Applicant tracking systems (ATS) were originally designed in the late 1990s to automate job seekers’ applications and for employers to track applicants. After leading corporate talent acquisition throughout my career, I know far too well that the ATS hasn’t evolved to meet the requirements for a competitive approach to recruiting today. As a result, many recruiting leaders have had to implement add-ons and modules to close the significant gap left by an outdated ATS.

Based on my experience, as well as networking with other recruiting leaders, here are 10 signs your ATS is stuck in the 90s and you should ditch it for something better. Like now:

1.  Candidate experience and drop-off rates

• 1990s: Your ATS shouldn’t be designed like a retailer site that has a shopping cart, account functionality, or one that requires a username and password.
• 2018: Your ATS takes one click to complete and submit an application (after clicking apply) on your career site.

2.  Employee referrals and turning every employee in your company into a recruiter

• 1990s: You expect your employees to visit an outdated employee referral page on the company intranet to constantly see what new jobs are open and think through who they might know.
• 2018: Your ATS automatically matches your jobs to your employees’ professional networks and proactively markets matches.

3.  Your talent database of applicants, candidates and leads

• 1990s: Performing a search in your ATS leaves your recruiters scratching their head wondering why a software engineer search in Silicon Valley pulls up administrative assistant candidates in New York.
• 2018: You can easily leverage your proprietary database and perform easy, results-driven searches that work.

4.  Interview and selection activities

• 1990s: Hiring in your company is not a collaborative effort and your process is reliant on email updates and voice mails between recruiters, hiring managers, and interview teams.
• 2018: Your ATS naturally engages your hiring teams and is easy to use. It has an app and a desktop version that provides a social feed of all hiring activities, as well as enabling real-time candidate ratings and interview feedback.

5.  Reporting and analytics 

• 1990s: You are pulling information from multiple sources, relying on spreadsheets, candidate self selected source data and third parties to painfully get basic reports.
• 2018: Your ATS is the single source of information and easily provides this information at a program-wide view as well as by job. Everything from job board contracts and agency spend is in one place and guides your best investment decisions.

6.  Corporate career site and marketing

• 1990s: You rely on Marketing and IT resources for any needs related to branding and your corporate career site. You spend most of your time building project plans and attending internal meetings.
• 2018: Your ATS allows you to quickly build or update your corporate career site and instantly deploy a new landing page for specific audiences you are targeting. It also creates search-engine-optomized ads directly from your ATS.

7.  Marketing and distributing your jobs

• 1990s: You use third party functionality to post your jobs, or you are posting them on each site manually.
• 2018: Your ATS automatically distributes your jobs to any job board or network, provides responsive job ad functionality and enables you to manage all of your contracts in one place.

8.  Managing external recruiters

• 1990s: Your process isn’t compliant and external agency or search firm recruiters are emailing candidates directly to hiring managers or internal recruiters, outside of your ATS.
• 2018: All of your recruiters are in your ATS, including agencies and search firms, allowing you to control costs, manage candidate delivery and analyze agency results.

9.  LinkedIn as a sourcing and branding strategy

• 1990s: Your recruiters are required to go back-and-forth between LinkedIn Recruiter and your ATS.
• 2018: You automatically know if a candidate is in your ATS while sourcing in LinkedIn Recruiter. You can also quickly and easily jump from a candidate profile in LinkedIn Recruiter to a candidate profile in your ATS, as well as automatically import LinkedIn profiles and InMail conversations.

10.  CRM capabilities for sourcing and lead generation

• 1990s: Your ATS was designed to track applicants once a candidate applies, but can’t manage lead generation, sourcing, and relationship activities.
• 2018: Your ATS has sophisticated CRM capabilities built directly within the system and you aren’t using another vendor to provide what your ATS can’t do.

This list is just the beginning of identifying pain points that recruiting teams face every day, just by using an outdated ATS. Your recruiting technology strategy shouldn’t include a patchwork of integrations and add-ons just because your ATS doesn’t meet your needs.

Every feature listed here already exists in the SmartRecruiters all-in-one Talent Acquisition Platform. Take a look for yourself to learn why recruiting teams are ditching the ATS for hiring success.

