Most recruiting systems are clunky and outdated, and employees don’t use them for sourcing executive candidates. As a result, your firm lacks a single source of truth for its executive searches.

The typical recruiting system is not user-friendly when it comes to sourcing. Human Resource Executives call these large applicant tracking systems (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) databases “the bane of most sourcers’ jobs.” And firms agree. Karen Burke D’Agostino, partner at executive search firm Polachi, called their talent-relationship management system based on a homegrown database “old, slow, and painful.”

When your sourcing staff can access information you’ve collected in past searches, they can move ahead more efficiently.

But the lack of user-friendliness for sourcing makes it unlikely that your staff will use your recruiting system during this stage. When your staff doesn’t use your system for sourcing, the data becomes outdated, which makes it even less attractive to use. This ultimately hurts your firm’s sourcing function. Because your database has outdated and incomplete information, your staff has to start from square one for each search, costing them in productivity and morale.

Ultimately, this hinders your ability to find the top-shelf candidates that can set your firm apart from others.

Three factors determine whether your sourcing staff will adopt your system

Thrive TRM is a recruiting and talent management platform created specifically for the executive search industry. Built entirely based on input by top executive recruiting firms, it offers a modern alternative to legacy executive recruiting software. It has earned rave reviews, and its users have placed more than 6,000 managers, professionals, and board members.

In its work with recruiters, the Thrive team has found that three factors are especially important for sourcing staff to adopt a system. The system must

  • be user-friendly;
  • support and enhance employees’ existing workflow; and
  • be an integral part of how the work happens.

Few systems offer all three.

1. Your team expects a modern, user-friendly interface.

People have become accustomed to the user-friendly interfaces made ubiquitous by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Your employees expect the same ease of use from their tools at work. Unfortunately, most recruiting systems lack modern capabilities and are difficult to use.

Poor user interfaces prevail among the common industry solutions. Jonathan Edwards, who heads up the executive search division at global workforce solutions company Wilson HCG, discovered this when evaluating options for executive search software. “Thrive was really the most obvious option,” Edwards said.

And firms that create their own systems find they deteriorate over time. D’Agostino said their homegrown database was “getting harder and harder to update, and it wasn’t interactive. It wasn’t in the cloud.”

Thrive’s modern interface is intuitively designed and based in the cloud to fit with how modern search firms operate.

See a snapshot of all active searches in Thrive’s dashboard, including status and recent activity.

Staff and clients can access their Thrive portal from any device. This means people can use the system with their preferred devices wherever they are, whenever they want. Like many firms today, Edwards needed a cloud-based system rather than Outlook-based, since he runs a Google- and cloud-based business

People can understand how to use Thrive easily. This makes collaboration easy, reducing training requirements and increasing adoption by staff and clients. D’Agostino says their clients “don’t even need a tutorial or walkthrough. You send them the link, they go in, and they can quickly figure it out.”

Thrive includes “smart searches.” The Thrive system includes a powerful search engine that can bring up information and connections between records. Edwards said that his multigenerational team learned the Thrive software with ease: “If you know how to use any web app, there’s nothing you can’t find in the Thrive TRM platform.”

With today’s technologies, predictive automation, rules, and AI, people expect no less.

2. Your team needs a system that makes their work easier.

For your associates and recruiters to use your recruiting system during sourcing, it must make their work easier. Current industry solutions require additional work and fail to provide value.

Many common customer relationship management and applicant tracking systems are broad solutions that are not specifically designed for the things your executive-sourcing staff need to do. They lack automated best practice workflows for executive search, collaborative communication features, and require manual entry of data. When your system fails to provide value to users, employees default to their own workarounds to find and record information during sourcing. Your high-paid executive recruiters shouldn’t be spending their days doing data entry — they need a system that works the way they work.

Thrive TRM was developed as a tool specifically for executive search, streamlining work during the sourcing stage and throughout the life cycle of a search. It pulls together people, collecting the necessary information and keeping everyone in the loop as the search progresses.

Quickly find relevant candidates in your database. Thrive’s Talent Management Platform lets you search on custom tags as well as standard candidate and company data.

Tagging makes the information more meaningful. Complete, accurate data in your system makes it a valuable resource for staff. This can include candidate, company, and industry data. But what really makes it valuable is the ability to tag fields to show connections between companies, contacts, networks, investors, and past searches.

Adding data requires no manual entry. This makes it much easier to maintain data quality and saves recruiters’ time. As associates conduct sourcing activities, they can update your database automatically and add new information from online professional profiles and resumes. They can add multiple candidates at once using our multilingual, enterprise-grade resume parser.

Clients and recruiters can update the system automatically. Clients can add feedback and complete candidate assessments directly via the collaboration portal or by sending an email. The information reflects automatically in the Thrive database, enriching the data with no extra effort required by staff.

The entire Thrive system is geared toward building better data with less effort.

3. People are more likely to adopt your system when their work happens directly in it.

Your recruiting system must function as the heart of their work if it is to gain widespread use by your sourcing team. This means the work happens in the system itself. Current industry solutions are fragmented, as people operate outside of the company’s recruiting system for the most part. This results in data being siloed in separate places like Google Docs, spreadsheets, and emails.

With Thrive, teams work and communicate directly in the platform. There’s no need for other applications like spreadsheets.

Send emails without leaving Thrive’s Search Management Portal. This streamlines outreach and enables better tracking and reporting.

For executive recruiting firms who use Thrive, the work happens directly in the system. It’s the first place they go when they begin sourcing activities. Take it from Kelly Kinnard, vice president of global talent at Battery Ventures. She says she uses Thrive “every day, all day.”

When all work happens and is recorded in one spot, you develop a single source of truth. This standardization makes work much more efficient for everyone. Team members can see past details, which reduces duplicate work. Marian Pond, vice president of executive talent at Lightspeed Venture Partners notes that “already, our process for managing talent is more formal and streamlined and we’re delivering better and quicker results for our companies.”

Here are a few of the things you can do inside Thrive:

  • Schedule meetings and manage your calendar
  • Assign tasks to teammates
  • Send, receive, and view past emails
  • Create and send reports
  • Collaborate with team members and clients
  • Collect assessments by recruiters and hiring teams
  • Gather hiring team comments and assessments of candidates
  • Move candidates from one stage to the next
  • Set automated email and in-app alerts to keep hiring teams in the loop

The biggest benefit? According to Kinnard, her firm now has “an online database of talent that we never had before.”

Delight your team with modern sourcing capabilities

Thrive was built specifically for the needs of today’s executive search firms. One of the biggest ways it benefits your team is by streamlining sourcing. It helps your team build a single source of truth to cut down on the legwork needed for every search. And the more your team uses your system, the more valuable it becomes to them with every search.

View our case studies to see how executive search firms like Polachi, WilsonHCG, and others have improved adoption and efficiency for their sourcing teams.

Ready to enjoy the benefits of a more powerful, streamlined sourcing process? Talk to us about Thrive today: Schedule your demo now.