Q: What’s your role at Yello and what brought you here?
I’m Danny Davidson, a technical product manager at Yello. I came to Yello for the opportunity — both in terms of career growth and the chance to shape a better world for hiring. I knew Yello worked with established and well-known brands, and as a technical product manager I get to have a direct impact in helping those companies find top talent, faster and more efficiently.
Q: What is Recruitment CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) Software?
A Recruitment CRM helps recruiters have more one-to-one, personalized interactions with candidates by tracking actions and sending engagements in one platform. That helps recruiting teams collaborate, create differentiated candidate experiences, build quality talent pipelines and accelerate the hiring process.
Q: Our Recruitment CRM is something Yello clients asked us to build. Can you tell us what the development process was like and how you worked with clients?
We started with the basics. At the core, we knew a CRM for enterprise companies needed the ability to:
- Search and source candidates externally (via job boards, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Search and source candidates internally (within the ATS and historical talent pools)
- Organize candidates into talent pools
- Send personalized communications
- Build “step and repeat” processes for recruitment teams
How did we determine these needs? By listening and working with our clients. That initial understanding led us to build a lot of key functionality, including:
- Candidate search and filters for ATS mining
- Centralizing external searches across multiple job boards
- Importing candidate’s LinkedIn profiles
- Tags and folders to organize candidates based on similar criteria
- Text and email campaigns
- Configurable workflows to automate data entry, communications and other manual tasks
But we didn’t always get things right the first time — for example, we overhauled our initial design for candidate search and filters because recruiters told us it wasn’t easy to get results they were looking for. Our team went back to the drawing board, working with clients to test and rollout Pinpoint Filters and Search in 2018. After that, we continued to listen to user feedback and identified another functionality need: location-based Radius Search, which we rolled out later that year — thanks to the clients that inspired it!
Q: How did you research recruiters’ needs for engaging candidates? What surprised you most about the way they work?
We did a lot of one-on-one phone calls with clients, as well as a Yello user survey to better understand the needs of our users specifically. We also supplemented that with online research about candidate engagement across the industry as a whole.
What surprised me the most is the shift in engagement strategies to be more personal and direct, especially for candidates in younger generations. For example, one of our clients piloted coffee meetups to source and engage candidates. It helps the candidates and recruiters to get to know each other in a more comfortable setting — and the company saw success compared to more traditional phone screens or interviews.
Recruiters can’t leverage everything that most platforms have to offer without a background or training in marketing. It’s a huge learning curve for most recruiters, which is why only 2% of companies are using all their recruitment marketing functionality.*
*Source: Aptitude Research, 2019 Talent Acquisition: Early Findings Research Report
Q: When it comes to engaging candidates, recruiters are overwhelmed. According to a Yello client survey, 2/3 of talent acquisition professionals feel that recruitment marketing systems are becoming too complex. Why do you think that is?
Recruiters can’t leverage everything that most platforms have to offer without a background or training in marketing. It’s a huge learning curve for most recruiters, which is why only 2% of companies are using all their recruitment marketing functionality.
Creating and implementing a recruitment marketing strategy is a full-time job. That work takes away from other key priorities like collaborating with hiring managers, managing events, building pipelines, evaluating or screening candidates and conducting follow-ups.
Yello’s CRM is streamlined to help prevent that. We made it as easy as possible for actual recruiters (not marketers!) to have personalized conversations with candidates. Those relationships are a top deciding factor for candidates, ultimately helping recruiters bring top talent in more effectively.
Q: Over time, we’ve added in radius search and Boolean search functionality to Yello’s CRM. Now your team is in the early stages of building smarter semantic search. Can you tell us a little more about that?
We’ve partnered with a leading search provider to build a best-in-class candidate search to rediscover top talent already sitting in their database.
On average, corporate jobs receive 250 applicants — but only one is hired. That means 249 candidates who are already interested in your employer brand are still sitting inside your ATS, waiting to be rediscovered for future opportunities. Searching inside of your ATS isn’t perfect, and many recruiters end up going through multiple rounds of trial-and-error searches to finally get a batch of potential candidates.
Yello’s new semantic search will help recruiters find those candidates nearly twice as fast. With artificial intelligence to better understand search intent, simple queries like “Sales Manager” will show results for all relevant candidates — like Sales Consultants or Account Executives — without multiple searches or complicated keyword strings.
Ultimately, that will help reduce recruiting time and costs. In initial testing with clients, semantic search returned 65% more relevant candidates than traditional keyword and Boolean searches. Engagement improved by 71%, meaning recruiters found candidates they wanted to reach out to nearly twice as fast as traditional search.
Stay tuned for more details coming soon!
- Radius search: Allows recruiters to find candidates based on distance from a specific location. For example, candidates within 10 miles from a certain zip code.
- Boolean search: Combines keywords with modifiers such as AND, NOT and OR to produce more targeted and relevant results. For example, two separate searches for network administrators and network architects could be combined into one: “network AND (administrator OR architect)”
- Semantic search: Automatically understands the meaning behind your search, instead of looking for literal matches of the words you’ve typed. For example, a simple search for “sales representative” could show results for sales engineers, sales consultants, account executives or account managers — as well as other relevant positions.
Q: What value can a CRM bring to a talent acquisition team? Why choose Yello?
Recruiters can build stronger candidate relationships at scale with personalized engagements that power talent pipeline growth. For talent acquisition leaders, a Recruitment CRM can provide increased visibility and preserve institutional knowledge with all candidate engagements and activities tracked in a centralized location.
Besides a dedication to simplicity and ease-of-use, what sets Yello’s CRM apart from other solutions is configurability. With more ATS integrations than most CRM vendors and a robust suite of add-on products like interview scheduling, event management, evaluations and job boards — Yello’s Recruitment CRM is built for enterprise teams and can be configured to support your recruiting process.
What sets Yello’s CRM apart from other solutions is configurability. We offer more ATS integrations than most CRM vendors and a robust suite of add-on products like interview scheduling, event management, evaluations and job boards.
Q: Any favorite stories or feedback you’ve heard about our CRM from clients?
A.T. Kearney’s digital campus recruiting strategy. I thought that was a great story and innovative use case, using our CRM to take on a new initiative for sourcing students virtually — ultimately engaging 77% more candidates while cutting physical events in half.
See what users are saying:
Product Tour: Yello’s Recruitment CRM
Manage candidate relationships from start to finish
Build stronger candidate relationships with personalized touchpoints and team collaboration including shared candidate profiles of all actions and engagements.
- Centralized candidate profiles
- Actionable dashboards
- Notes and activity logging
- Automated follow-up
Develop dynamic talent pipelines
Simultaneously identify talent for immediate needs while building a proactive repository to speed up hiring for future job openings.
- Talent communities
- Auto-categorization and tagging
- Actionable pipeline visualizations
- Segmented candidate outreach
Save time with precise candidate search
Find the perfect candidates every time with smart, targeted searches that scan your entire talent pool in seconds to narrow in on the exact candidates you need.
- Advanced Boolean search
- Radius search
- Personal and global saved searches
- Candidate resume preview
Measure success to improve strategically
Track your hiring pipeline to monitor growth by candidate sector, see candidate engagement results and tailor pipelining efforts to make smarter decisions in the future.
- Candidate surveys
- Engagement metrics
- Source channel tracking
- Pipeline visualizations
Are your candidate relationships strong enough?
Did you know 70% of candidates said that the recruiter they worked with during the interview process impacted their decision to accept a job? Give your team the tools they need to build better relationships — empowering them to make an impact and work more effectively.