You need to make new hires, but with so much choice online, where is best to post your job openings and expect to find the right candidate? Niche job boards are one solution, that should allow you to attract top talent, and deliver quality candidates with experience or interest in your specific industry (updated Dec 2017). The best job search sites include not only niche job boards, but also niche communities and niche publications.  SmartRecruiters’ customers have posted over a million jobs using our online recruiting software. We’ve found that 62% of open jobs are posted to niche job sites.

The Best 50 Niche Job Sites in alphabetical order

To attract talent that is driven to work in your industry and be the best in their field, post your job openings to the appropriate niche job boards, niche job sites and publications. With SmartRecruiters free recruiting software, you can post job openings to all these sites in one click.
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Adrants

Advertising jobs from your favorite advertising website, Adrants.

AllRetailJobs.com

The #1 job board for the Retail Industry.

Artconnect

Find artists from anywhere in the world. Sort postings by city or discipline and be inspired by the boundless creativity.

Authentic Jobs

Where companies and creative professionals meet to make a better web.

Beyond.com

Beyond.com is the one career network as focused as you are!

ClearanceJobs

ClearanceJobs is the premier secure job board focused exclusively on candidates with active or current U.S. government security clearances.

CollegeRecruiter.com

Newest job posting ads from CollegeRecruiter.com, the leading job board for students searching for internships and recent grads looking for entry-level jobs.

coroflot

Design-driven companies worldwide use Coroflot to recruit outstanding creative talent.

CrunchBoard

CrunchBoard gives you access to the millions of technology and business savvy readers of TechCrunch, MobileCrunch, CrunchGear, TechCrunch IT and is one of the most popular job boards for internet and tech jobs.

Culintro

Culintro is a national restaurant organization. Members have access to the fastest growing culinary job board, culinary internships and networking opportunities.

Dice.com

Dice.com is all about celebrating tech and tech careers – advice, community and having some geeky fun.

DiversityJobs.com

DiversityJobs.com is a job search engine that finds job listings from company career pages, other job boards, newspapers and associations.

Doostang

A community of over 1 million elite professionals with inside access to thousands of jobs from top employers.

eFinancial Careers

eFinancialCareers is the leading global career site network for professionals working in the banking and finance industry.

energyfolks

Energyfolks is a growing network of energy interested students and professionals from across the world’s top universities.

FinancialJobBank

FinancialJobBank.com is the premier career site for job seekers and employers in the Accounting and Finance industry.

FlexJobs

FlexJobs is an award-winning job site for part-time or full-time flexible jobs, such as telecommuting or flextime, in 50+ categories, entry-level to executive.

Geebo

Nationwide free classifieds for housing, rentals, roommates, employment, jobs, vehicles, autos, sale.

Vercida

Vercida connects your company to a diverse array of candidates, and help employers create a work environment that’s equitable for all.

Healthcare Jobsite

HealthcareJobsite.com is the premier career site for job seekers and employers in the Healthcare industry.

HireFlyer

HireFlyer.com is the top job search website solution online.

IT Job Pro

#1 IT Job Site, ITJobPro.com is a HUB for IT Professionalism world-wide looking for employment in Information Technology.

Joblux

Luxury Brands and Retail Careers Network.

JobsInLogistics.com

The #1 Job Board for the Logistics Industry.

JobsInManufacturing

For all positions in plant management, production planning, materials management, engineering, maintenance, purchasing and logistics.

JobsInTrucks.com

The #1 Driver Job Board.

Juju

Juju.com is a job search engine, not a job board. Juju’s comprehensive search results link to thousands of employer career portals, recruiter websites, job boards, and other employment sites all over the Internet.

Krop

Creative & Tech jobs.

The Levo League

Levo League is a thriving online and offline community of young professionals, role models, and innovative companies taking Gen Y by storm.

Mashable

The Mashable job board is great for finding bloggers, consultants, designers, developers, executives, marketers, and mobile programmers.

mediabistro.com

Community, jobs, courses, news, and resources from mediabistro.com and beyond. Please note that featured jobs posted to this feed are #paid.

