SmartRecruiters recently launched SmartMessage, the industry’s first natively-built text recruiting solution. This will allow hiring teams to reach a wider pool of candidates and deepen their engagement—bridging the divide between employers and applicants, one message a time.

Connecting people to jobs at scale is our mission at SmartRecruiters, and making communications easier between candidates and hiring teams easier is one of the key objectives we set out to accomplish in launching SmartMessage, a natively-built text recruiting product. 

With an average open rate of 95% and a response rate of 45%,  messaging presents an incredible opportunity for hiring teams to effectively reach candidates at scale. In May 2020, seventy SmartRecruiters users from ten different companies began testing SmartMessage as part of our early access program. 

Coming from a variety of industries—healthcare, government, education, farming, retail, and real estate—the test users and companies all shared the same overarching goal: to reach and engage candidates more effectively. During the testing phase, we worked closely with the group of test users to determine how we could turn their goal into reality. 

During this process, we found that more than 60% of our customers’ candidates prefer messaging over other communication channels—for a variety of reasons.

Some candidates are constantly on the go and prefer messaging, as it’s asynchronous in nature and allows them to respond at their convenience. Others simply don’t have stable access to the internet or have never fully adopted email in their personal or professional lives. 

Consequently, we realized that there’s still a lot of work to be done in removing the communications barrier between hiring teams and candidates globally and making jobs accessible to candidates from any and all backgrounds.

SmartMessage helps to bridge that divide by leveraging SMS and WhatsApp so that hiring teams can communicate with candidates—via a channel of their choice—wherever they are in the world.

SMS and WhatsApp also help ensure that candidates respond quickly and move through the hiring process efficiently. Point in case: SmartMessage early access customers revealed that, on average, their candidates responded to messages 80% faster than other channels. 

SmartMessage in Action: Re-engaging Dormant Candidates

Jeff Goody, Talent Acquisition Manager at Salud Family Health Centers, found SmartMessage to be particularly useful in re-engaging dormant candidates. Candidates sometimes missed emails that accidentally ended up in their spam folders, coming to the erroneous conclusion that the hiring team wasn’t interested. 

Jeff decided to give SmartMessage a try to better stay in touch with candidates. 

And it did just that. A combination of messages and phone calls, drawing attention to next steps, helped to reactivate dormant candidates. The overall candidate response rate increased significantly. In fact, he and his team were hugely impressed when they realized that oftentimes, candidates reply to messages within a matter of seconds; a mark of incomparable engagement compared to email and telephone. 

Impressed with the results, Jeff decided to adopt SmartMessage as part of a multichannel communications strategy—one that would bolster candidate engagement. 

The Future of Texting for Next Level Hiring 

The first release of SmartMessage lays the groundwork for a rich conversational recruiting software that empowers hiring teams through the entire process—from sourcing to onboarding. Developing this product in-house is advantageous as we’re able to do so while working closely with our customers, allowing us to carefully consider their needs.

Almost all of the features that early access customers have indicated are important to them have already been added to our product roadmap and will be implemented in the next couple of quarters. 

SmartMessage will continue to expand, eventually enabling users to engage prospects and seamlessly convert them—from CRM to ATS—into new hires. All thanks to messaging. Looking toward the future, we envision texting being fully embedded into each step across the entire hiring process.

It’s our goal to optimize SmartMessage via automation, allowing for synergistic workflows and a matchless hiring experience for both candidates and recruiters.

Stay up to date on all SmartRecruiters’ product releases by regularly checking our “What’s New” page!

When it comes to cost savings, few software applications can compete with a modern, sophisticated applicant tracking system. Demonstrating those savings in the form of a sound business case is half the battle.

Economic downturns pose unique challenges to Talent Acquisition. Recent research from the Fosway Group, Europe’s pre-eminent HR Analyst Group, makes clear that our current crisis has exacerbated every organizations’ ability to find candidates with key skills and has highlighted the need for companies to boost agility. The Fosway Group’s study also found that increasing investment in recruiting in the coming years is a top priority for businesses.

Add to this that a 2017 McKinsey survey found that 82% of Fortune 500 executives don’t believe their companies recruit highly talented people. 

Therefore, a plan to transform your TA platform needs to enhance hiring success within the constraints of given economic challenges.

What does hiring success actually mean? Many company’s use metrics like time-to-fill and cost-of-hire to measure hiring success. But a lower cost-of-hire and shorter time-to-fill just means cheaper and faster. Cheaper and faster does not account for quality. Therefore, time-to-fill and cost-of-hire are not adequate indicators of hiring success. We define Hiring Success as the ability to hire amazing talent on demand.

In our recent webinar, “Building the business case for your TA Transformation,” SmartRecruiters’ CEO Jerome Ternynyck urged organizations to “step up” their TA efforts in response to a recession. In our current downturn, there are two important ways to do so.   

1. In the wake of layoffs, transform your TA team into an outplacement agency.
   • AirBnB is a commendable model, in this regard.
2. Improve internal mobility—enhance transparency, fluidity, communication, etc.
   • Send a clear message to your employees about how you are enhancing your commitments to internal mobility.
     • For example, “We will not hire externally for x period of time. We are instead stepping up our efforts to improve internal mobility by x, y and z.”

Building Your Case

In an economic crisis businesses face two TA challenges:

1. How to speed up innovation
2. How to control the associated costs of innovation

No company has unlimited resources to allocate to innovating their TA platform. In most cases, firms have to innovate TA with less budget during an economic slump. Cost-neutrality is a best case scenario and an increased TA budget is highly unlikely. Firms therefore have to identify ways, in other words, to do more with less. 

So, let’s be honest: Your CFO is unlikely to approve of a business plan to transform your TA infrastructure unless you can demonstrate hard cost savings. Simply enhancing candidate experience isn’t good enough. 

The best way to improve your TA platform and lower costs is to focus on your applicant tracking system (ATS). 

