SmartRecruiters prides itself on providing bespoke solutions to our customers’ recruiting challenges. The flexibility of our Talent Acquisition Suite means it can be easily applied to a variety of situations and demands, as well as integrate a wide variety of additional tools and features. So whether you’re recruiting globally, locally, in high volume or low, SmartRecruiters will give you the tools you need to achieve Hiring Success.

However, don’t just take our word for it. Below are links to summaries of our various customer case studies. Each one examines a particular SmartRecruiters customer, the recruitment challenges they faced, and how the SmartRecruiters ATS helped to overcome them.

How DFC Left The Dark Ages And Saved 900 Work Hours A Week

Financial giant DFC was trying to recruit for a global company with nothing but spreadsheets and email chains. Here’s how SmartRecruiters introduced them to high-tech hiring.

Equinox: Hiring the Best Personal Trainers for Every Fitness Club

Equinox relies on finding the best and most experienced trainers out there, and who better to recruit great trainers than great trainers themselves? With SmartRecruiters’ in-built collaborative features, Equinox could involve its expert professionals in every stage of the hiring process.

Brightsparks: How Recruiting Agency Uses Technology to go “Beyond the Resume”

Brightsparks needed a way to entice the time and technology conscious Generation Z. SmartRecruiters allowed them to easily create the employer brand they wanted to espouse and make it easy for busy students to apply.

IGI Sharpens Its Focus On Successful Recruiting

Audio-visual developer IGI may be at the forefront of video technology, but their recruitment was still relying on filing cabinets. That’s until SmartRecruiters helped them develop a system and brand that matched their own products.

Scality: Powering 100% Year-Over-Year Growth with Great Hiring Quality

Scality wanted to ensure it found the best professionals out there by using a long and multi-faceted recruitment process. Unfortunately, their first attempts resulted in ‘spreadsheet madness’. SmartRecruiters on the other hand allows them to easily create a clear standard process which could include all their technical expertise.

How Pluralsight Regained Perfect Hiring Vision with SmartRecruiters

Pluralsight was expanding, and needed to recruit fast. A slow legacy system was letting them down, allowing great candidates to slip through the net and buckling under their demands. Luckily, SmartRecruiters provided the streamlined and scalable platform they needed.

Christian Brothers Automotive: Growing a strong franchise by growing strong teams

As a successful franchise, Christian Brothers favored a decentralized hiring approach that let local store managers becoming recruiters. Unfortunately, their legacy tech was cumbersome and unwieldy to operate. SmartRecruiters allowed managers to quickly and easy put on a recruiter hat, meaning they could spend more time dealing with customers and not clunky ATS.

Colliers International: Closes more deals with stronger candidates

Recruitment at Colliers was tedious. What made it worse was that previous candidates and recruitment efforts went unrecorded, wasting time and resources that could be applied to future searches. SmartRecruiters turned that around and introduced a quick, easy and robust system – saving time, money and stress.

Expeditors: Lean Resources. Global Footprint. Robust Results

Expeditors chaotic system of emails and spreadsheets was damaging their candidate experience and brand, counting them untold potential great hires. SmartRecruiters revolutionized that and allowed Expeditors to project the image both it, and its candidates, wanted.

Gameloft: Finding The Best Candidates The World Over

With offices in over 30 countries, Gameloft knew it needed to rely on local recruiters to find local talent. However, in a vast company, you also need standardized practises and standards. SmartRecruiters provided the tools to allow a global company to recruit locally.

Indigo: Recruiting Platform Adds Joy to Customer and Employee Experience

Indigo knows happy workers make customers. The first step to creating a happy staff is to make sure they have a great candidate experience when applying. SmartRecruiters let Indigo develop their brand, send jobs to the boards and platforms they wanted, and bring in the large numbers needed to fill seasonal vacancies. All from one platform.

After breaking into the market in 2009, Scality quickly established itself as a world leader in object and cloud storage, working with around half a billion end users and some of the US’ most prominent companies, including Comcast and Time Warner.

