the basics: What does great CRM actually look like?

Great CRM isn’t just quick email responses. It’s about building a reputation that creates healthy, sustainable talent pipelines.

Here is what stellar CRM looks like in every recruitment stage:

• Awareness: Build a social media presence that invites prospects to learn about your company.
• Attraction: Showcase your employer value proposition (EVP) through video testimonials and newsletters.
• Interest: Create a career site that connects candidates with roles matching their skills.
• Application: Develop email drip campaigns that keep candidates updated on their application status and company news.
• Evaluation: Share expectations and grading criteria upfront, so candidates can prepare.
• Interview: Accommodate requests for interviews outside typical hours for busy candidates.
• Hire: Deliver offers quickly and minimize repetitive data entry during onboarding.

Building a data-driven engagement strategy

Gathering candidate engagement and performance data is easy. The problem is knowing what to do with it.

The right metrics reveal which parts of your CRM strategy need work, leading to better engagement and stronger hires.

Focus on the right metrics to improve your CRM strategy

Track these key metrics to see how well your process identifies candidates, keeps them engaged, and motivates them to accept offers.

Pro tip: Collect data on all the metrics above, but focus on improving just two or three. You’ll see faster results when your teams target specific data points rather than spreading resources (and their attention) across everything.

Use benchmarking and real-world examples

Now that you’ve decided on the metrics you’re measuring, what does “good” even look like? The best way to determine this is to examine your current metrics against industry benchmarks and your historical data.

Here are some general CRM benchmarks to start. Bear in mind that these vary wildly by industry, so click the source links for the numbers that more closely pertain to you.

* Based on email marketing statistics

You’ll also want to look at your past data to make targeted improvements and even predict future trends. For example, if your candidate satisfaction score has stayed at 60/100 for a year, your recruitment experience isn’t meeting expectations.

Real-world example: TheKey, a home care assistance provider, constantly hunts for top caregivers in a competitive market. It started engaging talent through targeted email and text campaigns about open roles and company news. Result? A 55% open rate and 3,245 more candidates in their talent pool by re-engaging former employees.

Growing a long-term talent pool with proper CRM

CRM and candidate experience management work best for companies that hire continuously or struggle with hard-to-fill positions. But for them to be effective, sustained engagement and candidate feedback loops are key.

Nurture candidates even when you’re not hiring

Your talent needs are constantly changing. Even when you’re not actively hiring, unplanned departures or succession gaps can create urgent hiring needs.

CRM helps you maintain ongoing relationships to cut sourcing time and fill gaps faster. And it enables you to tap into these talent pools immediately:

• Passive candidates: Social media content about company events attracts talent who follow you and apply to future positions, even while employed elsewhere.
• Internal candidates: Internal recruiting offers advancement opportunities to existing employees.
• Alumni networks: Maintaining contact with former employees through email, text, and social media campaigns may encourage some to return.
• Silver medalists: Re-engage runner-ups from previous hiring rounds who already showed interest in your company.

Learn from candidate feedback

Gathering feedback on your engagement efforts is one of the fastest ways to improve your CRM strategy. But gathering honest feedback from candidates is tricky, especially if they didn’t reach the job offer stage.

For the best insights, try these tactics.

• Decide what you want to measure: Focus on overall experience or specific stages. Common surveys include post-application, post-interview, and post-hire.
• Time your surveys appropriately: Send post-application, post-interview, and post-hire surveys immediately while feedback is fresh. For rejected candidates, wait a week or two for emotions to cool.
• Offer incentives: Provide candidates with incentives, such as gift cards, to increase participation rates.
• Ensure anonymity: Inform candidates that their feedback will be completely anonymous to encourage honest responses.

Pro tip: Use survey platforms to manage candidate feedback. The best come with candidate experience survey templates, distribution automations, sentiment analysis, and anonymity thresholds. For more information on measuring candidate experience, check out How to measure candidate experience.

