In the interest of an honest, open and loving relationship between us, we're just going to state straight away that we're not trying to sell you a CRM. Yes, we make recruitment software, and yes we're weirdly passionate about it, but no, we don't want you to rush to our shop and buy it. Because contrary to popular opinion, not every CRM provider is right for every business. Every software company has different purposes and capabilities, and one size does not fit all my friends.

But we digress.

The real point here is, how do you know it's time to invest in a CRM? You've set up your business, you're feeling pretty pleased with yourself, the phones are ringing, but as usual, there's a million decisions to be made and not many people to talk to about them. So...

Let's start with the times you absolutely DON'T need a CRM:

If it's day one of business and you're sitting in your mum's spare room with a telephone in one hand and a LinkedIn recruiter license in the other. First start by starting. Win clients, talk to candidates and get things moving. Eventually yes, you're going to have to buy software, but keep your costs low and see if the business is viable before you start throwing thousands of pounds at technology.

If you don't have a sales funnel just yet, steer well clear of a CRM. Again, it's too early to start investing in software if you haven't even won the clients. Get out into the market, turn up at events and start making calls to get clients, then you can worry about a process.

Good, glad that's settled. Remember, the barriers to entry in recruitment are low, and that includes starting a business. Last year over 4,000 recruitment businesses were setup, and naturally they don't all survive.

Once your business is thriving and you're bringing in revenue, profit, candidates, clients and retaining your own staff, it's definitely time to think about the software you're using and how it can work better for you. For example:

Losing clients and employees: if one of your consultants walk and so does the client, it's a sure sign that the information and relationship is leaving the business with your consultants, and that's always going to be detrimental to the growth of your agency.

Admin: if your consultants are spending hours inputting manual fields of data to record information, it's time to cut them a break. A recruitment database is designed to automate most tasks so your consultants can spend more time making placements than inputting data.

Client breakups: if your relationships start to turn sour because information wasn't recorded correctly, or consultants don't know how many times a client has been contacted, or even if they misplace data and it leads to your team sending over the wrong CVs to a client, which incidentally are all things that have happened too often. Your CRM needs to keep a seamless record of when your client has been contacted and exactly which candidates have been sent over. The last thing you want to do is damage relationships because of bad admin. The cost is too high.

Conversions: at some point, you will have built a website and an online pretense, and if cultivated right, it will be sending high volumes of traffic to you, yet you're still unable to convert that traffic into direct ROI. If people are viewing your website but no one is picking up the phone, you've got a serious problem on your hands. Your CRM will help you convert those people into leads and fees for your business.

Hard-to-fill: we all have those roles that are a real pain to fill because of very specific skill sets and requirements, it's just part of the job. However, a spreadsheet won't help you here. Your recruitment software will. It can help you nurture candidates, move them through the pipeline and keep your candidate pools thriving so that you always have a suitable shortlist to fall back on.

About Access Recruitment

Access helps the UK's top recruitment agencies to simplify the everyday running of their business to improve productivity, control costs and enable growth. Access recruitment software brings together best-of-breed products onto one single platform to make a difference to the entire recruitment process - from sourcing the right candidate, paying staff, billing clients and complying with confidence.