SmartRecruiters Blog

Stop Tracking Applicants and Join the Hiring Success Movement

For far too long recruiting technology has not been aligned with hiring success and applicant tracking systems have been designed to do just that – track applicants. As a result, technology providers of these solutions have failed miserably in help companies engage and hire the best talent in a meaningful way.

For far too long recruiting technology has not been aligned with hiring success and applicant tracking systems have been designed to do just that – track applicants. As a result, technology providers of these solutions have failed miserably in helping companies engage and hire the best talent in a meaningful way.

The primary reason is enterprise applicant tracking systems were designed over 15 years ago to automate the application process by replacing paper with a computer. While this made a lot of sense at that time, recruiting technology hasn’t evolved at the pace required. And more importantly, it just doesn’t work in a competitive marketplace for hiring great talent.

How do we know it doesn’t work?

  • Today, 97% of candidates who are interested don’t apply or don’t complete the application process once they start.
  • 95% of hiring managers we speak to don’t use, and don’t want to use an applicant tracking system. They rely on email back-and-forth and a manual process. These managers also complain about recruiting.
  • Recruiters find as many workarounds as they can because there is layer after layer of technology to cover up all of the pain points, also known as the frankenstein syndrome.

Four years ago I made a decision a decision to build a single leading-edge platform to actually make hiring easy and more importantly make our customers successful in hiring. And while making customers successful in hiring is a bold statement for a technology provider, it’s the foundation that we have built the SmartRecruiters hiring success platform around.

How do we define hiring success? Simply put, it’s finding and hiring great people. This is accomplished by extraordinary recruiters who focus on a modern hiring process, including:

  1. Marketing: Targeting campaigns for active hiring and pipelining, investing wisely based on position and delivering the right candidate experience.
  2. Collaboration: Screening talent and selling as a team to get to a quality short list, comparing feedback to make the best hiring decisions and aligning efforts in one group conversation that flows in real time.
  3. Insights: Democratizing access to key metrics, Helping hiring teams answers their own questions and optimizing decision making on the fly.

All of this should be done through one platform and ecosystem, where you are in control and compliant. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done for companies that have a recruiting process that isn’t optimized or even worse for those that have had to purchase add-on modules to their applicant tracking system that didn’t work properly in the first place. This is the reality of a bad situation, primarily because there was no real alternative.

The good news is that thousands of companies have already made a decision to abandon their applicant tracking system and declare a commitment to achieving hiring success. And hiring success is more than a marketing slogan, it’s a real statement that SmartRecruiters is here to help companies be successful in hiring. And now today, there is finally an alternative for for the worlds largest companies who want to stop tracking applicants and start hiring great people.

Jerome Ternynck

Jerome Ternynck is the Founder & CEO of SmartRecruiters, the industry's premier talent acquisition suite to find and hire great people.