Making communication personal at scale

Candidates want to feel seen and supported, not just like they’re another name on a list. But asking recruiters to personalize every message leads to burnout.

Instead, advanced CRM solutions automate mass candidate communication while keeping it human-centered.

Use automation to improve candidate experiences

Your recruiters are human. They’re only available eight hours a day and have responsibilities outside direct communication with every job applicant. CRM systems reach candidates 24/7 without overloading your team.

The secret is custom, automated workflows that keep multiple talent pools engaged while recruiters focus on strategic, high-priority work.

Platforms like iCIMS Engage, for example, let you automate:

• Email and text drip campaigns to boost conversion rates.
• Candidate reminders to ensure participation in various recruitment stages.
• Application status updates to prevent recruiters from having to manually respond to candidate inquiries.
• Message timing to connect with candidates when they’re available.

With automation at your disposal, recruiters can spend more time in direct contact with the best candidates while scaling your recruitment operations.

Keep the human touch with smart AI

Generic, templated messaging is more likely to cause candidates to drop out of your recruitment process than stay for the long haul. However, intelligent AI delivers natural, personalized communications without compromising trust.

For your recruiters strapped for time, AI-powered CRM:

• Customizes outreach based on candidate needs and preferences.
• Recommends jobs based on résumés and skills.
• Surfaces content, like company news, events, and employee video testimonials, to candidates based on their interests and behaviors.
• Answers questions about available job opportunities and the status of candidate applications.
• Helps candidates find and apply to the right role through career site chatbots.

AI doesn’t replace human communication. Rather, it makes it easier for recruiters and candidates to realize their ultimate goal: Connecting the best talent with the right position.

Did you know? AI offers huge advantages for companies with high-volume hiring needs, but not all AI solutions are equal. Your AI tools should be trained on accurate data, promote human-led decision-making, reduce bias, and comply with laws such as the EU AI Act. Discover how iCIMS balances ethical AI with enhanced recruitment team effectiveness.

Measuring performance and proving ROI of your CRM efforts

It’s not enough to create candidate relationship campaigns without proving to leadership how CRM investment affects broader company goals. Once you’ve implemented changes, you’ll need to monitor its return on investment (ROI) through:

• Smarter recruiter decision-making.
• Faster recruitment processes.
• Reduced talent acquisition costs.
• Higher quality hires.

Track the impact of your CRM efforts

Better candidate communication may boost satisfaction scores and conversion rates. But those wins need to connect to bottom-line metrics like:

• Employee retention: Are new employees staying longer?
• Cost per hire: Does CRM automation reduce recruiting staff needs?
• Time to fill: Are recruiters sourcing and hiring faster? 
• Quality of hire: Are new hires contributing to your company’s success?
• Reengagement rate: Are past candidates and employees interacting with your messaging?

Remember that new candidate relationship management strategies don’t change these metrics overnight. Expect an adjustment period of a few months or more, with some metrics changing faster than others.

For example, cost per hire might spike initially as you invest in new CRM platforms. But if employee retention improves, you’ll spend less long-term on turnover — a net win.

Pro tip: Tie CRM key performance indicators (KPIs) to company, department, or individual recruiting goals, such as shortening time to fill. You’re more likely to see improvements in candidate engagement and hiring efficiency when recruitment stakeholders work toward shared objectives.

Let iCIMS help you build smarter candidate relationships

Don’t expect recruitment teams to create personal relationships with candidates when they’re already juggling 15 job requisitions and thousands of applicants. They need the right tools to reach the right candidates at the right time.

A CRM platform that focuses solely on optimizing one or two engagement elements can lead to a disjointed experience for candidates. You need a solution that makes candidate engagement core to every part of the hiring journey.

iCIMS’ comprehensive recruitment solution makes this a reality. With iCIMS Engage, you can automatically reach candidates with personalized communications 24/7, plus access advanced analytics to support ongoing improvement.

Discover how iCIMS Engage connects you with top talent consistently. Schedule your personalized demo today.