RecruiterMedia

Offers a smart alternative to universal employment websites with the only national, city-specific, job board on the planet!

Sales Gravy

SalesGravy.com connects top sales professionals with organizations looking for sales talent.

SalesHeads

SalesHeads.com is the premier career site for job seekers and employers in the Sales industry.

Simply Hired

We are a job search company whose goal is to make finding your next job a simple yet effective, enjoyable journey!

SnagaJob

The largest part-time and full-time hourly job resource. Check out their 4 Easy Steps to Recruiting Hourly Workers.

StackOverflowCareers

Careers 2.0 matches great programmers on Stack Overflow with great jobs.

Tech Careers

TechCareers.com is the premier career site for job seekers and employers in the IT and Engineering industries.

TechFetch

Tech jobs for top talent. Their vision is to create a global tech workforce community and empower them with opportunities to deliver global technology solutions.

TipTopJob

TipTopJob is the Generic Job Board that covers over 35 industries – search and apply for jobs online.

TweetMyJobs

Leading social and mobile job distribution network. We provide job seekers with great job matches where they want them, when they want them.

VentureBeat

The VentureBeat Job Board is great for finding people in IT, tech marketing and advertising, product management, and business development.

WayUp

Your source for the latest internship trends, tips, and access to great internship opportunities.

YouTern

YouTern connects emerging talent with dynamic start-ups, change oriented non-profits and passionate entrepreneurs – through internships!

Post and share your job to 200+ job boards in minutes.

SmartStart is free recruiting software for teams and smaller organizations of up to 250 employees.

Post Jobs for Free

Close your eyes and think about the last time you applied to a job. Was it hard? Were you frustrated? Did you consider dropping off at any point? If you answered ‘yes’, you are not alone. Over 74% of jobseekers get frustrated and drop off due to application length and/or complexity.* Truth is, being a jobseeker sucks! It’s hard to find the right job, it takes too long to apply to that job, and then you wait in what is known, across candidates, as the “resume black hole”. But as a company looking for great talent, how does that “resume black hole” affect your business?

Let’s start with the impact of a poor candidate experience: This has proven to extend beyond Human Resources and Talent Acquisition, directly influencing a business’ bottom line. A poor candidate experience not only deters the candidate from future jobs as well as the products / services of the company but it also affects the choices of their inner circle. Today, in this connected world, that experience and those opinions can travel far beyond that inner circle. Poor candidate experience = loss of great talent + loss of customers.

On the flip side, that connected world can allow for a positive candidate experience to travel just as far and fast, and in many cases, will lead to an increase in candidate volume, hires, and referrals. A healthier candidate pipeline and seamless apply-to-offer process will result in increased quality of hire, lower cost per hire and shorter time to fill. This ultimately will positively impact the bottom line.

Want this response from your candidates?

We, at SmartRecruiters, want to help companies of all shapes, sizes, and colors make their candidate experience a competitive advantage. Across our Corporate and Global editions, we see an average of 65% candidate conversion ratio (that’s only 35% drop off or 2x better than the rest of the systems out there) and 85% candidate satisfaction rating. With our launch of SmartStart, we want to extend this opportunity to small businesses for whom it is even harder to find great talent. At the same time, we are excited to impact the lives of millions of candidates by providing a top tier candidate experience and help them find their dream job.

We’re going back to our roots and staying true to our mission: Connecting people to jobs at scale. By introducing SmartStart, companies and teams with <250 FTEs now have access to a world-class recruiting software for free. Yes, free. As a result, tens-of-thousands more jobs and millions more candidates can now seamlessly connect.

Here’s to happier candidates and connecting people to jobs at scale!

You are who you hire,
Charlie

Today marks a very exciting day, both for SmartRecruiters and for the overall recruitment technology industry. It also marks an interesting and innovative pricing and packaging alternative to what 99% of software companies provide.

With the launch of SmartStart, we are now providing our world-class recruiting solution – the same one more or less used by folks like Visa, Optimizely, IKEA, and even 200,000+ employees at Bosch – absolutely free – to 99% of the businesses worldwide.