In many instances, ATS’s are outdated and those used by companies often resemble the Frankenstein monster—multiple programs acquired over an extended period of time piled on top of each other in a patchwork fashion. TA teams therefore have difficulty sourcing candidates because these systems don’t work effectively. This can deter hiring managers from using the ATS altogether, creating further inefficiency in the hiring process.

There are three potential areas for ATS improvement and savings and a modern TA suite provides value in each of these:

1. Technology: Consider moving to a single, pre-integrated system that integrates everything from ATS, CRM, marketing, job integration and so forth. 
2. Sourcing: Reduce your reliance on costly external agencies and find ways to standardize and streamline your hiring process. 
3. People: With more efficient technology and sourcing operations, assess whether you can reduce the size of your TA team. 

Your proposal to transform your TA process should clearly detail how your plan offers hard savings in each of these areas. Take a “spreadsheet approach” that shows both short-term and long-term cost savings (or cost-neutrality, at the least).

You can download a free ATS ROI calculator here. Detailed instructions on how to use it can be found in the video below with guidance from Phil Strazzulla, founder and CEO of SelectSoftware Reviews.

Your plan should also offer a timeline for this transformation. How long will it take to fully modernize the TA platform? What are the phases of this transformation, and so forth?

Lastly, don’t forget quality. How will your plan improve the quality of applicants, enhance candidate experience and increase velocity?

Conclusion

Improving your TA operations is essential in any circumstance, but an economic downturn places both added urgency and challenges to doing so. Modernizing your TA platform is an essential way to actualize the resiliency necessary to keep your business running during challenging financial times. 

Interested in upgrading your ATS? Let’s talk! For a limited time, SmartRecruiters is offering eligible companies a below-market-rate offer for a complete and flexible talent acquisition platform that is easy to use and can help drastically reduce software and service costs

The onboarding process is what bridges the gap between the candidate and employee experience. This transitional phase is subtle and quick, but, when given due consideration and care, pays off in dividends in the long run.

Onboarding is one of foundational building blocks of Hiring Success. Unfortunately, all too often it’s a process that’s overlooked and underrated. As a formal introduction, an effective onboarding process can put new employees on the path to success in your company, or steer them in the opposite direction.

In an age when companies are now investing more than ever in the acquisition and retention of talent—why do anything less than guide employees, at every step of the journey, to total success?

Let’s take a closer look at the true value of onboarding, what makes for a memorable onboarding experience, as well as what your company can to do continuously measure, build, and improve upon its process.

What Is Onboarding?

Employee onboarding is the process of formally integrating new employees into your organization, making them feel welcome and immersed in your company’s culture, as well as introducing them to the tools and teams they will be working with.

Onboarding can take many shapes and forms. In some companies, it consists of meetings and presentations in which new hires passively learn policies and procedures. In others, it’s a much more laid back affair and can consist of games, skits, costumes, thumping music, and a limbo bars.

No matter the approach, onboarding’s main objective is to ensure that newcomers feel welcome and comfortable in their new environment, and to provide them with the necessary skills, knowledge, and resources needed to begin their working relationship with your company on a positive, productive note.

Why It Matters

In many ways, the onboarding process isn’t so different from the first day of school—an experience that’s almost universally considered to be anxiety-provoking. It doesn’t have to be, though.

All that’s necessary to bridge the gap between two strangers is a handshake and a hello. Think of onboarding as an extended handshake and hello; an ice breaker to facilitate relationship building between new hires and their colleagues. The sooner they’re comfortable, the sooner they’ll feel at ease, confident, and ready to dive into their work.

Failing to do so, however, could potentially leave employees feeling unintegrated, disengaged, and ultimately disinterested. Furthermore, the absence of a formal onboarding can hinder the productivity of new employees, as well as their colleagues and supervisors.

Don’t take our word for it, though. According to Click Boarding, an HR-tech platform based in Minnesota, there’s some pretty convincing data that highlights the importance of onboarding.

• Companies with an engaging onboarding program retained 91% of their first-year workers.

• New hires with a well structured onboarding program were 69% more likely to remain at a company for up to three years.

• Onboarding improves company ROI by more than $79,000 / year.

The Essentials

1) Don’t Wait for Day One

As the old saying goes, “Why put off until tomorrow what you can start today?” Onboarding is no exception. You don’t have to wait until the actual orientation to start bringing new hires into the fold.

Small gestures like sending a welcome email or hand-written note to your future colleagues— or encouraging your team to reach out on LinkedIn and say “hey”—are highly encouraged during the onboarding process. It requires only minutes of your time and sends a signal of acceptance to newcomers early on that they’re sure to appreciate.

2) Everyone Loves a Good Story

You can’t realistically expect someone who’s going to work for you to become professionally invested in your company without good reason. Sure, you can always make the argument that pay is a good motivator, but transactional agreements can only carry you so far. Plus, times have changed and so have the workplace priorities of employees.

How do you convey the importance of your company to new hires, then? It’s pretty simple, actually. Tell them an honest, good old-fashioned story.

Try to think of a friend or family member who possesses the gift of gab and whose words can enchant and leave you spellbound, wanting to know more. Narrative can be captivating and persuasive—this pertains not just to individual people, but to groups of people (companies), as well.

Think about it for a minute. There’s a good chance you’re at least somewhat familiar with the life story of someone like Bill Gates; that he founded Microsoft in a garage in the 70s, within a decade became the youngest billionaire ever at 31, and in addition to being a hugely successful entrepreneur, dedicated himself to a life of philanthropy. His (and Microsoft’s) is a story that’s well-known.

Not every company will have a tale to tell that’s on par with Microsoft’s, but a backstory of that magnitude isn’t even necessary. If you can honestly explain the “who,” the “what,” and the “why” of your company, that will already make it more relatable than an impersonal business whose intentions and character are left to speculation.