What’s even more impressive is the fact Scality achieved all this with a relatively tiny staff. They had only 50 employees when starting out in 2009, increasing to around 200 in 2017. This reflects one important aspect of Scality’s hiring philosophy: quality over quantity.

Furthermore, in Scality’s business, quality is of utmost importance. Data storage is a big responsibility, with clients demanding a competent and professional partner they can trust to keep their data safe. Therefore, Scality can only afford to hire individuals who match their competency, company culture and professionalism.

Dealing With Brand-Destroying Tech

Attracting this kind of talent is no simple feat, while Scality’s small team also means each hire is of critical importance as hiring the wrong person could have dire ramifications.  Scality President and COO Erwan Menard explains:

“Just one hiring mistake can bring painful consequences that can add up to millions of dollars in lost opportunities.”

To ensure they only take on the best candidates, Scality must utilize a lengthy hiring process featuring deep collaboration between many different individuals. However, organizing such a system comes with its own issues, with Menard claiming their initial attempts at a homegrown system ended in everyone’s administrative nightmare: “spreadsheet madness”.

Furthermore, although the jobs Scality advertized required high levels of technical skill and professionalism, their job postings did not match this, creating a poor brand image that would dissuade the very people they were looking for from applying. Scality recruiter Eléonore Charles adds:

“It’s easy to forget that one person in the hiring process remains essential … the candidate. The very best candidates are in high demand and would view older technologies and processes as a red flag for joining a firm like ours.”

Curing Spreadsheet Madness

The flexibility of the SmartRecruiters talent acquisition suite means it’s equally effective for quickly staffing a new, expanding company, or  creating deep, lengthy and precisely engineered hiring processes. Here’s how:

• At its core, SmartRecruiters is a platform for hiring collaboration, allowing teams of various sizes to closely cooperate on the hiring process. Vital information is available instantaneously to anyone who requires it, while each member of the team can track, comment upon and rate candidates without the need for lengthy email chains or spreadsheets.
• SmartRecruiters also allows hiring teams to create personalized scorecards with which to closely assess potential candidates. This allows companies such as Scality, to rate candidates on the same criteria, resulting in an easy to digest and gauge company-wide opinion polls.
• Through built-in integrations, SmartRecruiters can quickly and painlessly post job advertisements to social media platforms and job boards. What’s more, one click applications creates a great candidate experience, creating an innovative hiring brand that matches Scality’s company culture.

Would you like to know more? Make sure to read the full case study, Scality: Powering 100% Year-Over-Year Growth with Great Hiring Quality.

As one of the world’s leading real estate empires, Colliers International has over 10,000 employees in 66 countries – including Australia. In fact, Colliers International Australia is one of the brightest success stories of the entire organization, with the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals ranking it among the 100 best outsourcing firms.

This achievement was thanks to the effort of 1,700 staff, a figure which has increased by 40% in the last year. However, as Liam Ovenden, Director of Acquisitions, Careers and Talent Management at Colliers International Australia explained to SmartRecruiters, that success wasn’t guaranteed. In fact, their hiring success was almost scuppered by a poor applicant tracking system.

Wasting Time In A Legacy ATS

Liam found their older applicant tracking system wasn’t evolving in pace with the recruitment market. What’s more, it was creating multiple points of contention across the company, resulting in wasted work hours and irritated staff. Liam explained:

“We found we were constantly engaging in tedious tasks. Loading a job was extremely time consuming, especially when posting to multiple sites. Any change in requirements, no matter how slight, was almost like reinventing the wheel.”

This software also let down Colliers in other areas, even in simple tasks such as keeping all candidates on record. Their legacy system made it too difficult to locate individuals who had been contacted in the past, no doubt adding to the tedium. What’s more Colliers was forking out money to post a new job every time a position needed to filled, even if they had previously interviewed someone perfect for the role.

All told, this situation was diminishing Colliers’ competitive advantage and most likely turning away potential applicants with a poor candidate experience.

From The Worst To The Best

Luckily, Colliers International Australia sought advice from their parent company, who suggested they look into SmartRecruiters. It’s a decision Liam Ovenden didn’t regret, adding:

“I’m pretty sure we were using one of the worst and most outdated legacy ATS platforms. Now I’m confident that we’re using one of the best talent acquisition suites available.”

