2022 Fosway 9-Grid for Talent Acquisition

It means we’re helping TA leaders successfully evolve and scale their talent functions.

It means our customers are successfully hiring the talent they need using our software.

It means more companies are on the journey to Hiring Success. 

It means great satisfaction for SmartRecruiters employees who are hyper-focused on customer success.

Why It Matters

It’s no secret that recruiting has never been more difficult. Recruiters are overworked. It’s taking longer to hire. Budgets are stretched. The pandemic has changed the candidate landscape. This is keeping leaders up at night wondering how they will fill crucial roles. 

We also know that recruiting has never been more important. The ability to hire is the biggest challenge most leaders face in growing their business.  It’s imperative for companies to attract⁠—and win⁠—the best talent, and fast!  

Because of this pressure, companies are re-evaluating their tech stack and recognizing how critical it is to evolving and scaling their TA functions. As companies level up talent acquisition, they want to partner with a technology provider that helps them improve hiring outcomes. Fosway’s report gives customers confidence in their choice of a vendor because they trust the company’s rigorous independent research. It provides transparency into the performance, potential, presence, and cost of different providers.

Why SmartRecruiters?

Being new to SmartRecruiters when we started working through the evaluation process with Fosway, I was blown away by just how much progress we’d made with our product and customers in just a year.

In 2021, we zeroed in on recruitment marketing because we understand how it’s SO CRUCIAL it is for achieving Hiring Success. We invested in SmartJobs for next-generation programmatic job advertising, and we added Attrax – known for award-winning career sites – to the SmartRecruiters portfolio. And we added more than 150 additional features and capabilities to our suite.

We continue to lead the industry in data security, privacy, and global compliance, with a growing list of internationally recognized security and privacy standards. We recently earned SOC 2 Type II Certification with a distinguished clean audit, adding that to the list of ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA. And we went multi-cloud – with our suite now available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. 

Our ecosystem grew to over 650 partners. This doesn’t just make it easier and faster for our customers to build out the tech stack they need, but they also benefit from enhanced innovation driven by our partners.

As for customers, we added 300 new enterprises. And in total, our customer base has been able to accelerate hiring by nearly 400% in one year.

What’s Next?

Here at SmartRecruiters, we are relentless about exceeding customer expectations and leading the industry. We will continue to innovate, expand our platform and capabilities globally, and scale our team to deliver world-class customer success. 

As companies work to solve hiring, those best prepared for the future will be those who embrace modern talent acquisition technology.

We continue to believe the winners in this talent market will be those who evolve their talent teams and embrace modern talent acquisition solutions, like SmartRecruiters. 

Want to see SmartRecruiters’ talent acquisition suite for yourself? Click here to begin your journey towards Hiring Success.

We talk with the founder of the independent HR analyst firm, Fosway Group, to understand how the next generation of HR will transform customer and vendor relations.

Fosway Group, named for the ancient network of roads built by the Romans to connect Europe – The Fosse Way – takes on the credo of its namesake: “A straight path is always the best way.” For the Romans, the phrase was geographic, For Europe’s #1 HR Industry Analyst focused on NextGen HR, Talent, and Learning – it’s about solutions. Founded in 1996, this group of experts believes in being unusually direct, likening themselves to “a critical friend who cuts through the market hype.”

We sat down with the company’s founder and CEO, David Wilson, directly after his rousing keynote at Hiring Success 18 – Berlin Edition, for a frank talk on the future of HR tech innovation, and where vendors can step it up.

Why is recruiting becoming so important right now?

Every corporation that we talk to has “recruiting” or “war for talent” at the top of its agenda. We mostly work with European headquartered mid and large multinational companies, and in nearly all cases talent acquisition is a broken function.

…Why is that?

The reasons vary, of course, but we are seeing two main trends: a changing workforce and an aging-out of old, legacy software solutions for enterprise recruiting.

To expand on the former, soft skills shortages have become extremely acute, which is partly a result of the changing needs of an organization. To keep pace, the ever-shortening cycles of innovation, today’s businesses require “digitally savvy” employees. A phrase which means more than technical proficiency, but the ability to keep pace with the evolution of tools and practices.

As for the latter, it’s a matter of timing. Most of these businesses have gone through one renewal cycle with their hiring technology and are now due for a second, but rather than continue with a legacy system, companies are looking towards newer vendors that support new – more consumer-friendly, marketing-esque – recruiting processes.

What’s driving this process evolution?

We see an obsession with candidate experience. No one wants a transactional process anymore, unfortunately, the older systems don’t support that shift towards personalized application experiences, so organizations are looking for new tech solutions.

What’s blocking innovation in day-to-day recruiting?

Continued innovation in the solutions providers is almost irrelevant. What’s actually important is innovation in the customers using this technology.

The new toys matter only as much as they are adopted by the organization using the product. So vendors must not only continue to evolve their product but support innovation in their customers as well. It’s not enough to just send a laundry list of new features every quarter with no thought as to how organizations can actually adopt and start using them.

So then, what needs to happen?

After configuration, the interest in manual innovation really wanes in the customer. People don’t take a break from the daily grind to think about pushing the product further. I think the rate of change of innovation on the software side is much higher than that of the customers. Vendors need to focus on helping customers build a strong future success model around their product. It’s about showing the incremental value for the company going forward.

So, what does that mean? Two obvious avenues I see for vendors to do this are…

• Dynamic Optimization
• Evolving Business Case

To speak to the former, I am very interested in the potential of AI embedded in SaaP solutions to help users update at the point of need and according to their own patterns. Think about it! My assumption is, and I think it’s a pretty reasonable one, is that a vendor could configure a software solution around the processes of the user, without much change to the overall product, but a huge boost in new feature adoption; because the features being surfaced would be prioritized according to that particular user’s work patterns.

And as for the latter, an evolving business case should be a given for any annual recurring cost. Essentially the vendor creates a model for the future based on their product, for the customer. Tech providers are great at doing this the first time around, but the continued and increased benefits of the solution can be illustrated every year. The first year is this benefit, and the next year is the original benefit plus A, B, and C!

Deep partnerships between the vendor and customer are key going into the future!

For more on Fosway’s market analysis, visit www.fosway.com