6 Best Practices to Maintain a Top-Quality Recruitment Contact Database
Has it been some time since you cleaned up your contact database? Do you sometimes run into the problem of having duplicate, inaccurate, inconsistent, outdated, or simply missing candidate data? Regardless of how large your database is, timely clean-ups can help recruiters and talent acquisition teams improve their workflow and maximise their efficiency.
What is a Contact Database in Recruitment?
What are the Benefits of Tidying Up Recruitment Candidate Database?
- Increased Reliability and Accuracy of Contact Information
- Boosted Productivity and Efficiency
- More Accurate Progress Tracking
6 Best Practices for Tidying Up a Contact Database
- Have a Backup and Recovery Plan
- Define Your Data
- Establish Clear Data Entry Protocols
- Update Existing Information
- Segment the Database
- Clean Up the Contact Database in a Timely Manner
Conclusion
What is a Contact Database in Recruitment?
A contact database is where candidate data is entered and stored by recruiters, hiring managers and talent acquisition teams, which is referred to during the recruitment process. This helps talent teams organise and track their potential candidates and acts as a searchable database to look up candidates of interest at any time, aiding in filling job openings.
This contact database can appear in different formats, ranging from a rudimentary spreadsheet to a candidate relationship management (CRM) database, to a more specialised, targeted recruitment software.
What are the Benefits of Tidying Up Recruitment Candidate Database?
Recruitment and hiring teams can reap several benefits with a cleaner, more organised contact database.
1. Increased Reliability and Accuracy of Contact Information
This comes with removing all duplicated, unnecessary, outdated and missing information in the contact database, allowing teams to avoid second-guessing candidate details throughout the recruitment process. This helps teams avoid making costly mistakes that could lead to candidate dropouts as they are able to accurately analyse candidate data to make informed decisions.
2. Boosted Productivity and Efficiency
Having a contact database with the most up-to-date, relevant and accurate information that is easily accessible makes it easier for teams to filter through the information they need on demand. With recruiting teams not spending chunks of time trying to make sense of a messy database, they have more time for other key tasks to drive placements such as keeping candidate engagement high, as well as investing time into nurturing client relationships.
3. More Accurate Progress Tracking
With an up-to-date database, teams can more accurately track the progress of each candidate through the sourcing, interviewing, hiring and onboarding stages. Besides that, they can track all interactions and communications with candidates to avoid overlapping and duplicate candidate engagement and find communication gaps immediately.
6 Best Practices for Tidying Up a Contact Database
Want to tidy up your contact database but not sure where to start? Here are some tips you can start using today to kick start the cleaning process.
1. Have a Backup and Recovery Plan
It is recommended you have one to ensure your data is safe. Start by making a copy of your contact database in case you run into any problems during the clean-up.
2. Define Your Data
To figure out what data to keep and delete, you must first determine which data matters to your recruitment process. From there, you can begin to get rid of irrelevant and redundant information from your database.
3. Establish Clear Data Entry Protocols
Having clear guidelines for data formatting, abbreviations, and mandatory fields ensures that there is data consistency. It also ensures that all important and necessary information is entered, preventing gaps in candidate information.
Besides that, standardising the data entry ensures that all information keyed into the database has the same format, such as email addresses, addresses (st. or street?), gender (F or female?), and countries (USA or +1?), to name a few.
4. Update Existing Information
Where possible, it is important to make sure that existing data is up to date, such as contact details, company information and job titles, while also removing any outdated information. Do take note to also remove any duplicate entries for greater accuracy.
5. Segment the Database
Depending on how big your organisation is and how many stakeholders require access to the database, it may be helpful to segment the data into more relevant parts for various stakeholders such as recruiters or hiring managers.
6. Clean Up the Contact Database in a Timely Manner
It goes without saying that frequently cleaning and maintaining your contact database helps to ensure that your information is consistently updated, accurate, and organised, hindering bottlenecks from surfacing in your recruitment process.
By following these tips, you can rest assured knowing that your contact database is well-organised with easily accessible, accurate and up-to-date data that you can rely on throughout each stage of your recruitment process.
If you find that you have a limited candidate contact database after doing a clean-up, and you want to fill roles despite this problem, you can make use of AI-powered sourcing tools like Scout which can help you increase your fill rate and cut down on your sourcing time by half.
Conclusion
Regardless of the size of a contact database, it is worth investing some time into tidying it up as accuracy helps streamline the recruitment process and boost productivity. This can be done by first defining what datasets are important and necessary, establishing data entry protocols to ensure that the data entered is consistent, and keeping the information updated.
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