Here’s how SmartRecruiters helped Colliers International Australia turn their hiring around:

• SmartRecruiters’ easy to navigate platform allows for collaborative hiring with multiple hiring managers. Each member of the team can view the work of the others and come to group decisions. This was especially important to Colliers Australia whose 26 offices are spread over a large geographic region.
• The platform also allows for seamless communication between both recruiters, team members and candidates. More importantly for Colliers, all candidate information is retained and easy to find. Even executives began to get involved in the process, namely because it was so simple.
• More engaging job postings, backed up by integration with social media platforms greatly reduced bounce rates, meaning candidate applications went up.

As a result of SmartRecruiters’ platform, Colliers saw their number of hires via referrals increase threefold, reducing the cost and time needed to fill positions.

To find out more about the partnership between Colliers International Australia and SmartRecruiters, read our case study, Colliers International: Leading global real estate firm closes more deals with stronger candidates.

In a recent article about Facebook’s “diversity”, a major news publication reported their employment as 69% male, 57% white, 34% Asian, 4% Hispanic  2% black and 3% other ethnics.  There was no mention of age or religion, or other important “protected” demographic categories. Their global head of diversity at Facebook said “we have a long way to go.”  Toward what?  Maybe Facebook hires a lot of Asians because, as a group, they stand out as performers in math and technology.  Maybe they hire a lot of Asians because their office is in a geographic location with high concentrations of Asians in the workforce, thus reflecting local demographics.

Should Facebook’s labor force reflect the percentages of these protected categories in the entire population (or the global population or in their local geographic location)?  Facebook said it is trying to generate more hires for “underrepresented groups” so I take it that achieving population distributions is their goal, though the value of this is not made clear.  If we apply the same standard to all other businesses, including 6 million small employers with an average of 10 employees, the cost of achieving the “desired” distribution and the implications for the quality and productivity of the resulting workforce become serious concerns with questionable benefits.

Consider an NBA team. Its small number of players (about 15 on a team) hardly represents the population distribution. I see no seniors, no short people, relatively few whites, Asians and Hispanics, and I would guess not many of Jewish persuasion or many other religions. Shouldn’t they be held to the same standard as Facebook or any other business?  The NBA hires based on skill and performance, it probably doesn’t care much what you look like (even if owners have personal views that are disagreeable, they hire based on skill).  Any firm that purposefully does not hire the “best” workers it can find for the jobs it has regardless of what they look like or believe will underperform (as would an NBA team that hired people my age to play).

A “Stanford fellow” observed “Clearly Facebook has to step up now and so something about these numbers.”  Really?  Well, I can barely use my cell phone, but I am available for one of the “senior” slots in their new demographically correct labor force.  Pressuring firms (or requiring it as some wish to do) to structure their labor force to match some politically determined distribution will diminish the productivity of the work force and the performance of our economy.  Firms must be able to hire the best workers available if we are to get the most out of our resources.

This article was written by William Dunkelberg from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

Every few years we get a new crop of business buzzwords to slog through. They waft in on the breeze, and all of a sudden they’re on everyone’s lips and marketing collateral. During the first internet boom we had ‘end-to-end solutions’ and ‘full-service provider’ coming out our ears. Now it’s hard to get through a business meeting without someone using the words talent, community or engagement — sometimes all three in the same sentence.

It’s easy to talk about talent, and about building community at work. The problem is that talent and culture and community are words that don’t mean anything if they aren’t put into practice. If you and I each had a nickel for every corporate recruiting brochure and annual report that uses the words “We Value Talent” in them we’d be on the beach in Grand Cayman right now, but just talking about talent doesn’t make a talent-valuing culture real.

It’s sad that anyone would think that you could get great people in the door at your company and keep them there just by flinging around the words “We value talent.” That defies everything we know about human behavior, specifically the observation that actions speak louder than words. If you truly value talent in your organization, it’s easy to show it. If you take just a few of our eight suggestions below you’re going to get better hires in the door faster, and you’re going to keep the people you’ve already got on board happy and (wait for it!) engaged.

