Meeting People Is Easy

Starting my 5th week here at the new gig, and I'm meeting some great people every day. At the end of the day yesterday, I bumped into a fellow 'newby' (just starting her 3rd week) whose expertise is in CRM. We chatted for a few minutes, I mentioned Salesforce.com and she gave me an 'bleh' look. Not a fan obviously. We agreed that we had much to talk about in the future though.

We are starting an ATS RFP here, and I'm going to be looking into other recruiting technologies for the firm as well (this is not an invite for vendors to start spamming me, thank you). I think I know what CRM is from the sales perspective, but that is just based upon what I have read, primarily through recruiting-related articles. It will be interesting to get the perspective from someone who really understands how this software works and how it can and should be applied in a variety of situations. During our brief discussion, I mentioned how most ATSs have been lacking in their CRM capabilities, despite the outcry for this functionality from the recruiting world. I told her how this has limited recruiters abilities to communicate more effectively with candidates, to which she then added "prospects too". She gets it. I smiled.

As I explore sourcing-function options for the firm, CRM capability will be a key ingredient to our success. It's great that I made this internal connection and that someone outside of recruiting recognized that Candidates are Customers, and that CRM technology is critical to engaging both.

* BTW, this blog post title comes from a brilliant concert movie by Radiohead from 1998. Not as big of a Radiohead fan as I once was, but there's unreleased material ("Big Boots", "Follow Me Around", "Big Ideas") from that film that is some of my favorite work by them.