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Ok, let’s dive in for today. What’s Cooking?

It’s Not The CRM!

Many businesses think it’s the CRM that drives the sales.

Partially true, but dig deeper, CRM often is the distraction that does more harm than good.

In this article, I am going to tell you:

1. Problem of Agency CRM

2. How to create and work with the right CRM to drive business

3. A bonus tip for using CRM to reduce business leakage (Must Learn!!!)

Problem of Agency CRM

I worked for several agencies and each has their in-house CRM (customer relationship management) systems that they develop on their own or bought off the shelf.

This is my heartfelt review but none of them is efficient.

The CRM is not poorly designed but populating a CRM happens to be the 80% work that produces 20% output or even less. (Pareto Principle)

At agency level, one of the key goals of the agency owners is to populate their CRM with a growing database of profiles that they can utilize anytime. This is one of the core pillars of most agencies who traditionally use it to sell to their clients.

Every recruiter is expected to contribute to this growing database. Short of filling in bank account numbers, every candidate’s record is filled to the brim with sensitive and non-sensitive information. All this is done in the name of ensuring profile accuracy for better job matching.

It is an absolute overkill and a massive time drain on each of your recruiter. If you are an agency leader, this is not what you pay them for.

No matter how big your in-house database is or will be, it cannot be bigger than a LIVE platform like LinkedIn, nor can that database be kept updated on its own. In fact, the records become outdated quickly and they just sit there doing naught.

The only consolation is that you have candidate contact details but those can change. Imagine doing all that work for just contact details is just killing the recruiter’s productivity.

Unless with intentional design, most agencies use legacy CRM because they feel they had to. Otherwise, they can’t compete. They use it to create a database and position to their clients as one of their key value propositions - that they have on hand a strong network of candidates who are ready for deployment. It’s a fallacy.

As a recruiter, your biggest profitable activity is to place candidates, and not populating soon-to-be outdated databases.

The Right CRM

My recruitment philosophy is to focus on the vital few that matters.

For every hiring mandate, only a few vital candidates are needed and the best way is to carry out a fresh search of new candidates. This ensures “freshness” resulting in candidates who are motivated to explore and move into new roles.

The CRM should be simple and requires little time to maintain. To achieve these requirements, I use Google Spreadsheet and Drive (folders). It is all cloud based and accessible anywhere. Spreadsheet allows me to add/adjust fields accordingly and every candidate record is a single row that is easy to view, edit and update. Best of all, they are free if you are not using a custom domain which I would recommend for branding purpose. A custom domain does not cost much.

Thus for every position, I have 3 to 5 candidates at max and over time, even though it is a growing database of profiles, it is not difficult to maintain as my recruiting philosophy is never to flood my clients with more profiles than necessary.

Many of my assignments were closed on a single profile - you only need one right profile to close the deal.

Over time, I built a small pool of active candidates which I can revisit whenever the same type of role appears.

Compare my simple setup (David) to agency CRMs (Goliath) that often boast thousands of profiles, mine “paled” in comparison but efficiency wise, we’re giving the big boys a run for their money. You can do that when you are running your business as a solopreneur, because getting results in the most efficient way is your natural target, not building a humongous database.

Another reason why agencies opt for building up their databases massively is due to their belief that recruiters within the organization can ride on the combined efforts of every recruiter that contributes to the growing database. The intention is well meant, but its efficacy is questionable.

(Bonus!!!) Prevent Business Leakage With CRM

One of the key benefits of having a CRM is that it can automate important tasks and here’s a brilliant use case.

With a simple CRM, you can track when your candidate was proposed to the client. Take note of that date (it’s in your email) and record it down in your CRM (e.g., Date Proposed column). On the adjacent column, set another field and name it Renewal Date and set that date 11 months down. So if your candidate is first proposed to the client on 1 Jan 2024, then the renewal date is 1 Dec 2024.

What this renewal date does is to remind you to check in with your candidate about his interest to explore other career opportunities with the same client if he hasn’t already been offered. If the candidate is still keen, you resend their updated profile to the client and get yourself locked in for another year with the client for this candidate.

If not, were your client to approach the same candidate on 1 Jan 2025, it would be considered as their candidate and you will not get paid if they offer him a position subsequently.

Will my client do that to me? You asked.

Good question. The simple answer is YES. It may not be intentional but it does happen from time to time. By contractual agreement, there is nothing you can do. Why risk it when you can mitigate in advance? You have already put in the hard work. Besides, by setting these reminders, it also helps you to get in touch with your candidates to update and explore opportunities.

p.s. Follow me on LinkedIn and DM “CRM” to get my setup for free.

Joo Kwang
​Author of Solopreneur’s Guide to Recruitment Business

​About this newsletter: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my weekly TSR (The Solo Recruiter) newsletter. Every week, you learn the strategies that successful recruiters use to grow their businesses. So you can also do the same and launch your business.