There is no catch, no hidden surprises, no missing features, and no forced upsell.

For companies hiring less than 10 people at a time (which is about 250 employees or less) our core next gen recruiting product is free. And according to US Census Data, there are 18,204,679 companies in the US and 18,136,977 of them have less than 250 employees.

Starting today, 18,136,977 companies in the US and an order of magnitude more than that worldwide, can use in my mind (I am biased) the best recruiting solution in the market for free.

This is in a way a return to our roots.

For those not familiar with SmartRecruiters, we started as a completely free software with an integrated market-place. We then, like other tech companies do, started to add “miums” to get people to pay more for the free software and so on. However, along our commercialization journey we discovered that there was terrific demand from and defensible differentiation for mid-enterprise to large global organizations. This was simply because these organizations were already using sub-par recruiting technology which was hurting their ability to compete for great talent and they completely and quickly “got it” why we were better. It also helped that they had readily available money to spend. This then became our primary go-to-market and we have effectively competed here vis a vis the legacy laggard HRIS and recruiting tech competitors.

So the question is – why not just ignore that market segment that isn’t your primary focus? Why bother with launching what appears to be a silly business offering – the same great product for free for 99% of the world’s companies?

I will tell you why:

Because We Can. The secret sauce of SAAS providers is that for most companies, the variable cost of supporting an incremental customer (at least from a software development and hosting perspective) is de minimis. Our success up-market allows us to cover financially whatever incremental expense is borne by supporting our SmartStart customers. Furthermore, unlike most software companies which serve the enterprise and lose the plot in regards to ease of use and as such can’t effectively serve SMBs, our platform is and must always be incredibly easy to use – otherwise candidates and hiring managers, the two populations that most ATS’s ignore/abuse, would reject the software in less than five seconds.

Because We Should. Per the last point, ensuring that we have a product that 99% of the world’s companies can easily sign up for and use in a self-service manner will continue to keep our product and design teams honest and prevent us from becoming Taleo in 2027 that everyone has selected but hates. With SmartStart we will immediately add thousands of customers (albeit free) who may not provide immediate revenue today but will likely become amazing brand advocates and buzz-generators (which is often priceless) and some of them will grow large enough at some point to pay us for our software.

Because We Care. This is the most important reason. Our mission at SmartRecruiters is to connect great people to great jobs. Frankly, it is simply too hard for companies to find the great talent they need to thrive and achieve their goals. Given our raison d’etre, given our business success and given the fact that we can offer a great free offering for 99% of the world’s companies without it being what our investors might call a “great distraction”, we simply believe we must do it. Anything to the contrary would be disingenuous to the higher purpose we are trying to serve at SmartRecruiters.

You are who you hire,
Brett

At SmartRecruiters, we strive everyday to make recruiters and their teams more productive with innovative integrations and features. Part of our product development process is figuring out how we can make the candidate inquiry-to-hire process shorter and more delightful for everyone. With this month’s product release, we’re making the offer process easier to close and hire the best talent.

One of the most difficult problems recruiters deal with is how to simplify the candidate offer management process. Time and time again, recruiters have told us that they’ll send a PDF, then a candidate will download it, then they PRINT it out on paper (!!), sign it, RE-SCAN the filled form, upload it, and if anything about is incorrect, they have to go the entire process AGAIN. It’s really cumbersome, and can get in the way of finalizing a hire.

This clearly is not an easy process to bring the best talent to your organization.

And that changes today.

With SmartRecruiters’ new Docusign integration, it’s now easier than ever to get your candidates to sign on the (digital) dotted line! Furthermore, we’ve removed the obstacles of dealing with the mess multiple PDFs, printing, scanning, and other document nightmares.

Recruiters can now send a digital document, and signers can e-sign offers in minutes – even on their mobile device.

Here’s why this integration means a lot to us: our main goal was to make sure the user’s experience would reflect both Docusign’s depth of configuration, while feeling native to SmartRecruiters’ simple and easy to use interface.

