Government: Automating a candidate recruitment journey with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Synopsis

A major government department uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 (Dynamics) as its customer relationship management (CRM) system for its a flagship recruitment programme that serves communities across the UK. The CRM helps the department attract, convert, and nurture candidates — mainly through email marketing and events.

The department was using basic out-of-the-box Dynamics functionalities which need high levels of manual work. Tecknuovo worked with Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate to build integrations and automated functionalities that are now helping the department drastically reduce manual labour.

This is helping the department save time, use taxpayers’ money wisely, and help more aspiring candidates into roles through an improved applicant experience.

The challenge

The CRM functionalities that needed improvement fall into three categories: engaging with candidates through outbound marketing and events, managing and getting value from candidate data, and integrating the CRM with external services.

Engaging with candidates

The department’s Marketing teams were creating events and sending emails to candidates manually, taking up time and lending the process to human error.

Managing candidates’ data

The department was using bulky “extract, transform, load” (ETL) tools to transfer data in two steps: from spreadsheets to a staging database, and finally into the CRM. It also lacked a way of analysing and visualising candidate data to understand and make better decisions based on it.

Integrations with external services

Candidates engage with the process through other channels than just direct contact from the department’s Marketing teams. It wanted smart integrations that would track candidates’ progress through other means, based on information about them within the CRM.

Solving today

Customer Engagement module: Automating data visualisation

Our team used the Dynamics Customer Engagement module to improve how the department processes and gets value from its candidate data.

To let the department visualise and utilise the data its CRM holds about candidates, Tecknuovo created a data reporting function with Power BI.

It hinges on an integration that exports data from Dynamics to BigQuery in real time, skipping over the staging database layer that existed in the systems previous infrastructure. BigQuery builds data visualisation reports in Looker Studio, creating easily digestible insights on how much money and effort is being spent on which marketing activities, and how this affects candidate enrolment, onboarding, and success. The department can use this data to easily determine where to keep, shift, or remove priorities.

Customer Insights module: Automating email marketing and events (H3)

Tecknuovo used Power Apps to build a series of canvas apps that help the department’s Marketing team speed up and improve how they set up events, build customer journeys, and collect information about candidates.

Building candidate journeys

The Marketing teams were building candidate journeys manually. This is the flow of emails that invites candidates to events, sends reminders about them, onboards new candidates, and shares other information about the recruitment system’s process. Our team built a canvas app that sets this all up automatically. It draws on data like candidates’ geographical location to send them invites to events near them, and sends a customised flow of emails to each candidate according to known information about their journey so far.

Automating event generation

The department’s Marketing teams run 35 events per year, setting these up by manually feeding data into spreadsheets which a CRM team would then process to create each event. The canvas app lets Marketing team members easily select the information they need to create an event within the app. It then pulls together the information and specifications from the CRM data to create the event.

Real-time data synchronisation on events

At the events, the department teams were registering candidates’ attendance by checking them off in spreadsheets, which would then get sent for processing and uploading by the CRM team. To save time and effort, Tecknuovo’s team built a canvas app that synchronises event attendance data into the CRM in real-time.

Integrations with external services

Our team worked with Power Automate to build two other integrations with the Dynamics CRM: GOV.UK Notify and the recruitment system’s advisory services.

GOV.UK Notify

The GOV.UK Notify service lets public sector organisations send emails, text messages, and letters to users. Our team built an integration that lets Marketing team members send SMSs to the recruitment system’s candidates directly through the Dynamics CRM.

Recruitment system advisory services

The recruitment system offers candidates an advisory phoneline service that’s sub-contracted to an external supplier. We built an integration between this platform and the system’s CRM. It tracks and records each time a candidate makes an inbound call, and it shares information about scheduled outbound calls that an advisor needs to have with a candidate.

Building tomorrow

Upskilling teams on the tools

Our teams designed all of the integrations and apps to let the Marketing team to use them without relying on external support. They are intuitive, can be used easily at the user interface level, and need no manual configurations to work.

Our teams upskilled the department on how to use each application, leaving them fully independent of Tecknuovo or other suppliers to use the new and improved CRM.

Results

Minimising resource to save money

We started with a Tecknuovo team of four. As we quickly built out the CRM’s efficiency, we reduced the team to three, with one working part-time.

The efficiencies have also helped the department downsize its internal CRM team. Because we replaced the data processing requirement with automated tools, the department** now only needs half the resources**dedicated to managing the CRM’s data.

Time and cost efficiencies

We helped the department get rid of three unnecessary tools that were costing money and slowing its infrastructure down. We reduced reporting tools from two to one, and fully removed the staging database.

We also helped reduce the time to set up a candidate event journey from 210 weeks to 21. It previously took teams six weeks per event journey, which our processes have helped reduce to three days.

Finally, we reduced the processing time for candidate check-ins at events from 112 days to zero per year, thanks to our canvas app’s instant synchronisation.