Someone in your company surely already has a great elevator pitch for investors. Put one together for the people who will be investing their time and effort into the success of your company.

3) Provide Some Purpose

To long for a purpose in life is to be human. Therefore, considering the fact that as adults we spend the bulk of our waking hours at work, it stands to reason that people also long for purpose in their careers.

Keep this in mind when designing your onboarding process. What purpose is your company trying to achieve? Do you have goals and projects in place to make that purpose a reality? That’s not to say that your company’s purpose should mirror that of a non-profit’s if, for example, it’s an accounting firm. The exact definition of purpose is flexible. What’s important is that you clearly communicate that purpose during onboarding, and thereafter.

Even if it’s a simple, straightforward purpose with supporting goals and objectives, it will help your workforce to rationally understand the “how” and “why” behind their work. Additionally, people tend to be more cooperative when they’re given a purpose/reason for their actions.

4) Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Your organization’s main assets are the people that make it run. As people are social animals, it’s important to emphasize values like cooperation and trust. Cultivate an appreciation for these values from day one by embedding related activities into your onboarding. The development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships at work is an ongoing task; impress the importance of said relationships from the start.

5) Play the Part of Cultural Informant

Make sure your new hires know the layout of the office and the social aspects that come with it. For example if people in the company often go out for coffee in the afternoon, make that known. If competitive games of foosball are a regular occurrence, but only after lunch, let them know. Insider tips like these help employees come into the fold with confidence.

6) Formidable Forms and Formalities

While there are several cool and unconventional ways to make the onboarding experience really enjoyable—unfortunately there are others that will probably never cease to be a bit dull. Like filling out state and federal tax withholding forms. However, it’s a very important part of the process. One that requires attention to detail, for the sake of your company and the employees you’re onboarding.

Make sure that you inform yourself and new employees of what paperwork will have to be completed before their first day. It’s also important to set aside time to thoroughly explain labor laws, safety regulations, company-related compliance requirements, as well as those mandated by local, state, and international governing bodies. For example, General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) regulations or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) 

7) Be Visual and Straightforward

New jobs can be daunting. Sometimes it can take new hires months to settle in, understand all the working parts, and realize how they fit in to the big picture. There’s a lot of information to take in at first.

Therefore, if you can find a way to clearly and visually explain (cue up your org charts!) the structure of your company, hierarchy of management, the general division of labor among departments, and how all of that ties back to the responsibilities and workflows of new hires, it will definitely make the whole experience slightly more digestible.

Need some inspiration on how to create a great org chart? Check out the following resource from Microsoft.

8) Be Resourceful and Friendly

Set your employees up for success by letting them know where to turn if they need something. Remember, it can take awhile to get set up during the first few weeks (or longer) at the office. Newcomers need time to get into the groove, establish a routine, internalize new processes, and so on.

Inevitably, they’ll have a lot of questions and gaps in their knowledge. This doesn’t come without at least a touch of anxiety for most people. You can help mitigate that by having go-to resources and knowledge repositories for everything related to your company’s processes, guidelines, resources, and regulations. That could be something as simple as a shared folder in Google Drive or a thorough Confluence Page. Knowledge is power. Share it.

Make Your Checklists and Check Them Twice

Depending on how involved your company’s onboarding process is, you—and new hires you onboard—might have to take care of several administrative tasks like filling out forms. If you happen to be onboarding a large cohort, the number of tasks you’ll be faced with could start to multiply like quickly. To stay on top of the tasks at hand, lean on one of the organizational tools around—the list.

It’s not the list in and of itself that’s important. Rather, it’s what it represents and helps accomplish—organization and standardization. Both essential to onboarding. If you misplace or outright forget to collect an importance document from a new hire, like their payroll information of work permit, the consequences could be very inconvenient.

Or imagine the following scenario: a group of employees is onboarded and informed of a newly implemented company perk like a yearly personal development budget for everyone in the company. However, two weeks later the next group of new hires don’t receive that info during their onboarding process, only to find out weeks or months after the fact.

Might seem like a small oversight, and it’s one that could easily happen depending on how many people in your company are responsible for onboarding, but it won’t be viewed that way by your colleagues if they’re under the impression that there’s a lack of parity in the company when it comes to benefits.

Best way to avoid such snafus? You guessed it: checklists. Below you’ll find four free and thorough onboarding checklist templates available for download.

Keep Count of Costs to Make the Most of Your Process

In order to maximize the money you invest in onboarding, it’s important to first determine the associated costs, such as the following examples:

Onboarding Paperwork and Administrative Time

• Let’s say you have an HR assistant that you pay $15.00 an hour, If you hire 70 new employees per year and it takes an average of 10 hours of admin time, per new hire, to process their paperwork— that adds up to $10,500 per year.

Cost of Management to Onboard and Train New Hires

• If you’re Head of People (who makes $80,000 per year) spends 8 hours on onboarding per new hire, and you hire 70 new people per year—that amounts to $21,280 per year.

Taking just these two costs into account, for a company that hires 70 new employees per year, the average costs amounts to $454 per new hire. However, there are a handful of other factors that should be taken into consideration, too:

• How much time do team members in other departments (such as IT) spend, on average, helping with onboarding and training?
• How much money, per new hire, is spent on the welcome kit / package?
• What’s the average cost per new hire for hardware, software, furniture, and other supplies?

Stretching Your Onboarding Bucks

When you have a more granular view of the money required for onboarding, you can then begin to explore products and solutions that could potentially save you valuable time and money. For example, if you know that you spent approximately $10,500 per year on administrative paperwork and you find a company that guarantees they can reduce that cost by half through digital document delivery—that’s an option worth pursuing.

Another way optimize the money you allocate to onboarding is to leverage the synergies of your recruitment and learning & development (L&D) budgets.