But we won’t stop there. In building this integration, we asked our current clients what was critical when sending an offer and this is what we heard:

1: Attaching multiple documents – SmartRecruiters’ Docusign integration will not only support just sending offers, but recruiters can attach everything from NDA’s, invention agreements, benefits summaries, and more. They can also set a custom order for these documents. It’s robust and flexible.

2: Sending to multiple signers – Frequently, an executive will sign an offer before it is sent to a candidate, or recruiters may want to send a document to finance so they are kept up to date on the candidate’s signing progress. SmartRecruiters now supports multiple signers as well as multiple signing roles in Docusign.

3: Pre-set signing locations – Do you have to explain to your signers where to sign on complicated documents? Not a problem anymore: on documents you send, administrators can pre-set signing locations and different types of data to support even the most complex legal documents.

4: Mobile Signing – People are using their phones and mobile devices for business uses more and more each day. With the mobile optimized integration, candidates can now receive offers on their mobile phone, and sign immediately on their screen. It’s now easier than ever to close your newest employee.

By the way, everything I mentioned above doesn’t even begin to cover all the cool things about our Docusign integration. Things like saving all your documents after sending and signing, an automatically updated “offer accepted” candidate’s status, and a simple Docusign Login Integration are all included.

The bottom line is this: I remember the first time I used Docusign to e-sign a lease and it was like magic. And I can’t wait to get this into our clients hands to see how it changes the way they send and sign offers. You can forget about a million other little steps just to get a document finished. With Docusign and SmartRecruiters, all it takes is send and sign.

New research conducted at the recent HR Technology conference in October 2015 provides insight into how traditional software is failing today’s Talent Acquisition leaders. In short, the old software does little to actually help TA acquire talent.

Instead it forces recruiters to use an unruly and unhelpful set of tools that kills recruiter productivity, fails to meet the needs of hiring managers, and provides no actionable insight into the TA process.

These findings are easily absorbed from a new infographic that summarizes the research. Titled Abandoned Technology: Why Talent Acquisition Leaders Have Stopped Using Traditional Recruiting Software (PDF), the infographic drills down to detailed observations gleaned from HR, TA and HRIT leaders.

In most cases, their companies are still using an ATS, often in conjunction with a variety of add-ons to patch the ATS’s shortcomings. Such a situation is unlikely to continue, especially as next generation systems are now available in the form of TA Platforms.

SmartRecruiters sponsored this research and is publishing this infographic to highlight the roadblocks in front of many TA leaders. Of course, we wouldn’t point out a problem if there wasn’t a solution. That solution is the SmartRecruiters TA Platform, which you can read about here.

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</p> <div style="max-width:540px;"> <p><a href='https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/research-alert-ta-leaders-abandoning-traditional-recruiting-software/' style="text-decoration:none;"><span style="display: block; margin:20px 0 10px 0; font-size:10px; font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color:#666;">Abandoned Technology: Why Talent Acquisition Leaders Have Stopped Using Traditional Recruiting Software</span><br /> <img src='https://cdn.smartrecruiters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/infographiclarge.gif' alt='Abandoned Technology: Why Talent Acquisition Leaders Have Stopped Using Traditional Recruiting Software' width='540px' border='0' /></a></p> </div> <p>

Hello out there in SmartRecruiters land! It’s the holiday season, which means we come bearing GIFTS in the form of new features! We release new features every month, and this month is extra special because it includes ideas submitted by you in our SmartIdeas feature forum. So without further ado, here are the great new capabilities included in the December release.

1. Hiring Plan Analytics

This one was submitted by our users! Click here to see the submission.

Last month, we introduced Pipeline Analytics (the best way to get a glance of your entire hiring process). This month, we’re made these hiring analytics more powerful with Hiring Plan Analytics!

Hiring Plan Analytics provide insight into your hiring plan through real-time reports that track hiring progress against goals. They also allow you to drill into time-to-hire and time-to-start metrics to better understand opportunities for improvement across all your company’s departments and locations.

You can learn more about all of the Recruiting Analytics in the SmartRecruiters TA Platform here.

