Staffing Agency Software - recruitment marketing part III 

                                              

Staffing agency software that cannot market to clients is incomplete.  If you have 10,000 quality applicants in your resume database and no clients you will not make any money as a recruiter.  One of the fundamentals of marketing is to know who you are marketing to.  I believe it is called demographics.  Recruiting software must be able to gather every itsy bitsy piece of information on clients.  Executive search is about knowing everything about your client and your applicant to make a good placement that will enrich your applicants career and add value to your client.  This same information is the foundation of your marketing program to your client base.  But if your executive search software cannot identify the difference between each clients special needs and market to those needs it is failing you as a complete recruiting system.  Your system is merely a resume database, applicant tracking system, contact manager or a CRM.  

With Gopher as your recruiting tool you will be able to draw out any demographics because it is an 'All query engine'.  But being able to query or find on anything in your database won't help you much if the information is not in the database to begin with.  Recruiting software to be complete must be able to gather information from clients like a sponge and then be able to use that information in a marketing program.  If you own a Gopher recruitment system you have just that! Gopher is hard wired to Microsoft Word and it's Mail/Merge feature.  The mail merge can use Gopher's ability to query, find or search on any information in the database including notes!

What am I saying?  You can email thousands of email to clients playing back in each email what you learned about them as a client and even bits of your last conversation.  Now that's marketing.  Also it is important to understand that a time consuming research and information gathering program did not have to performed by some very expensive consulting firm.  All the information you need was right there in your database gathered naturally over time as you made calls and had conversations with clients.

Ok, so with a recruiting system like Gopher you may have all the information and tools you need to effectively market to clients.  But do you know how to do that?  I hope so, but if you don't here are some good articles and links to CRM's that may put you on the right track.

As far as CRM packages go I think the best place to start is the CRMAdvocate . The site has a good newsletter, tons of case studies and articles on CRM.   If you can't find your CRM needs starting from this site then what your looking for is not a CRM.

Paul Quinn at Quinntessential is an excellent source for marketing strategies for recruiters.  I would definitely recommend subscribing to his free newsletter. His real value is that he provides marketing expertise specifically for the recruiting industry.  I found that recruiting as an industry is in a breed all onto itself in terms of sales and marketing with needs and expertise that do not cross over to sales and marketing for other industries.

Gary Stauble at the recruiting lab also has some excellent material on client marketing for recruiters.  In one article he describes the three R's, Reach, Repetition and Relevance. It is really quite simple and you should read the entire article.  But in summary;  Reach is about how many clients you can contact on a regular basis.  Repetition is how often to you contact these client prospects. Finally, relevance is what information are you contacting them with.  The reason I am so found of this article is because it is so simple.  I really, like simplicity because it always gives you more time to concentrate on execution rather than the nits and gnats of elaborate schemes that eventually implode on themselves because of the endless thirst the system has for data, follow up, corrections, updating and everything else that gets in your way as a recruiter.

David Perry has an article, "Boldly Make Changes" which explains the changes to recruiting that the internet has brought and about how recruiter and their marketing must change to meet the new world of recruiting.