Moving to a new recruitment CRM: what to plan for

Moving to a new recruitment CRM does not have to mean losing your history or disrupting live work. What matters is agreeing, early and clearly, what moves across, who does the work and how you will check it.

Why moving feels risky

Years of candidates, clients, bookings and compliance records live in your current system. Moving them raises fair questions. Will anything be lost? Will it disrupt placements that are already running? How much of my team's time will it take?

Most of the worry comes from not knowing what will happen. A migration that is scoped clearly at the start, with someone accountable for the work, is far less stressful than one that is left vague.

What to look for in a supplier's migration

• A clear scope, agreed up front. You should know what will move across before work starts, not find out afterwards.
• Someone else doing the heavy lifting. Your team has a day job. Ask who actually does the migration work, and what they will need from you.
• A way to give your requirements that suits your team. Long meetings are hard to schedule around live placements.
• The option to do it yourself. Some teams prefer to import their own data. A good supplier lets you choose.
• A chance to check the result. You should be able to review your data in the new system and raise anything that looks wrong.

Questions to ask in a demo

1. What data can move across, and who decides?
2. Who does the migration work, your team or ours?
3. How do you gather our requirements?
4. Can we import our own data instead, and how does that compare?
5. What do you need from us, and when?
6. How do we check the data once it has moved?

Preparing for a move

• List where your data lives today. That means your current system, but also spreadsheets and shared folders.
• Decide what matters. Moving everything is possible, but it helps to know which records your team relies on most.
• Name one point person for the migration, so questions get answered quickly.
• Agree who signs off the data once it has moved.

Common pitfalls

• Leaving it to the last minute. Give yourselves time to plan, rather than squeezing a migration around a contract end date.
• Leaving out the people who use the data. Consultants know which records matter, so involve them.
• Not checking afterwards. Review the data in the new system before you rely on it.

How Edun CRM helps

Edun does the migration work for you. Everything can move across, and exactly what moves is agreed with you during migration requirements gathering, which is an asynchronous process.

If you would rather do it yourselves, you can import your data straight into Edun CRM using Edun's import pro-formas. Having Edun do it is simpler.

Frequently asked questions