2. Notifications Bell on Mobile

Nothing is more important to hiring today than having all of your information available on your phone! We introduced the notification bell to SmartRecruiters in the October 2015 release. Now that same bell is available in the SmartRecruiters mobile app, allowing you to stay up to date from anywhere when something in your hiring process needs your attention. We all know that Time-to-Hire is important, and you can drive it faster by managing your hiring process while standing in line for a delicious latte! ☕️☕️☕️

3. New Marketplace Partners

We love our partners, and these new integrations will make your hiring process even easier.

1. Psychometra: Send your candidate a quick assessment that discovers their cognitive abilities and personality.
2. Skillmeter: This ensures you’re hiring successfully by pre-selecting candidates based on their actual skills and knowledge.
3. Kentech: They provide investigative background check technologies, combining experience in both high tech and high touch solutions.

4. ✨Delightful Enhancements!

We can’t forget to tell you about all the little things that make up using SmartRecruiters even better:

• Candidate fields can now be created as dropdowns. You’re no longer restricted to free text!
• Search works even better in publisher, because now you can put a space between the first and last name. Similar names problem: eliminated!
• Candidates can now accept offers from the candidate portal.
• Candidate information now auto-populates in the offer or new hire section in a candidate’s record.
• When a candidate is in review, they will receive an email notification. No more extra emails from candidates asking if you saw their resume ✉️!
• Candidates can now reply to messages in the candidate portal.
• When candidates apply to multiple jobs, and are rejected from one, they will be automatically moved to New on their next application.
• Users can now see what their job ad will look like live using the “preview” button.
• User can configure single-select candidate fields and use them via Public API.
• User can set values for a candidate for all types of candidate fields via Public API.

And that’s it. Happy holidays from all of us at SmartRecruiters. And if you have any ideas for future features, we’re listening: just head over our SmartIdeas feature forum!

You might also want to check out the What’s New page to see details of this release and all its predecessors. We’ll see you next month with more awesome features!

Your candidates are not data points. They’re people with unique stories, hopes and the potential to change your company for the better. However, the only way to give them the experience they deserve is to treat your candidate pipeline like a set of data points that can be analyzed.

This analysis helps you understand and eliminate the bottlenecks that drag out time-to-hire and drag down your employment brand by negatively impacting candidate experience.

Introducing Pipeline Analytics: Actionable reports of your hiring process

The good news is that now you can get deep and insightful information about your candidate pipeline. No spreadsheets needed! Starting this month, you can access easy-to-use Pipeline Analytics right from within the SmartRecruiters TA Platform. These include an intuitive and robust set of graphical insights grouped in two essential reports: Current Pipeline and Historical Pipeline.

Forget the enormous spreadsheets and number crunching! Whether it’s a weekly management meeting to review open requisitions or a quarterly offsite to refine your talent acquisition strategy, these interactive reports have your needs covered.

Current Pipeline Analytics: Optimize your hiring in real-time

The Current Pipeline report analyzes what’s going on now for all the jobs in your system. It helps you answer important tactical questions about the current health of your hiring process. Are we getting new candidates? Do we need more recruiting resources to manage inbound candidate traffic faster? How many good candidates are in advanced interview rounds? How many offers are outstanding, and which candidates are we hoping to close soon?

These questions routinely come up when Talent Acquisition leaders, hiring managers and executives discuss the current state of open requisitions and act fast on strategies that are not working. Communicating the status of hiring progress on a weekly basis empowers TA leaders to be proactive by identifying which jobs are “on track” and spotting obstacles before they become problems. Current Pipeline Analytics gives TA leaders a single portal to answer those questions, and more!

Historical Pipeline Analytics: Understand pipeline trends

The Historical Pipeline report analyzes your hiring process over time. These analytics help you understand hiring velocity, historical trends and bottlenecks. They are valuable for TA strategy reviews, especially discussions about hiring KPIs and projected performance.

For example, you can’t really set an offer acceptance goal without a comprehensive data review first. The ratio between offers extended and accepted is not enough to build a solid goal: First you need to analyze the outliers across your organization to see if data is skewed for certain departments, locations or even hiring managers. Analyzing outlier data for various subsets of your organization will help you understand the best practices from your hiring champions, identify teams struggling to close candidates, and as a result, adjust hiring methods and set better performance goals for the entire organization.