1. Put a Human Voice in Your Job Ads

Use a human voice in your job ads. Great candidates are not going to care that your company has an Immediate Need. They won’t respond to job ads that talk right past them using the third person, like “The Selected Candidate will possess five years of Blah-di-Blah and speak Ancient Greek.” Awful third-person boilerplate like “The Selected Candidate will…” says to your valued future employees, “That Selected Candidate we’re referring to is obviously not YOU.” If you want people to care about your Immediate Need, talk to them as humans.

2. Remove the Electrified Fence

The best job candidates, people who could help your firm the most, won’t suffer the indignities of Black Hole recruiting. I’m talking about the electrified-fence Applicant Tracking System that stands between your talent-hungry managers and the brilliant people outside the wall who could help them. Take down the Black Hole system and replace it with a human recruiting process if you want worthy contributors to consider joining you.

3. Hire Adults and Unleash Them

Years ago I heard at a business conference that the administrative cost of managing an existing policy, no matter how trivial, would dwarf the cost of whatever problem the policy had been drafted to address within a few years. That makes sense — the more bureaucracy in your shop, the less effectively your sales-and-production engines can run. The remedy is to hire thinking adults and take the shackles off them. Reduce the number of policies, increase the latitude of everyone on your team from the front-desk receptionist up, and focus on the important stuff.

4. Put Culture First

Every day I talk to frustrated CEOs and VPs who say “We talk about all goals all the time, but we don’t hit them.” Expecting to hit goals because you talk about the goals is nonsensical. People already know what the goals are. If your environment doesn’t lend itself to frank and constant discussion about what isn’t working, or if it’s discouraged or forbidden to mention any aspect of the Emperor of Your Business’s naked state, then you can talk goals until you’re blue in the face with no improvement. Your culture is the whole shebang. If the trust level isn’t high enough to support truth-telling at every level, the words “We Value Talent” fall flat.

5. View Recruiting as a Team Sport

Companies that get and keep great people are companies that make recruiting a continual activity and charge everyone in the organization with cultivating contacts. Can you imagine a Procurement Manager saying “Gee, I hope none of my current suppliers goes out of business – I don’t know what I’d do!” They have backup suppliers on hand, and backups to the backups. Recruiting works the same way.

Every manager and every HR person should have a robust and vibrant network and connections throughout your industry and locale. Recruiting viewed as a wave rather than a set of particles becomes a cultural value in itself.

6. Market Your Jobs Like a Marketer

How do marketers get the word out about their products? They don’t splash ads all over creation and then complain that too many of the wrong leads came in. They take responsibility for their marketing efforts. You can do the same thing in recruiting. You’ll let the closest-in members of your tribe know about new job opportunities first. That means your employers, suppliers and customers.

If you need to spread the net more widely, you’ll let fans and followers of your company know about new jobs available. Throwing ads out into the void is just as bad as a job-seeker spraying the landscape with his resume. If you value talent, use your community in your talent-snagging efforts!

7. Build a Talent Community

Anyone who interacts with your company is a conduit to your next hire, if not your next hire him- or herself. In 2014, launch a talent community to keep your fans and contacts close at hand. It is easy and fun to start conversing with the folks who appreciate your company, use your products or want to work with you some day. Get them on a newsletter list or a LinkedIn Group, keep them informed and chatting about your company’s news and future plans and stop running job ads, once and for all!

8. Talk about Fear and Trust

All the motivational posters in the world and even the most alluring bonus plans won’t change the talent-valuing equation unless you talk about the energy in the room at every opportunity. Corporate, institutional and startup cultures can all get tight and tense when the fear level goes up, and your best employees won’t say a word. They’ll just give notice and move to a competitor.

It’s easy to show your team and the folks outside the palace walls that you value talent beyond the lip service level, if you do. Start with our list of action steps, and then invent your own!

Like Liz Ryan’s worldview? Follow her on Twitter (@humanworkplace) and Facebook! Send Liz a LinkedIn invitation at liz@humanworkplace.com. 

This article was written by Liz Ryan from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, the only platform managers and candidates love.