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Best Practices for Recruiting Firms
Best Practices for Recruiting Firms

Best Practices for Recruiting Firms

Success at Copper avatar
Written by Success at Copper
Updated over a week ago

The following is a Q&A with our Customer Success Team around what a SAAS Sales Company using Copper should consider.

How might a recruiting firm use leads, people, companies and/or opportunities?

There are likely two sides of your business that you may be tracking: Candidates vs Clients

Candidates:

  • Leads: uncontacted candidates; your team can use this large list of leads to reach out to potential candidates you may want to work with. You can use the lead conversion process to qualify your candidates to ensure a strong pool.

  • People: candidates, contacts at companies with open positions, other contacts that may provide referrals

  • Companies: companies with open positions

  • Opportunities: you may choose to create an opportunity for each candidate to track through a pipeline. In doing so, you may be tracking the different phases of that candidates potential hiring process.

Clients

  • Leads: you probably won’t need to use leads, but one way that you might utilize this section is as a holding tank of companies for whom you’ve not yet worked with or provided your services.

  • People: contacts at companies with open positions, other contacts that may provide referrals

  • Companies: companies with open positions

  • Opportunities: you might consider creating an opportunity for each job posting your team is looking to fill. Your pipeline would then represent the steps your team will take in order to complete a successful job posting with your clients.

How will a recruiting firm structure it's pipeline?

Multiple pipelines are going to be helpful here. You could have one for candidates and one for contract acquisition. Check them out below:

Candidate Pipeline

    • Searching

    • Sending Job Openings

    • Actively Interviewing

    • Negotiation

    • Final Paperwork

  • Statuses

    • Open = candidate is actively searching for position

    • Won = successful candidate search

    • Lost = candidate did not find job in current search

    • Abandoned = your team chose not to pursue working with candidate

Contract Acquisition Pipeline

    • Qualified

    • Scoping

    • Negotiation

    • Contract Agreement

  • Status

    • Open = your team is actively negotiating to work with a Client

    • Won = successfully acquired contracts

    • Lost = Client went with a different recruiting firm

    • Abandoned = your team chose not to pursue opportunity

Client Pipeline

    • Job Posting

    • Initial Interviews

    • Onsite Interviews

    • Final Interviews

    • Negotiation

    • Offer Sent

  • Statuses

    • Open = candidate is actively searching for position

    • Won = successful candidate search

    • Lost = candidate did not find job in current search

    • Abandoned = your team chose not to pursue working with candidate

What custom fields should a recruiting firm add to records?

When your team is creating custom fields on your people and opportunities, you’ll want to consider the best methods of categorizing and segmenting your large lists of candidates and clients. Eventually, you’ll have a significant pool of contacts stored in your system, so you’ll need these fields to break down your full list into smaller chunks or segments. Consider what are the ways you’ll want to group your candidates and clients.

We recommend creating the following custom fields:

People (aka Candidates) fields

  • Education - Multi-Select Dropdown: BA, BS, Masters, PhD, etc

  • Work History

  • Years Experience - Number field

  • Industry/Sector Experience - Multi-Select Dropdown

  • Roles Interested In - Multi-Select Dropdown

  • Geographical Preferences - Multi-Select Dropdown

  • Interests - Multi-Select Dropdown

  • Salary Range - Dropdown

  • Currently Employed? - Checkbox

  • Skills - Multi-Select Dropdown

Companies (aka Clients) fields

  • Industry/Sector - Dropdown

  • Company Size - Dropdown of ranges

  • Region - Dropdown

  • Interview Process Description

Opportunities (aka Candidates) fields

  • Fit - Dropdown

  • Timeline - Date Field

Opportunities (aka Clients) fields

  • Number of Interview Rounds

  • Salary Range - Dropdown

  • Negotiable Salary? - Checkbox

  • Compensation Package Type - Dropdown

  • Remote Position? - Checkbox

  • Required Skills - Multi-Select Dropdown

  • Required Experience (maybe sector specific)- Multi-Select Dropdown

On our Field Settings page, you can choose to make certain fields, like 'Email Address,' required so you capture the data you absolutely need.

Now let's talk about leads in the context of your client and candidate workflows.

Candidates:

Leads are not necessarily recommended, but can be used. In that case, they would be your un-contacted candidates. You would convert the lead to a person record when you decide to continue working with them in their job search. Your team can use this large list of leads to reach out to potential candidates you may want to work with. You can use the lead conversion process to qualify your candidates to ensure a strong pool. If you use leads, you might consider adjusting the following system fields:

  • Status: Uncontacted; Not yet qualified, Unqualified

  • Sources: Referral, University Outreach, Partner, Email, Website

Clients:

You probably won’t need to use leads, but one way that you might utilize this section is as a holding tank of companies for whom you’ve not yet worked with or provided your services. A lead conversion would be an agreement to work with a company to help find them strong candidates. You might edit the following system fields to enhance this workflow:

    • Status: Uncontacted; Assessing, Stretch Fit

    • Source: Referral, Email, Website

How should a recruiting firm structure it's teams and visibility permissions?

Typically we do not see teams set up in this use case, as most recruiting firms prefer open visibility and access across teams and users. If you do want to set up teams, you might consider teams based on geography or industry.

We recommend the following visibility settings:

  • Email - Open

  • Record - Open

    • Generally, recruiting teams work in a transparent ecosystem, unless they each recruiter is very specifically assigned to a Candidate or Client

    • If you’re not using Projects, you can remove Projects from

  • Reports - Open

    • You’ll only want to restrict reporting if your team does not work collaboratively

What integrations could benefit a recruiting firm?

You could use Zapier to do the following:

  • Automate congratulatory emails to candidates that are successfully placed

  • Set up recurring or periodic tasks

Still have questions?

Still have questions? Ask in our Community, and get answers from our Customer Success Team as well as fellow users.

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