Likewise, your hiring velocity – the time candidates spend in the pipeline – may surprise you when you drill down to specific recruiters or hiring managers. Long wait-time to hear back from a recruiter or hiring manager is a top candidate complaint that severely impacts employer brand perception. However, every hiring process is unique: different roles and companies need different time to properly evaluate a candidate. Optimizing your hiring process so it takes just enough time – but not more – is a science-based art. You can achieve greatness only by establishing what good hiring velocity looks like for your organization (based on the data, of course), and then helping your hiring managers and recruiters get there.

Our Historical Pipeline report has even more details to accelerate your hiring velocity. By looking at different time periods, you can see whether you’ve got enough candidates to hit your goals and how quickly candidates move through the process for those periods. Comparing your recent performance to previous periods will establish whether your hiring velocity and offer acceptance are getting better or worse, including the factors driving those trends.

Win the war for talent with data-driven strategies

Great companies strive to deliver a great candidate experience and to optimize the hiring process internally. Few succeed because they don’t make fact-based decisions or track the progress of process improvements. The new SmartRecruiters Pipeline Analytics are designed to empower TA champions to achieve their hiring success goals through deep and data-informed decisions. In a world that is more and more data-driven, the choice is pretty straightforward: either turn your candidate pipeline data into a valuable asset or lose the war for talent to competitors who do.

We had the good fortune to spend a day last week with the recruiting leaders from a dozen of our customers.  Given our mission to “reinvent recruiting for candidates and companies”, it was reassuring to receive positive feedback that we are on our way and get amazing guidance on where we should focus next.

I have been in the software industry for 20 years and run hundreds of “advisory boards”, but have never experienced the level of “we are in this together-ness” that emanated from that room.  To a person and company – whether from centralized tech hiring models at Ancestry.com, Atlassian, IAC, Informatica or Okta, or from decentralized field hiring models at Equinox and Skechers – the feedback was universal that everyone felt they had finally discovered, in their words, a recruiting platform that “doesn’t suck” and a vendor that “doesn’t disappear” post-sale.

Admittedly and somewhat unfortunately, the bar to jump over is not high. As I wrote in HR Deserves Great Software Too, the technology that has been peddled to HR and especially to recruiting has been abysmal. Even worse, the level of partnership post-sales is non-existent.  Our approach as a product-centric, user-centric and customer-centric company, is to enable Hiring Success. This only occurs when one combines a comprehensive platform with a talented post-sales team who is with the client every step of the way as they drive transformation across their organization. Why? Simple. We are in the hero-making business.  If our champions don’t accomplish amazing “stand up and take notice” things, then we are no different than every other promising but ultimately “it’s all the just same” technology vendor.

Some of these clients have been with us less than six months and have already seen amazing results. My favorite quote of the day was “we received more candidates with SmartRecruiters in 2 months than we did with Taleo in 7 years”.  Almost as impressive were those echoing that “for the first time ever, our hiring managers not only log into our recruiting platform frequently but there is demand from new hiring managers to get set up on SmartRecruiters because they hear it’s terrific”.  Others raved about the candidate experience they now can provide, unlocking inbound channels that they had long ago given up on. Wow.  That is what’s all about.  Most reassuring was the level of intimacy and appreciation for our post-sales team – often the folks who go unnoticed in software companies. Literally every customer raved about their implementation and account management team, considering those folks as part of their ongoing team.

We had a very interactive day where we spent the first half receiving pointed feedback about our go-to-market strategies, especially “if they worked here”, how would they adjust our marketing, sales and support approaches. This isn’t a traditional question posed to customers but I have always felt your customers will guide you best. For the afternoon, we went deep into our product roadmap and allowed the customers to play “product manager”, prioritizing the areas we should focus on for the next six months (“needs”), along with what would be life-changing for them in a year (“dreams”). We then went deep into defining and prioritizing Hiring Success metrics, because our platform (where you have all the data from source to close, and where candidates, recruiters and hiring managers actually use the system) enables Recruiting leaders to access in real-time the key metrics around Quality, Speed and Costs –for what they need to present up to the C-level and what they need to better manage their teams.