According to organizational psychologist and leadership coach Alison JY Lee: “Valuable information about each new hire is collected through the hours spent in the recruiting process. By the time of onboarding, you should have information on their key strengths and the key challenges that may affect their engagement and performance in the company. Using that information, you could sync with L&D to address these areas with an individualized development plan from the get-go. This way, you’ll be able to extend value from recruitment spending into performance, and get savings from the accelerated pace at which a new hire can add value to the business.”

There’s an Integration for That

Like every tool, you need to figure out how to make your applicant tracking system (ATS) work for you. Not the other way around. Fortunately, there are some really great products on the market to make the onboarding process more seamless—and many of them can easily be linked to your ATS.

These integrations will allow you to facilitate many of the administrative aspects of the onboarding process, freeing up your time to focus on the larger task at hand—making it a memorable experience.

Below you’ll find three examples of employee onboarding solutions that just might make your life a little easier.

1) One Less Task to Background Check off the List

Once you’ve extended a candidate an offer, chances are you might need to run a routine background check before proceeding to the next step. Often these are seen in food service and retail, but they are also commonplace in high security clearance jobs.

Background check solutions like Checkr make it easy to quickly screen candidates, share the results with your team, and store said results in a centralized location. This cuts down on turnaround time, improves the candidate experience, reduces recruiter workflows, mitigates risk, and helps TA teams maintain compliance.

2) Signed, Sealed, Delivered!

There was a time when one of the greatest occupational hazards that HR teams faced was paper cuts—especially when onboarding new hires. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case.

Thanks to companies like DocuSign, it’s now possible to electronically create, send, and receive legally binding signatures for important documents like offer letters and job contracts. Just think of all the time (and paper cuts) you’ll save by not having to fill out forms, take trips to the post office, or schedule meetings for the sole purpose of signing documents.

3) Welcome Talent as You Would Like to be Welcomed

Did you know that 22% of new hires leave the job within the first 45 days? If only they’d had a more memorable onboarding experience!

Platforms such as ClickBoarding have made the entire onboarding process accessible, easy, and an obvious choice for any company looking to add a bit of pizazz to the way they welcome new talent.

To borrow their messaging: “Keep new hires connected and engaged with the brand they fell in love with. Welcome them with a video, office map, cultural norms, and any other content that tells your story. Add branded content during every part of the experience to start building their loyalty even before day one.”

Top 5 Takeaways to Keep in Mind

1. There’s immense value (monetary and non-monetary) in onboarding.
2. Put thought and care into the process. It makes a difference.
3. Organization and standardization are essential.
4. Calculate your costs. Be mindful of ways to optimize budget.
5. Look for digital solutions to save money, streamline process, and boost candidate experience.

Coming Attractions—2021: SmartRecruiters’ Onboarding Solution

The onboarding process, among other things, bridges the transition between the candidate journey and employment. When executed well, it helps facilitate an experience for the job seeker / soon-to-be employee that’s seamless and memorable.

If mishandled, it creates for a dissonant experience. One that might make a new hire question their decision to accept the job your company has offered them.

Needless to say, there’s a lot at stake. Therefore, SmartRecruiters is pleased to announce that we will be offering onboarding functionality as a native, integrated feature on our talent acquisition suite as of 2021. More details can be found in the above keynote presentation from SmartRecruiters’ Head of Product, Natalia Baryshnikova’s, at this year’s Hiring Success conference.

Now that you’ve got a handle on how to take your onboarding game to the next level, what’s next? Make every phase of your candidate experience memorable. We’ll show you how in The Definitive Guide to Hiring Success.

An overview of the evolution of SmartRecruiters’ Talent Acquisition Suite over the course of the last 12 months. 

In 2019, SmartRecruiters’ product team focused on user love, making existing  products more powerful and intuitive at the same time. We went deep in feature development with a focus on productivity for all users, delivering improved experiences for recruiters, system administrators, and candidates. In the end, we shipped over 200 features and addressed over 145 user voice requests. 

By remaining agile and regularly releasing delightful enhancements, we were able to provide our users with more value in a timely and consistent manner. Furthermore, each feature was implemented to empower our customers through the three pillars of Hiring Success: Talent Attraction & Engagement, Collaboration & Selection, and Management & Operating Model.

Below, we’ve shortlisted 10 of our favorite product releases from 2019. 

1) Measure NHS in Product 

At the end of October, we unveiled a new product release that brought to market a strategic metric for measuring new hire fit into our platform. The feature came alongside multiple process automation and platform extensibility updates that enable hiring teams to scale their efforts.

Most organizations attempt to measure quality of hire, but find it difficult to capture. Quality is often measured during year-end performance reviews, which come far after the hiring process is completed. To measure hiring success and strategize sooner, we wanted to empower organizations to automatically track their Net Hiring Score (NHS) in-product. Similar to a Net Promoter Score, which is the standard for measuring customer experience, the NHS measures the fit between new hires and jobs immediately after their ramp-up period.

Thanks to this update, SmartRecruiters customers can now automatically survey hiring managers and new hires 90 days after their start date to capture the hiring manager’s assessment of a new hire’s aptitude, attitude, and potential, as well as the new hire’s assessment of job responsibilities, management, and company culture. Responses are collected and presented in a real-time dashboard to track an organization’s NHS over time.

2) Interview Self-Scheduling 

Interview scheduling can be an unnecessary hassle for both recruiters and candidates alike—one that involves multiple touchpoints and juggling of schedules in an attempt to find an agreed upon time slot. Thanks to our interview self-scheduling tool, the entire process is now decidedly easier.

Interview self-scheduling allows recruiters to suggest interview time blocks and send them to candidates. Candidates select time slots based on the interviewers’ calendar availability. This is enabled through calendar integration, which is supported for the following calendars: Google Calendar, Office 365, and Exchange.

3) Auto-Triggered Assessments

Previously, SmartRecruiters users with admin rights could configure custom steps in the hiring process to include assessments. However, sending the assessments to a candidate who made it to that step still required a manual action from a member of the hiring team. 

