Best CRM for recruitment

In recruitment? Chances are you’ve lost track of how many people you’ve spoken to on your quest for talent. As a recruiter, managing candidate pipelines, tracking communications, and ensuring smooth interactions with clients and candidates can quickly become overwhelming.
A dedicated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for recruitment can help you streamline these tasks by organizing candidate data, automating follow-ups, and tracking every stage of the hiring process—all from one platform. With the right CRM, you can improve efficiency, enhance candidate experience, and make better placements faster.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the best CRM options for recruiters like you, focusing on tools that will help you manage your recruitment pipeline and grow your agency effectively.

Why do recruiters need a CRM?

On top of keeping track of all those conversations you have with different talent pools daily. A CRM can help you collaborate with your team. It can serve as a single source of truth where all the notes taken by you and your team on each candidate you have, actions left to take and more. Here's how.

Challenges without a CRM

Without a CRM, keeping track of candidate and client information becomes chaotic, leading to errors and inefficiencies. As well as a few common challenges.

• Disorganization: Without a CRM, keeping track of candidate and client information becomes chaotic, leading to errors and inefficiencies.
• Missed opportunities: Important leads and follow-ups can slip through the cracks, resulting in lost business.
• Inefficient orocesses: Manual data entry and fragmented systems slow down recruitment processes and increase the risk of mistakes.
• Lack of insight: Without centralized data, gaining valuable insights and analytics to make informed decisions is challenging.
• Inconsistent communication: Communication with clients and candidates can become disjointed, harming relationships and your agency's reputation.

Benefits of a CRM

Fortunately, the right CRM can help you address these challenges and provide some extra benefits that will help your team collaborate better.

• Centralized information: A CRM stores all client and candidate data in one place, ensuring easy access and better organization.
• Enhanced efficiency: Automating repetitive tasks frees up time for your team to focus on high-value activities.
• Improved customer relationships: Track interactions and follow-ups to build stronger relationships with clients and candidates.
• Better decision-making: Access to real-time data and analytics helps you make informed strategic decisions.
• Increased sales: Efficiently manage your pipeline and close more deals with a streamlined sales process.
• Consistent communication: Maintain uniform and timely communication with clients and candidates, enhancing your agency's professionalism.

How to evaluate and choose a CRM

With a lot of CRMs to choose from, it can be hard to understand which one will suit your needs best. To help you with your shortlisting and decision making process, we've put together some tips that you can adapt accordingly.

1. Define your requirements

To find the best CRM for recruitment, start by identifying the key features your agency needs. Consider functionalities like candidate tracking, automated job posting, and resume parsing. Look for integrations with job boards, social media platforms, and email marketing tools to streamline your recruitment process. A CRM that offers robust analytics and reporting can also help you make data-driven decisions. If you're unsure where to start, we suggest using the following list of features and adding anything specific you're looking for.

Top 6 features recruitment teams need to look for in a CRM

1. Candidate management: This is the bread and butter of any good CRM. This feature will help you streamline processes like capturing, categorizing, and keeping track of potential and existing talent. Look out for features such as: contact syncing, custom fields and filters, pipeline management. Pay special attention to user experience. You don’t want anything clunky or time-consuming.
2. Sourcing: Sourcing candidates is time-consuming. A good CRM will be able to help you save time and help you save candidate information in moments, without leaving the page. Look out for features such as: Chrome extensions to streamline your process and auto-grouping.
3. Contact enrichment:  Found the perfect candidate? Missing some key information? Contact enrichment will help you fill in the blanks and save time. 
4. Candidate interaction and data insights: Whether you’re reaching out to a candidate for the first time, following up or sending them an offer letter, a good CRM should be able to help you keep an eye on open rates and bounce rates and do the heavy-lifting with an email template library. 
5. Talent pool management: A good CRM should be able to help you nurture your talent pool. Especially when it’s full of candidates who are highly qualified for future roles and have previously expressed interest. Look out for features that let you set reminders and assign the right team member to follow up with them.
6. Recruit as a team: Instead of having multiple candidate lists on separate spreadsheets that are inaccessible, a good CRM can help you import these lists in moments and create a pipeline view that makes it easy for you and your team to collaborate and keep your process up to date.

2. Budget considerations

When choosing a CRM for recruitment, balance the cost against the potential return on investment. While some platforms might seem expensive, their advanced features could save you time and improve placement rates. Evaluate whether a cloud-based CRM for recruitment offers scalable pricing models that grow with your business. Affordable CRM for recruitment options can still provide essential features without breaking the bank.

3. Selection process

Looking for the right CRM involves a few steps and a lot of research if you want to get it right the first time, or have something specific you're after. But – it's worth the effort. Start by reading reviews and testimonials from other recruitment agencies. Request demos to see the platform in action and assess its user-friendliness. Check if the vendor offers customer support and training resources to help you get the most out of the CRM. Consider vendors who specialize in recruitment and staffing solutions.

4. Get a demo

Before diving into a new CRM, it's crucial to get a demo. A demo allows you to explore the features and functionalities specific to recruitment. This hands-on experience can help you determine if the CRM meets your agency's needs. Get started with a demo of folk here to see why it's loved by recruiters.