Then we wrapped it up with a terrific meal – good food, good libations and good cheer all around.

What’s my take-away? We are on the right track for sure. This is a noisy and confusing industry, with literally hundreds of companies claiming to help customers “find-engage-hire” and literally thousands of customers dissatisfied with the actual results.  Our approach to hiring success is unique, and our approach to how we partner with our clients is special. Our clients, as evidenced by some of their comments below, will drive us forward to effect the change that they seek.

“I just feel so lucky to be with a vendor that cares so much about their clients. Honestly, SmartRecruiters is part of our culture now. This was simply amazing”.

“I think SmartRecruiters is at the point where we just see it as an extension of our team…A lot of that was validated when we heard similar feedback from the other clients”.

“Great to get some early insight into the process and hear all the success other clients have had. It is really important for us to have a highly engaged vendor. We have never had that before”.

“We’ve only just begun, but we already feel like our voice is being heard and we are part of the SmartRecruiters family”.

“We’re growing so fast and literally couldn’t ever imagine we’d find a partner like SmartRecruiters.”

“We never imagined there would be a tool out there that can amplify the quality of hires that we are forced to make in the way in which SmartRecruiters has”

The market for recruitment technology is taking off. There’s been approximately $2.3 billion in human resources technology investments over the last 5 years. And the buyers are demanding more quality. In a 2014 study by Software Advice the 6 most common reasons to purchase an applicant tracking system were efficiency, company growth, current features missing, consolidate systems, current is cumbersome and modernize. Price is not the issue when purchasing technology to manage recruiting; it’s about solving the issue of how to manage the company’s recruitment efforts. Companies are willing to pay to solve this problem.

When evaluating the technology that powers your recruitment efforts, here are 4 reasons to look beyond the applicant tracking system:

1. Not Designed to Help You Source Across Channels

What good is an applicant tracking system without applicants? Even if the ATS has all the bells, whistles and workflows, using an applicant tracking system without sourcing channel integration is like going to a party where there are no other people. Your recruiting analytics needs a single dashboard.

2. Unwieldy & Poor Candidate Application Process

It’s amazing how much companies pay to drive traffic to job ads, career pages, and their social networks, only to fail to capture information from those interested people due to a lengthy application form.

CEO to HR: “I don’t understand. Why are we not getting good candidates?” pic.twitter.com/ni6Epo5r3f

— Jerome Ternynck (@jerometernynck) November 7, 2014

3. Cumbersome Experience & UI for Hiring Teams

Every time a clunky ATS scares the hiring manager from using the ATS, the company loses money from time and resources inefficiencies. Needing a manual reminder to take interview notes costs the company money. Missing a job interview to scheduling error costs the company money. Every time the job poster doesn’t know what screening questions to ask and not ask, it costs the company money. Every time a hiring manager doesn’t leverage a template to send a standard email, it costs the company money.

Long story short, before committing to an applicant tracking system, make sure that your hiring managers have a high propensity to actually use the system. Companies that hire the best have hiring managers that are highly engaged and collaborative participants in the hiring process.

4. Limited Insights as Sourcing & Hiring Data is “Off-system”

Sourcing channels depend on quantity and quality. If the sourcing budget is not tied to the candidate lifecycle, return on recruitment budget can not be accurately measured. Top talent acquisition professionals look for a dashboard with cost per candidate, cost per interview, and cost per hire across the entire company, each department and role. Seeing the company’s historical recruitment performance, and having it filterable by sourcing channel creates smart, data informed decisions for your next recruiting dollar.

If companies want to take their talent acquisition efforts seriously, they have to be ready to review what is working and not working. Too often the legacy applicant tracking system is holding companies back. But companies don’t want to rip and replace their entire recruitment management every year. The foundation of a company’s recruitment technology is a long term decision. In this age of APIs, end users and social media, my one recommendation is to think of applicant tracking as a mere feature within your integrated recruiting platform.