With the introduction of auto-triggered assessments, we’ve made it possible to automatically send assessments to candidates once their application has been moved into a pre-defined stage of the application process. This automation also works when bulk moving a group of candidates to a hiring step that includes an auto-triggered assessment.

4) 263 New Data Points for Reporting 

In 2019, we added 263 new data points for reporting, allowing our users to measure their hiring efforts with even more accuracy. New metrics include, but are not limited to the ability to report on:

• Screening questions
• Job location (e.g. state)
• Job approvals 
• Offer approvals
• Minimum or maximum salary for jobs
• Interview data

On the topic of data reporting, Kelly Fang, lead product manager for data and platform at SmartRecruiters said: 

“I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished in the last couple of releases, especially when it comes to supporting our customers with their diverse and specific reporting needs. We have tripled the amount of available data in Report Builder since January of this year and also seen triple the amount of total reports being created. Compared to December 2018, the average number of reports per customer jumped from 7.6 to 17.2.”

5) Smart CRM Campaign Template Editor 

Thanks to the upgrade of our campaign template editor, users can now easily build branded campaign templates with the ease of drag-and-drop functionality.

The Smart CRM campaign template editor also includes new settings to define the template’s background and body color, as well as content blocks and new components such as text, images, buttons, and dividers. 

Users can select between two different layouts and then drag and drop components into the content blocks: 

6) Custom Hiring Team Roles 

In January, we added Custom Hiring Team roles to allow our customers to precisely configure the access and actions allowed for each hiring team member. 

Previously, users were assigned one of the five default hiring team roles on a particular job. These roles defined the user’s access to certain information about the job and candidates who applied to the job, and the actions this user could take on the job/candidates.

Now, as seen in the images below, admins can configure the actions and information available to each default hiring role. Additionally, it’s possible to create/configure up to 5 new custom roles. 

More information on Custom Hiring Team roles can be found here.

7) SmartJobs in Product 

Since we incorporated a SmartJobs starter form into the admin settings page, it’s now easier for users to spearhead the setup of their programmatic advertising spend and enquire about programmatic advertising solutions available to them.

Administrators can specify the key parameters they would like to optimize such as the number of jobs they’d like to receive candidates for via programmatic advertising, their budget, and advertising strategy preferences. 

According to product manager Sinan Gürcan:

“Our team has been focused on our vision to transform job advertising. ‘Post-and-pray’ recruiting is diminishing, and we have been working hard throughout 2019 to offer an intelligent alternative to our customers. SmartJobs is proven to positively impact hiring velocity, and we are very much looking forward to further developing this feature. Some exciting news for 2020: As of February, SmartJobs customers will be able to automate and manage their SmartJobs campaigns directly from the application.” 

8) Filter by Screening Questions

Recruiting at scale and with speed is all about efficiency—especially when it comes to the screening process. In January, we added the ability to filter candidates by screening questions so that recruiters can quickly identify candidates by their answers.

Previously, recruiters were unable to identify and group candidates based on specific answers to screening questions. They had to manually review each application to assess responses.

9) LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect 

Due to LinkedIn retiring the previous iteration of their “Apply with LinkedIn” feature, we made this functionality available only to companies with a LinkedIn Recruiter seat or Job Slots contract. Now, candidates that apply to jobs at these organizations will be able to use the “Connect with LinkedIn” function to import their LinkedIn profile. 

This is advantageous for candidates and recruiters for the following reasons:

• If a candidate is already logged into LinkedIn, as soon as they click “Apply with LinkedIn” their profile will be populated.
• If a candidate is not logged into LinkedIn, as soon as they click “Apply with LinkedIn,” a popup will appear and ask for LinkedIn credentials.
• Candidate data will be stored in ATS and LinkedIn Recruiter.
• LinkedIn Recruiter seat holders can identify who started applying to a job, but did not finish through the “Apply Starters” feature.

10) Continuous Enhancements in Candidate Experience

At SmartRecruiters, it’s very important for us to provide applicants with a compelling candidate experience. This usually begins with the process of applying for a job through our platform, which is intuitive, modern, and easy to use. 

In 2019, we made it easier for candidates to add and edit applications thanks to a new font update, better validation, and smart date pickers.

We also rolled out the following functionalities to streamline the candidate experience: 

• The job title and company is displayed at the top of the page, reminding the candidate of the job he or she is applying for.
• Candidates can now upload their resumes more quickly by dragging and dropping it directly onto the page.
• Candidates can now see quick validation feedback after filling out a field on the application form.

What a year it’s been for product! Stayed tuned for more exciting updates in 2020 and be sure to regularly visit our What’s New page to view the latest releases.

We hope to see you at Hiring Success 20!

Hiring Success is not a user conference, it is the best recruiting conference in the world. Join 1200+ TA leaders who are committed to shaping the future of recruiting and discover how you can achieve Hiring Success.

Advanced ticket pricing ends Dec 31st. Register here.

One of the most important parts of shopping for software is informing yourself as a consumer ahead of time. To that end, here’s valuable intel, backed by years of industry experience, on how to carefully research and select the next addition to your company’s technology stack.

My career to date has been an interesting journey. I’ve worked for recruitment agencies, in-house talent acquisition teams, in human resources (HR) and talent acquisition (TA) tech and now the applicant tracking system (ATS)/candidate relationship management (CRM) space. In that time, I have been privileged enough to be both a buying customer of HR/TA tech (in a previous life) and most recently working vendor side as a provider. I’ve come full circle now.

I STILL hear some really worrying comments, bold statements, and twisted statistics made by vendors at events, meetups, and behind closed doors as if their half-truths or deceptions won’t get out. In the open world of social media–and God knows how many feedback or review sites—why some vendors still sell pipe dreams, but deliver harsh realities is beyond me. Enough is enough. I am on a mission to call out rubbish when I see it and to help HR/TA teams in the process.