A comparison of the top CRM options

Now that you know what type of features to look out for, let’s take a look at some CRMs that can help you with your recruitment process.

1. folk

Looking for something that has all the features you need in one platform? Check out folk. 

WIth folk, you’ll be able to centralize all your candidates data into a single place. Creating a single source of truth for your team to collaborate on. You can also import candidate search lists directly from LinkedIn without leaving the page with their handy Chrome extension, folkX.

Contact management

In folk, creating contact lists and keeping them up to date is easy with contact sync support. You’ll be able to consolidate all your contacts into one platform from LinkedIn, Google or Outlook with ease. And, if you’re missing data you will no longer have to waste time manually hunting for a contact’s email address thanks to its contact enrichment feature.

All those notes that you have everywhere on the same candidate can finally also have a home of its own, and your team can easily access and update with their own notes. 

Candidate sourcing

While you’re on the hunt for your next superstar hire, chances are you might be using multiple sources to find them. If that’s the case, you might be keeping all your notes on their contact information in different places which can be a real challenge when it’s time to reach out to them. 

With folk, you can now simplify this process with their Chrome extension, folkX. It lets you import search lists directly from LinkedIn, and candidate profiles straight into the folk CRM no matter where your search has taken you. Saving you from having to manually copy and paste things into different platforms. 

Contact enrichment  

Have you noticed that some of your candidates in your talent pipeline are missing contact details like email addresses? Once they’re all imported into folk, you’ll be able to fill in these blanks in moments by following this short tutorial. 

Candidate interaction and data insights

folk lets you send personalized emails in bulk, without having to leave the platform. You can make use of AI support to help you save time. If you’re interested in finding out which email campaign performed the best, you can get detailed reporting on their delivered, clicked, opened and bounce rates. If you don’t have time, you can also make use of folk’s extensive library of  email templates. 

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Automation and AI support

Say goodbye to manually deleting duplicates in your talent pipeline with folk’s auto-deduplication feature. If that wasn’t enough, folk has its very own AI-powered automation feature called ‘Magic Fields’. It will be able to help you automate other manual tasks like data cleansing and categorization, data enrichment, and email campaigns. 

Talent pool management

folk can help you keep your talent pool engaged at every step of your recruitment process. Your team will have a custom pipeline view where they can track progress, see their latest interactions with each candidate, share notes and set reminders for each other. 

Integrations

Communicating with candidates from multiple platforms? With folk's seamless integrations with Google and Outlook, your contacts and interactions are not only synchronized but also easily accessible. You can view all past interactions, including emails and calendar events, right within the contact details.

You’ll also be able to leverage Zapier, and Make.com’s integrations. Giving you access to thousands of tools to truly personalize your CRMs according to your team’s needs.

Collaborate and recruit as a team

Speaking to a lot of candidates across different job openings? Confused about who has contacted who? 

On top of the automatic syncing to your email and calendar, you can add any interaction including online and offline conversations to folk. This way, you’ll always have full context of all your interactions with each candidate in one place. You can also easily keep shared notes with your teammates on specific candidates and set reminders for yourself and teammates, so you never miss a follow-up again.

Price and plans

You can try folk for free with a 14 day free trial. After that, a monthly or annual subscription plan is as follows.

• Standard: $20 per user, per month.
• Premium: $40 per user, per month.‍
• Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is a free CRM platform largely built for sales and marketing teams. There is a possibility of using an integration to link to an ATS but it will incur a steep cost and complicated setup process.

Contact management

Similarly to folk, you can build a contact list library and sync all your contacts from Google and Outlook. Its traditional contact management features allows you to store and organize essential contact information, ranging from names and emails to phone numbers and addresses as well as keep details of past interactions.

Candidate sourcing

In HubSpot, you’ll have to manually import candidate lists, or capture job applications through a form.

Contact enrichment

HubSpot offers contact enrichment as part of its CRM’s contact management tools through HubSpot Insights which was designed with a sales focus. However, the lead data enrichment process is a little complicated. It relies on matching email addresses to records in a database, so if you’re manually putting in data and it’s not in the same format, it will be hard for it to match.

Candidate interaction and data insights

Hubspot also allows you to send email campaigns at scale, with the option to include variables for more personalized communications. Its dashboards are marketing and sales focused. With insights into marketing campaigns, and limited insights into contacts.

Talent pool management

Keeping your talent pool engaged with HubSpot will be expensive. If you want access to email templates, unlimited email tracking and notifications and email automation – you’ll need to get additional plans for their marketing and sales products. 

Collaborate and recruit as a team

HubSpot’s collaboration sidebar and being able to interact on various assets in general is heavily dependent on your subscription. Expect to require a professional or enterprise plan. 

Automation and AI support

Expect to be able to set up action sequences triggered by specific events like a contact advancing in the sales pipeline or submitting a website form. HubSpot also has an AI support feature but it’s more targeted towards marketing with its ability to write content and generate social media captions. 

Integrations

HubSpot offers an extensive library of integrations, including an ATS integration. But setup can incur additional costs, and create complications. 

