Christmas may have been a month ago, but SmartRecruiters has one more little present for its users: a new product release.

On January 25th, SmartRecruiters rolled out its Winter 2018 product update to all users of the platform. The release came packed with quite a few developments – including custom data reports, and integration of regional social networks such as DACH’s Xing and China’s WeChat – however, one of the most extensive updates concerns parallel processing and universal profiles.

What Exactly Are Universal Profiles and Parallel Processing?

Parallel Processing allows a candidate to apply for multiple positions within a single company. This new development takes full advantage of our new Universal Profiles, which allow you to quickly and easily see every application made by a particular candidate via a new ‘All Applications’ tab.

On an industry-wide scale, only around 15% of candidates make multiple applications with a single employer, although that number fluctuates depending on the sector, industry and job type. For example, companies which tend to source younger, graduate applicants are likely to see higher numbers of parallel applications, especially for entry-level positions or internships. Universal profiles will be particularly useful to these kinds of SmartRecruiters customers.

How Does It Benefit Candidates and Hiring Managers?

Universal profiles are designed to benefit both the candidate and the hiring manager at the same time. For the candidate, the benefits are clear: they can now apply for more positions within their favorite company, increasing the chances of nailing down that dream job. What’s more, hiring managers can keep better track of your applications, reducing the chance they’ll be lost in the ether. These developments will also result in a better candidate experience by providing additional transparency and ease of communication.

These benefits also carry over to the hiring manager. The increased collaboration and transparency means embarrassing mistakes can easily be avoided, such as two separate hiring managers sending offers or templated rejection emails to the same candidate. Now, thanks to Universal Profiles, each hiring manager will know where a particular candidate is in the process of all their applications with the company, as well as who is handling these applications, allowing them to better tailor their responses and communications.

All-in-all, this leads to an increase in candidate satisfaction, which leads to better employees and ultimately, hiring success.

Additionally, for companies undergoing expansion, restructuring or reorganizing, universal profiles could be an invaluable tool for dealing with many current employees reapplying to different positions within the company.

An Opportunity to Change Up Your Recruitment Process

Parallel processing also offers the opportunity to get creative with your hiring processes. For example, it could be used to foster internal competition between hiring managers for particular candidates, imbuing your staff with new drive and determination in their recruitment efforts.

If that’s not your style, the very same functionality can be used to encourage new levels of collaboration and cooperation. The ability for each manager to see where a particular candidate has applied means communication between users is seamless. So, if a candidate has applied to multiple roles, hiring managers can now easily discuss which position for which the applicant is actually best suited.

How Was Universal Profiles Rolled Out?

Universal profiles and parallel processing will became available from January 25th as part of our Winter 2018 product release. We understand the changes could impact upon existing workflows, and so a two-month opt-in grace period will be available from the date of release. Customers eager to jump in and take advantage of all parallel processing has to offer are free to do so from day one, however, those who want to take longer preparing, training, or testing the changes on test accounts will also have the time they need.

After the grace period, parallel processing will be rolled out to all customers as part of the SmartRecruiters platform.

This season’s release is a hat-trick of practical use add-ons that will make your candidate pipeline more efficient, give you greater power to interpret data and enable you to expand into local markets.

Every season we release new features, expanding our ever-evolving TAS to make your hiring process easier. Last season that meant integrating with big names like Slack, Facebook, Google, and Amazon to reduce your clicks and encourage collaboration from hiring managers. Another excitedly awaited functionality rolled out in Fall 2017 was ‘delayed candidate rejections’ which enables recruiters to delay rejection emails so if they immediately know someone is a poor fit, they can delay notifications.

Each season is different but we are always after the same goal. Make hiring better. Our Winter 18 features focus on transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness with add-ons that help recruiters find candidates in local markets, process them without redundancy, and then review their own work processes with easy to use analytics to keep improving their process for their company and their candidates.

Universal Profile

One person one profile. Each candidate creates a single profile with up-to-date information.

In large companies who experience a high volume of both internal and external candidates all applying for multiple jobs it can be harder than you think for one arm to know what the other arm is doing. Nothing looks more unprofessional to a candidate than to receive communications from two different hiring managers from the same company who seem to be unaware of each other’s existence.

Now, with Universal Profiles, recruiters can eliminate this common pain point and work across departments to find the best fit for every job opening.

Universal profiles source up to date CRM information from the candidates before and after the application process allowing employers access to the current status of every applicant.

Our VP of Product Rebecca Carr adds that in the future, “a proprietary ‘job fit’ score will be further amended to these profiles from the new SmartRecruiters Ai  which is currently in beta.”

So you can even use these profiles to source candidates for future jobs and encourage internal mobility!

Report Builder

A full-suite reporting command center including native reporting engine, ad hoc report builder, and real-time data warehouse unique and accessible to each customer.

We all know there’s a difference between having something and actually using it. Like the abandoned treadmill in the corner of most garages, a data set is only as effective as our ability to interpret.

As HR evolves to be a more strategic function and analytics are required to better understand candidate quality, cost saving, and business velocity, Director of Product, Natalia Baryshnikova explains, “Organizations will be able to compose, run and schedule real-time reports on their personal data sets across all SmartRecruiters modules, including the core platform and upcoming CRM and AI modules.” Which means you can start putting your data to work for you today instead of at some distant point in the future.

Latest integration: XING and WeChat

After integrating with big names like Slack, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, there’s still more collaboration to be had.

Most recently we’ve gained partnerships with regional vendors like XING (Linkedin competitor DACH) and WeChat in China, and all of Asia to further glocalize our suite and make sure our customers can find the candidates where they need and when they need.