It’s been eye-opening and I feel that I have seen and heard enough to share some tactics I’ve picked up along the way that help businesses prepare for and protect themselves from some of the hot-air and misleading statements that are often made during the selection processes by vendors at industry events today.

The best way to protect yourself and form an opinion of a vendor that you are considering for your business is to roll your sleeves up real high and do the research yourself.

Don’t be fooled! Research those tools! Geek out a bit. It’s actually fun to get in to the weeds of it all.

Over the years, I have witnessed smart leaders in HR/TA/procurement find new ways to probe hard and really push the question “Why?” when going through the selection process. From the perspective of a customer, as well a vendor.

Below are some criteria you should keep in mind during the selection process. They should help you uncover some real home truths about the vendor you might be partnering up with over next 12, 24, 36 months, and beyond:

1) Expertise

What is the vendor’s background? Who is leading their business? Have they worked in the industry before? Have they worked on your side of the fence and experienced your business challenges first hand? I am not saying that this is totally essential, but it’s great to know if this vendor truly knows your industry or is just taking a stab at a gap in the market.

2) Performance

If they are publicly listed, check or ask for their financial and performance reports over the last 12 to 24 months before you look at the technology. Any listed business is an open book and their reports will show you what’s really happening. If not listed, ask about their customer growth percentage, retention/renewal rates, pricing structure, and if/how/why that has changed–especially if there’s been a decrease.

3) Value

If the price is one of the vendors key unique selling points (USPs), ask why their technology is priced the way it is. Unfortunately, cheaply-priced technology usually means that it comes with poor support and product innovation models. Great technology requires great investment, which will drive even greater results. If it’s cheap, why? What value does this drive for you as a customer post-sales? The value for money will be far less impactful than the value for your business.

4) Impact

What impact or return on investment (ROI) does the platform really have for your business? People often make choices based on cost or the latest industry buzzwords without thinking about the impact a tool will actually have on their business–physically AND financially.

Will it save you money in the long run, does it drive revenue, better business outcomes, etc? Ask vendors how they measure ROI and how often can they demonstrate it to you in a presentable format that you can take to your CFO in order to show true business impact. Is there any way you can see the ROI in a live dashboard or through another business intelligence tool. People will often buy platforms because it offers a great user experience. The problem is they’re buying based on experience alone and without consideration for measurable, meaningful data or the ability to report on it.

5) Product Releases and Roadmaps

There is a lot of fluff out there and many vendors will tell you that they are “continuously working on the innovation of the platform.” The best way to see if they are truly doing this is to ask for their product roadmap, as well as the list of enhancements, new features, and products launched over the last 12 to 24 months.

This will show you how quickly they move, innovate and how present they really are in the market. Perhaps even how much investment or revenue they are generating to build new tech that will keep you ahead of the talent economy as it grows, changes, and throws new challenges your way.

6) References

This is my favorite. Ask the vendor for a reference of someone that recently left to move to another platform. Also ask for a reference from a legacy customer, a customer that is currently going through implementation, and a customer that has been live less than six months. You could also ask for a reference from someone that wanted the vendor’s platform, went through a selection process, but couldn’t commit (no matter the reason).

The latter was one I came across during a recent cycle I was in and thought it was genius. It can give you a totally different perspective. If the vendors won’t provide this type of reference, it’s not because they don’t have them, it’s because they don’t want to give them to you, so alarm bells should start ringing.

Buying tech that drives BIG business outcomes is possible, but it requires you to do your homework. Take your time, research the entire market (locally and globally) and if the vendor really trusts their product, they will be an open book and encourage you to go and look at other platforms for comparison.

At SmartRecruiters, we believe that every vendor should be transparent about all of the above points. Feel free to reach out if I can help in any way, or if you would like to discuss anything further. I’m on a mission to help businesses make better HR/TA tech decisions and, as a result, better hiring decisions.

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Google Hire has been scheduled for discontinuation. In September 2020, the applicant tracking system (ATS) will be removed from G-suite, affecting recruiters and business owners across North America and the U.K.

This news comes as a disappointment to those who rely on the ATS to source and hire new talent. As a company devoted to connecting people to jobs, we can empathize. A well-made recruiting platform can mean the difference between company-wide growth or total stagnation. Finding such a tool can be hard; having to give it up even harder.

Therefore, to make the transition easier, we’d like to offer a demo of SmartRecruiters with free data migration to all existing Google Hire customers. We’d love the opportunity to share with each and every one of you something we’re very passionate about—Hiring Success. 

We define Hiring Success as the ability to attract, select, and hire the best talent for any role, on demand and on budget—an outcome enabled by the SmartRecruiters technology. And to-date we’ve empowered over 4,000 companies in 100+ countries across the globe to achieve such outcomes. This is what Hiring Success has looked like for many of those companies: 

Don’t take our word for it, though. Here’s what one of our clients—Sandi Lurie, VP of Global Recruiting at Optimizely—has to say about SmartRecruiters and Hiring Success:

SmartRecruiters is not just a great ATS, they are an incredible partner in the journey to hiring exceptional talent. The platform itself promotes easy collaboration across hiring teams and the UI is intuitive.

Sandi Lurie
VP of Global Recruiting
Optimizely

Interested in writing the first chapter of your company’s Hiring Success story? Then schedule a demo today. And, as mentioned above, to make the transition as seamless as possible, we’ll offer full support with free data migration. We look forward to hearing from you!

Learn why recruiters need a “best of breed” solution to win the war for talent from our expert webinar with Glassdoor and SmartRecruiters.

Companies often push their talent acquisition (TA) team to use the recruiting module of the human capital management (HCM) system already in place to manage employee facing administrative tasks like payroll, benefits, and performance tracking. On the surface, it seems like a good idea.  IT is happy because there are no further integrations needed, and finance thinks it will be better for the bottom line. However, time and again, we see that the costs greatly outweigh the benefits.

