We talk about data cleansing a lot, but its importance can never be undervalued. No matter how old your recruitment agency is, it’s crucial to ensure that everyone with access to your CRM is inputting data correctly and consistently. Bad habits can form over the years, which leads to extensive searches for candidates and poor matches for job roles.
In this blog, we’ve identified 5 CRM data cleansing tips to ensure you’re only left with quality data. After all, efficient Bullhorn CRM data management is essential for finding and contacting top candidates quickly.
Identify unreachable candidates
We’ve all been there – adding candidates or contact to a database because they’re perfect, but not including an email address or telephone number (or populating that mandatory field with TBC!). We can deal with that later. But later never comes, does it? Let’s be real here; you can never contact those people, so why clutter your searches with unreachables?
Instead of sifting through an extra 50, 100 (or more) candidates without contact information, clean them up. It’s good practice to either archive them or simply delete them.
On Bullhorn, to search for candidates without an email address, go to ‘Search’, then ‘Additional Criteria’, followed by ‘Work or Primary Email’, and finally pick ‘Exclude’. All emails contain an @, so excluding this symbol will bring up all your candidates without one.
To search for candidates without telephone numbers, follow the same process again, but choose ‘Direct Phone’ and exclude numbers individually from 0 to 9. It’s a bit more long winded, but it’s still worth doing. Within Bullhorn Automation, you can create these lists really easily, then build automations accordingly!
Clean out old records
Another top tip is to ensure your data is up to date. Records can be old or you might not have been in contact with them for a while. This can present a whole host of problems, such as whether candidates are still looking for roles or if they’ve changed their contact details. Regularly updating CRM records ensures your database reflects the most relevant and actionable information.
To search for old records on Bullhorn, go to ‘Search’, then ‘Additional Criteria’ and click on ‘Date Last Modified’. You can input a time period to search or you can also look before or after a specific date.
If you’ve been making notes on records (and we always recommend that you do), you can alternatively clean out old records by using the Advanced Note Searching feature. You can filter this by ‘Does Have’ and ‘Date Added’ to display records that don’t have a note added to them within any given time period.
Unless you’re a Bullhorn Administrator, you can’t mass delete records, so you might have to simply archive them instead. This way, it will be easier to bring them back into the system rather than starting from scratch, should you need to.
Merge duplicate records
How many records do you have for the same contact? Following consistent data entry and inputting is paramount to having clean data, and filling up searches with multiple versions of the same candidate is a waste of time. Removing duplicate records in your CRM not only declutters your system but also prevents inefficiencies like different recruiters contacting the same candidate multiple times.
To avoid this nightmare, identify your duplicates and merge them. You can do this in Bullhorn by navigating to ‘Actions’ and then ‘Merge Records’. You’ll need the ID number or name of the duplicate that you want to merge with. The primary contact should be the one with the most amount of notes or the most up to date. Doing this is irreversible within the Bullhorn CRM.
Set up required fields for specific data
Implementing CRM best practices for recruiters, like defining mandatory fields, can greatly improve your system’s usability. However, this doesn’t mean everything should be a mandatory field as this can be off-putting. To ensure your recruiters are logging key information, strike a balance and only make the absolute essentials mandatory fields for records.
On Bullhorn, administrators can set up required fields by going to ‘Menu’, then ‘Admin’ and ‘Field Mappings’. You can then select which fields you require to be mandatory. If you haven’t already done so, you can avoid unreachable contacts by making telephone and email required fields. Post code can be useful for radius searches, so you might want to consider that as well!
Correct typos and extra spaces
Typos and human errors will always persist, no matter the amount of training you conduct. This is another reason why regularly cleansing your data is an absolute must. A regular CRM cleanup process ensures errors like typos and inconsistencies don’t pile up over time. If you choose to do this monthly, quarterly or annually, try to stick to it.
To help future-proof this task, you might want to consider the following:
Do you have guidelines for naming conventions and data formatting?
Do you conduct training sessions to engage your CRM users?
Do you need a lot of free-form text fields in your CRM records?
Do you define permissions and user roles correctly?
Do you have a process for purging records after an extended period of inactivity?
By streamlining data entry, you can minimise the amount of typos, extras spaces, additional numbers, and everything else in your system. It won’t totally eliminate them, but it will make life easier. For additional insights on maintaining clean and accurate data, check out these CRM data management best practices.
Strong data hygiene for recruitment agencies improves placement speed and ensures the best candidates are matched to the right roles. So when it comes to data cleansing, you can’t be too careful. This can be achieved with the right know-how and proper guidance.
If you’re unsure where to start, get in contact with us and we will point you in the right direction.
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