When you hear the phrase ‘Customer Relationship Management (CRM)’, you probably start thinking about sales teams and giant corporations with thousands of customer accounts worldwide.
While these companies certainly use a CRM, it’s also a great tool for smaller organizations, and it doesn’t necessarily require sales to be helpful. If you know your company needs a CRM solution but don’t know where to start, don’t worry. This guide will discuss some of the most important parts of CRM solutions and how CDL driver recruiters can use them to their advantage.
What CRM can do for your recruiting team
Just as a typical sales organization would manage prospects and customers, so too can a CRM help CDL driver recruiters track and manage new and current applicants. Think of CDL driver recruiting as a continuous sales cycle – you move a ‘lead’ down a ‘pipeline’ as you ‘sell’ them on your team and ultimately ‘close’ the deal by hiring them, and then you ‘nurture’ them to decrease attrition.
When it comes to recruiting, CRM takes on a new meaning: “Candidate Relationship Management’. CRM is the key to managing every single touchpoint of this lifecycle accurately and efficiently so nothing slips through the cracks. CRM platforms can provide many features that, when leveraged in tandem with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), can result in a true driver-focused and efficient recruiting process.
So what can a CRM do for you? Here are just a few features that CDL driver recruiters can take advantage of to improve driver applicant experiences:
Email campaign management: Most high-functioning CRM platforms have a marketing component alongside the sales platform to help companies communicate and engage with new customers. For driver recruiters, this means a top of the line email marketing platform to send targeted, optimized emails to driver leads. You can easily personalize any dynamic content in your emails to make them even more personal.
Text message campaigns: Additionally, CRM platforms are known for housing as much customer information as possible, making it easy for sales reps to quickly reach out to their prospects whenever – and however – they need to. This mentality is also present in the world of CDL driver recruiting, and recruiters can leverage text-first campaigns to engage with drivers. All it takes is a few clicks on your desktop and you’re in a two-way text conversation. Better yet, all conversations, notes, and follow-up details are securely stored in a single location – your CRM platform.
Nurture / drip programs: Sometimes, sales teams rely on CRM to send pre-built, timed emails out to accounts that have gone dark, or to customers who are self-sufficient. This is called nurturing, and it is extremely relevant to driver recruiters for multiple reasons:
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Set up nurture programs for drivers that have gone dark somewhere in the recruiting process, but still seem to be prospects.
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Send more information on your company, relevant content that’s valuable to them, or even lists of perks you offer drivers. Anything to get drivers to re-engage and jump back into the recruiting process.
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Use nurture programs to onboard new drivers or keep current drivers involved with your company as a whole. Even though drivers are on the road, they still like to be part of a community, and drip programs are the perfect way to keep them up-to-date on what’s going on.
Lead management and retention: At its most basic level, CRM is a management tool that keeps information clearly organized and focused. This is great for driver recruiters who are often dealing with multiple drivers, conversations, and open applications at once. CRM allows recruiters to pinpoint exactly where a driver is in the recruiting process, identify the status of their application, and even send actual offer letters and onboarding paperwork electronically. Once drivers are hired, CRM can help keep tabs on them, monitor their involvement with company messaging, and see if there are any red flags that need addressing.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to CRM. From tracking deals to managing recruiter compensation plans, using a CRM solution alongside your ATS platform can help your company operate on a much more productive level. To learn how you can incorporate a CRM solution into your current technology stack, schedule a one-on-one consultation with a DriverReach recruiting specialist today!