For a deeper understanding as to why HCM solutions aren’t the software answer for recruiters, we turn to four takeaways from our “Hire Smarter” webinar with experts Rob Symons, VP of Northern Europe at SmartRecruiters and Ravi Edwards, sales leader for EMEA at Glassdoor.

1. Scale: Recruitment happens on a scale more comparable to sales or marketing than employee management. For example, the Royal Post hires 30,000 temporary employees every year around Christmas. In order to hit this target, they have to receive one-million applications, and one can imagine that the number of marketing touches has to be exponentially greater. Companies who chose to use HCM recruiting modules may think they are saving money only to be surprised by rampant server expenses.
2. Interface: Employees may deal with clunky systems (when it’s crucial to their job function), but candidates (and many hiring managers) certainly will not. Sixty percent of candidates abandon job applications midway through because they are too complicated. A consumer-grade user interface (UI) is a must, that means the system uses design philosophy to ensure little or no training is needed to navigate the platform (think Facebook or eBay).
3. Compliance: The newly enacted General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in Europe, and similar legislation in England and California, are elevating the level of concern around the proper handling of candidate information. A system without compliance at its core forces teams to create timely manual solutions that negatively impact productivity.
4. Complexity: Recruiting is a complicated process with many moving parts. Most hires are made with a minimum of 15 resources. For example email, text, social media, job boards, psychometrics, background checks, video interviews, digital signature, and the list goes on. The recruiting system needs to support these applications, and HCMs just can’t.

The bottom line is, HCM  is an internal-facing system that cannot keep pace with the recruiting demands of today’s talent economy. TA needs more than applicant tracking systems (ATS), they need dedicated talent acquisition suites (TAS) in order to remain competitive.

To learn more watch the recording below, or join us live for our next webinar with Glassdoor, “How to Hire Smarter – Discover how data-driven recruitment can revolutionize your business – from hiring at scale to measuring success”, December 5th, 2018 | 11 am GMT. Register here!

Assessment is an important pre-hiring step, but if not done correctly you could be in a world of legal hurt.

Today’s employers must shoulder the burden of responsibility when it comes to knowing and complying with relevant anti-discrimination laws. According to a recent study, 42 percent of TA professionals felt that negligent hiring practices were the top concern for companies in 2018. “Ban the box” legislation, GDPR compliance, and other legal restrictions mean that companies need to be hyper-vigilant about their hiring practices.

Aware of these sensitive legal issues, a diverse team of scientists, business executives, and HR professionals came together in March of 2011 with the goal of building legally-defensible pre-employment assessments for any job. This team sought to create a cost-effective and time-saving solution that would empower organizations of all sizes to hire better quality candidates without sacrificing candidate experience.

The result? RightHire, an internet-based pre-hire assessment solution that is the only one of its kind to leverage a powerful innovative feature known as Synthetic Validity (patent-pending).

Using the RightHire platform, employers can build assessments that are legally defensible, highly predictive, offer a more positive candidate experience, and are 20 times faster than traditional methods of building assessments. Additionally, customers can build assessments for all types of positions, even low volume roles that aren’t typically covered by other solutions.

To learn more, we talk to Dave Mayers, RightHire’s VP of Business Development.

Briefly, on the back of a cocktail napkin, how does your product work?

Our assessment system evaluates applicants for any job. Administrators on the SmartRecruiters applicant tracking system (ATS) create customized job evaluations for each particular role within a company. Recruiters can then access this template library, and invite candidates to complete the relevant assessment. Once the candidate finishes, the hiring team receives a score for the applicant’s likelihood of success.

Why is your product a necessary tool for any SmartRecruiters customer?

Our pre-hire assessment system saves time while increasing the quality of hire, which means more productive workers who stick around longer.

What does your product do that can’t be replicated?

Our system is based on a novel technology called Synthetic Validity, exclusively licensed from the University of Calgary, Canada, which allows our customers to build legally-defensible job assessments that save companies precious resources.

How does your product help make the hiring process as easy as possible?

Customers can use our assessment system at the top of the recruiting funnel to assess all job applicants and screen-out poor-performing candidates. Alternatively, customers can use our assessments on applicants that pass the resume/phone screening, so interviewers can spend more time with vetted candidates.

How long would it take for the average existing SR user to implement and take full advantage of your product?

Implementation and startup take less than two hours, allowing hiring teams to augment their recruiting function the same day they sign up for RightHire.

What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition and how do you fit into it?

We believe that innovation is key to the future of TA. RightHire is the first assessment to enable customers to quickly and cost-effectively build assessments for any of their jobs in a legally defensible way.

Recruiting’s digital revolution has been a boon for job seekers around the world, and now students and recent graduates have a tool designed to connect them with the best employers possible.

Your first job out of college probably felt like the most important event of your life, and for many, looking back, it was as pivotal as if felt back them. Imagine there’d been tech to tailor-match your skills to prospective employers looking for students and recent grads just like you? Well, let Melissa Weir, Head of B2B Marketing at WayUp tell you a few things about what WayUp can do to help you with that.

Check out WayUp and others on the SmartRecruiters marketplace!

What was the inspiration behind WayUp?

When Liz Wessel, co-founder and CEO of WayUp, was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, she was a campus ambassador for Anheuser-Busch, where the company asked if she could help recruit mechanical engineering candidates. Liz was floored that such a big company would reach out to a sophomore, and she realized there was a huge opportunity to help companies recruit straight from college campuses.

What were some issues in the hiring process you thought needed changing?

The college campus recruiting model wasn’t efficient. There were only a handful of people in career services, tasked with supporting thousands of students ready to find an internship, or their first job after graduation. This unbalanced system doesn’t provide students with resources to find jobs suited to their interests, or to discover new opportunities.