Price and plans

HubSpot offers a few plans depending on what features and business function you intend to use it for. Their CRM suite has an annual subscription as follows.

• Starter: $15 per user, per month.
• Professional: $450 per user, per month.
• Enterprise: $1,500 per user, per month.

3. Recruitly

Recruitly is a CRM designed for staffing agencies. Its CRM has a recruitment focus and ATS system. Expect steep price plans to reflect this.

Contact management

Like a standard contact management feature, you can expect to be able to have a complete view on a contact. It also has Gmail and Outlook integration, where you can send an email from your account and get it tracked on Recruitly’s CRM. 

Candidate sourcing

Similarly to folk, Recruitly has a handy Chrome extension that lets you source candidates from LinkedIn and import them straight into their CRM. However, it does not let you import search lists as easily. 

Contact enrichment

At the time of writing, Recruitly does not have a contact enrichment feature.

Automation and AI support

Recruitly offers recruitment-focused automation support. Set up requires you to be familiar with the ‘when/if’ trigger. Getting the right sequence can be time consuming for first time users  if you want to automate complicated tasks.  

Candidate interaction and data insights

Recruitly provides an email editor and access to analytics. Similarly to folk, you can design email campaigns and get distribution lists. 

Collaborate and recruit as a team

Similarly to folk, with Recruitly you can get a full view of your customer and collaborate with your team on tasks, get email alerts and make notes.

Price and plans

Unless you’re an independent user, Recruitly can get expensive.

• Solo plan: Starts from $30/month.
• Startup agencies: $50/seat/month.
• Professional: $75/seat/month.
• Enterprise: $100/seat/month.

4. Zoho Recruit

Chances are you’ve heard of Zoho. Zoho Recruit combines their CRM and ATS platform together. There are separate price plans for corporate HR teams and staffing agencies, but expect a steep cost.

Contact management

As it is not a traditional CRM, Zoho Recruit does not have a contact management feature per se. In its place, their ATS provides a hiring pipeline, which is a collection of stages in the recruitment process. To get that set up to reflect your company’s recruitment process, you’ll need to map out what it looks like on their system.

Candidate sourcing

Zoho Recruit relies on a candidate application form as its first step for sourcing active candidates. The platform provides a default application form where you can choose optional and mandatory fields. They also allow you to add a number of career sites.

Contact enrichment

You can only get access to contact enrichment in Zoho CRM. In Zoho Recruit, you can only get help auto-populating candidate information. More on that, here.

Automation and AI support

Expect to be able to set up automatic replies, alerts, and notifications in advance. However, this requires an understanding of the sequence you need to automate the otherwise manual task and follows the ‘when/if’ rule. There’s also an AI-powered recruiting assistant. 

Candidate interaction and data insights

Zoho Recruit offers limited email marketing capabilities designed specifically for the email sequence of an offer management process. Its data insight is just as focused, with calculating and tracking key recruiting performance indicators (KPIs) like time-to-fill, time-to-hire, age-of-job, and offer acceptance rate.

Collaborate and recruit as a team

In Zoho Recruit, there is a collaborative element in that you can get quick responses from your team by using @mentions and adding comments. 

Price and plans

Zoho Recruit’s annual price and plans are limited to corporate HR teams and staffing agencies.

• Corporate HR team standard plan: $25/seat/month.
• Enterprise plan from $50/seat/month.
• Staffing agencies have the same option the same plans, with the difference being an added Professional tier which comes in at $50/seat/month.

Conclusion

When it comes to the best CRM for recruiting, get something that will give you access to the right features at a fair price point. While Zoho Recruit, HubSpot, and Recruitly all offer strong tools for recruitment, folk is best suited for recruiters who need flexibility, simplicity, and a relationship-driven approach. Unlike more rigid platforms, folk allows recruiters to easily customize workflows to fit their hiring process, automate follow-ups, and prioritize building meaningful candidate relationships. Its ease of use and focus on personalization make folk the ideal CRM for recruiters who want to streamline their efforts while staying connected to top talent. Try folk today, free. 

Need a helping hand? Use our free tool to find your perfect CRM match.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do recruiters need a CRM?

Recruiters need a CRM to manage candidate and client relationships effectively, streamline the recruitment process, and track interactions efficiently. A CRM helps recruiters organize candidate data, automate communication, and gain insights into recruitment metrics, improving overall efficiency and success rates in placements.

What features should recruiters look for in a CRM?

Recruiters should look for the following features in a CRM:

• Candidate and client management: Efficiently manage and track interactions with candidates and clients.
• Automated communication: Schedule and automate emails and follow-ups.
• Analytics: Gain insights into recruitment performance and metrics.
• Integration with job boards and social media: Connect seamlessly with job boards and social media platforms.

Why is folk the best CRM for recruiters?

folk is the best CRM for recruiters because it offers comprehensive candidate and client management, and robust automation features. folk's intuitive interface and insightful analytics help recruiters streamline their processes, enhance candidate experiences, and improve placement success rates, making it an ideal choice for managing recruitment activities efficiently.