Salesforce Couldn’t Handle This Private Equity Firm’s Unique Requirements

The firm’s internal recruiters use their comprehensive network of contacts to find the right people to add to these re-tooled leadership teams. They need visibility into their relationships and talent pool across their portfolio of companies—including executives’ qualifications, experience, attributes, and geographic location—to ensure the best possible match. They also use LinkedIn for enhanced analysis of candidates and their relationships.

The firm was using Salesforce and a homegrown system, which did not have the specialized, complex querying or resumé parsing functionality they required. Other best-of-breed systems for tracking the hiring process were evaluated but also fell short. So, the firm turned to HSO, which had already been engaged to replace Salesforce with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as their financial Services CRM.

Dynamics 365 offers out-of-the-box functionality for searches, which allows the user to do keyword searches and even complex querying. However, the firm’s highly complex needs required querying skills that most people without a programming background don’t possess.

The firm required a system with that robust querying functionality, but with an easy-to-use interface that would enable recruiters themselves to quickly search deep into records based on specific criteria. For example, a recruiter might need to search for a C-level executive with an MBA, a background in Finance, and a willingness to relocate to Asia. The recruiter could then save the result of the configured query and start working to build more of a relationship with the resulting list of candidates.

The new solution has not only reduced what before required two systems plus Outlook to a single financial services CRM system but now non-technical users can execute very customized queries quickly and easily. For example, they can now search for candidates who have held the position of COO, have a certain number of years in Operations, live in the Northeast, attended a specific school or have a specific degree, worked at a specific company or in a specific industry, AND have worked with specific technologies. Any information about a candidate that can be “tagged” can be included in a query. The more tags used, the more specific the resulting list.

The simplicity of the new Power App, along with the fact that it looks and feels just like the firm’s Dynamics 365 CRM solution in which it is embedded, reduced training time to nearly nothing. Sophisticated reporting on pipeline and candidate dossiers saves recruiters immeasurable hours, enabling them to focus on gaining more value from their searches than the administration of the system.