Companies can’t visit every college every year, and when they get the chance, it’s usually for career fairs attended by a small portion of the student population, which makes it difficult to target and source for specific roles, especially in STEM and Finance. There had to be a better way to reach, recruit, engage and hire quality early-career candidates.

Why is WayUp a necessary tool for SmartRecruiters customers?

For over 5 million early-career professionals, WayUp is the go-to platform to explore job and internship opportunities, receive advice, and be discovered by employers. Top companies from startups to Fortune 500s use WayUp’s platform to reach, recruit, and engage early-career talent. WayUp students and recent graduates represent over 6,600 campuses in the US, and WayUp’s candidates are currently growing at 35,000 new students and recent graduates per week.

So how does it actually work?

Employers post targeted job listings, invite candidates to apply, and directly message them, all on one platform. We also offer industry-leading employment branding, to help employers build awareness among Gen Z and Millennials.

What does WayUp do that can’t be done through normal job boards?

Where traditional recruiting platforms may focus on years of experience, certifications, and professional networks, WayUp allows students to showcase their personal and professional experience, interests, and areas of study.

For employers, traditional job boards and recruiting marketplaces lead with quantity over quality. They simply don’t satisfy the recruiting funnel for students and recent graduates. WayUp bridges that gap, leading to the highest hiring rate among all early-career recruiting platforms.

How does WayUp make the hiring process as easy as possible?

For every job you post on WayUp, you can apply filters to guarantee only the most appropriate candidates can see the job and apply for it. Employers can directly message and invite individuals to apply.

What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition?

We feel strongly that opportunity belongs to all. People should never be limited by their economic status, race, sexual orientation, gender, who they know, where they went to school, or where they’re from.

Meet the company out to prove there aren’t “bad employers” or “bad candidates”, there’s just “bad fit.”   

Using a proprietary psychometric algorithm, Good&Co helps companies increase employee engagement, reduce turnover and make better hiring decisions, all the while empowering millions of employees to make smarter, more informed career decisions. Good&Co was founded in 2012, is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and is part of the SmartRecruiters Marketplace family. We sat down with the senior product manager, Jay Jernigan to dig a bit deeper about what makes this quirky new startup tick.

What is the inspiration behind the company?

Good&Co was built around the idea that there are no bad employees or bad companies – just bad fit. Our free apps have helped companies, managers, and employees from every industry discover their strengths and learn how to build stronger, more productive workplace relationships.

What makes team Identity so important?

Hiring mistakes due to poor culture fit have huge financial and social implications. It’s demoralizing for employees, and incredibly expensive for employers. We designed our tools to help companies seamlessly add the right talent to high-performing teams without sacrificing productivity or sabotaging chemistry. That’s why we’re on a mission to create happier, more productive workplaces – a solution that not only helps people, but eventually impacts companies’ bottom lines. Our approach aims to fundamentally fix the human capital crisis by empowering both job seekers and companies with the information they need to make smarter, more informed job-matching decisions.

On a cocktail napkin – how does Good&Co work?

Our tools leverage psychometrics research, big data, and AI to enable companies and managers to make better-informed hiring and infrastructure decisions by identifying organizational strengths, based on company culture, to boost employee engagement and reduce turnover. Good&Co’s Proprietary Psychometric Algorithm (PPA) leverages over 30 years of research in career psychometrics and psychological analysis to provide quantified, science-backed culture insights for more than 10,000 companies worldwide. In short, we’ve discovered what elevates a candidate and a team from good to great.

Ok that’s at least both sides of a cocktail napkin. What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition and Onboarding?

The quantification and understanding of human capital is currently one of the least efficient in our economy. As software and social connectedness transform the old world, the inevitable outcome will be global, efficient markets for human capital. That’s because creating value, now more than ever, depends on people’s talents and a deeper understanding of each other.

At Good&Co, we’re taking big steps in that direction: using influences of big data, quantified self, psychology, and social networks, we are creating inherently valuable data assets through authentic engagement. We’re creating a people-driven system to define, diagnose and evolve environments with purpose.

How can workplace integration of new hires make or break recruitment?

We know the process of hiring can be time-consuming, and hiring the wrong candidate can be costly and hinder success in today’s fast-paced work environment. Good&Co’s Teamwork Pro gives a better understanding of a candidate’s fit within your teams, with your hiring managers, and provides valuable engagement tools to ensure that your employees are happy in the workplace.

Why is Good&Co a necessary tool for a SmartRecruiters customer?

Candidate reports provide insights around eight distinct factors of personality, showing how a candidate might interact with others, their leadership style, and their approach to work. These insights compliment a standard resume, and help you choose the best candidates to shortlist, interview, and hire in today’s candidate-driven market.

How does Good&Co compliment the SmartRecruiters TAS?

Our reports offer key candidate insights to sift, sort, and match candidates quickly for your roles, saving you time compared to other assessment providers.  

What have been some benefits of partnering with SR?

The flexibility of the SmartRecruiters TAS provides recruiters and hiring managers the ability to introduce our Candidate Reports automatically at any stage of the recruitment process. Our reports offer sample interview questions tailored to the candidate’s individual insights, so you may want to request a candidate quiz prior to a phone screen, the first interview, or when a candidate is placed in your shortlist.  The flexibility of SmartRecruiters means you can tailor the timing to best suit your needs.

How long would it take for the average existing SR user to implement?

The process to add our reports to a candidate’s profile is quite simple – just select our complimentary assessment from the assessment menu. The quiz takes less than 20 minutes to complete, and most candidates are done within 48 hours. Your results are delivered immediately after the quiz is completed.

What would you say to a recent SmartRecruiters customer unsure about further integration into the SR Marketplace?

SmartRecruiters has a strong partner support team in place that can help answer any questions you might have, the API documentation is clear, well documented, and flexible to suit your needs.