SmartRecruiters Reviews

Our main function for the solution is definitely for the applicant tracking system. Any position that we need to fill internally for the company, has to go through here. We go through our approval process with the different managers and then once it's approved, we post it. We use the product to source candidates, track our candidates throughout the interview process, collaborate with managers as well throughout the hiring process in terms of candidate feedback, and communicate with candidates as well. There's multiple different features and functions there, however, overall it's just an applicant tracking system, essentially.

I'm still working remotely. It depends on where you're at within our company here in the US however, I sit in Houston and we're working remotely right now. It can be a bit tougher when you can't just pop down the office and pop your head in and say, "Hey, can you take a look at this candidate?" With everything online, it is just super easy now.

The major benefit would be a faster hiring process, or potentially getting someone in the seat faster. The product is reducing that time to fill. Collaboration with the hiring managers and even easier engagement with candidates and being able to keep track of communications makes things happen really fast. You can look at the solution and answer questions like" Did I reach out to this person? Have I screened this person? It's really helped reduce time to fill in that regard. Just being able to streamline the communication has made every aspect easier.

The features that I've found most valuable would be the collaboration with the hiring managers, and being able to get them more involved in the process without having to shoot emails back and forth and having the inbox gets so jammed up, especially these days. 

It's nice to have one central location where we have all of our candidates that we're speaking with in one area. We also have our feedback there. It's like a LinkedIn or a Facebook for our internal hiring process. That's really what I equate it to. That's my number one feature, especially coming from an applicant tracking system where we didn't have that. 

The second thing I really like about the product is the candidate experience side of things. It really allows for more interaction and engagement with our candidates. Even if that's just being able to give feedback right away to candidates, whether they're a good fit or not. Just being able to interact with them easier and they know where they stand in the process as well without me having to necessarily directly speak with them.

What I really like about it is that it feels minimal, but is also dynamic. There aren't a lot of ways to get lost, which is good. Sometimes with different hiring managers we work with, if they're not so technical, some people can get lost. However, there are just enough navigational abilities where it's just a few options. It just has minimal options for individuals who otherwise might be a bit overwhelmed with new systems.

We still have things that are popping up where we realize we need to add some items. 

The first pain point for us is when we're scheduling interviews with candidates. We don't have an integration with a Microsoft Teams link yet. We can use the SmartRecruiters system to set up interviews, phone interviews, and those are easy. However, since we don't have a Team link or a Zoom link integrated into the system, we can't send out those invitations with that link. You still have to do it separately. It's not entirely an all-in-one process. That's been obviously a very recent pain point with the uptick and video interviews.

In terms of customization, that's been a bit difficult as well. The way that we have it set up is we don't have a team here in the US with my company internally to be able to make the changes needed. SmartRecruiters is a newer product and so it seems we have to go through a waiting period to get changes. Whether that's having to make changes internally or waiting for SmartRecruiters to make those updates or changes in different features. The speed as to make those changes regarding feedback can get bogged down a bit.

The solution needs to work on a single sign-on.

I would like to see the communication feature within the candidate profiles. Sometimes with the emails, it can get a bit clunky as well. Sometimes those emails, when they're getting sent to candidates, they don't look the best, or maybe it doesn't feel like those emails are being sent in a timely manner. I'm not quite sure if they can fix that either. However, we don't have quite, a detailed process laid out ourselves, in terms of recruitment. 

I've been using the solution for about a year at this point.

I would say it's a stable, reliable product. It has its hiccups here and there as every other system does. Overall, I'd say there haven't been any major setbacks or anything that's really kept us from being able to move along here. It's reliable.

We haven't really scaled it too much. I'm trying to think of any new processes that we've added. It's been pretty similar users. We've been adding users here and there as needed. We haven't really scaled it to the next round of users yet. We haven't scaled it that necessarily, it's just been on the fly so far, and only as needed and one or two users at a time.

In terms of the number of users we have, I can only speak for the U.S. essentially. I'd say it's at least around 200 to 300 users. For the most part, it's just the decision-makers, Business Unit Leaders, and Line Managers as well. Mainly, it's just the individuals who have a team underneath the management mostly, and recruiters as well as HR.

The solution is being used very extensively. I use it every single day. I've seen quite a lot of activity, especially on a global scale. 

To my knowledge, there are no strict plans to increase usage. However, we do have a plan to increase it to eventually include everybody in the organization, no matter what level they are at. Whether that could be an entry-level employee, just utilizing it to see what other career opportunities there are internally. That's where we want to get it to work. 
Being able to get our employees to see possible career growth and just kind of give them a better idea of what opportunities are out there internally is the next step for us.

Tech support has been pretty good. I typically will send an internal message to our support team. If they can't solve it on their end, then they escalate it to tech support. And I would say they do a pretty good job of getting back in touch with our own internal support team as well. I would say if there are any issues, they're usually resolved within a week or two easily.

They're quite responsive. Customer service always seems pretty on point. I really haven't run into anybody from that side who I would have an issue with or anything like that. They do a pretty good job.

With my current company, we used Taleo previously, which I didn't mind. I do find it to be a bit clunkier. I've heard that from others as well. Maybe it's not quite as user friendly from our perspective. I've used utilized Taleo and then previous to that, I did use Salesforce as well. That was when I was doing recruitment and also business development. That was a great tool. I would say, if you have the money, Salesforce definitely is the way to go for applicant tracking as well. I know that's a separate thing, however, that's a pretty good system too. 

When I'm looking at SmartRecruiters, it's definitely great compared to Taleo. It was a great move for my current company to move towards that. However, if I look back at my experience with Salesforce, it definitely doesn't compare to that necessarily. Of course, they aren't exactly the same types of products.

Utilizing Taleo, managers didn't have the same access as they do with SmartRecruiters, being able to see every candidate that applies, which can also bog you down a little bit. However, they can see what they're missing out on or what they're not missing out on. They can see the other side, and it allows them to understand, more so, where I'm coming from, or give them a little insight into the world of talent acquisition. The biggest lesson has been with the hiring managers if they do want to be involved. If they do want to collaborate, SmartRecruiters makes it easier for them to do that.

The initial setup seemed straight forward. What I did like is that it did seem like there was a decent amount of room for customization, especially within our company.

We had a global rollout. Depending on what country you're with, we were able to customize whether to offer detailed features. We could set it up so that we're sending offer letters, or even setting up the requisition or creating a job within the system that could be customized as well. 

It was a bit of a blank slate there. It could be considered tough as well as you have to really take a look at your process and think okay, what's important? What do we absolutely need? Is this a need or is this a want? I liked being able to customize it as needed, however, then it also left a lot of open space to where it would kind of have been nice to have a bit more of a focus if that makes sense.

For the deployment, we had a global team who lead the charge for all the countries throughout the globe. In the U.S. it was just me and two or three other individuals who led the rollout for the U.S. only.

I would say the entire deployment took a few months definitely from start to finish. I would say maybe upwards of three months were needed for us.

The deployment plan was essentially to try and figure out what the requirements were in terms of what we're missing. We had a couple of recruiters involved. We had a software developer involved and someone on our HR side as well to help us in figuring out the different endpoints that were needed there.

What we did is we would work with global. They would give us the initial outline of what they wanted. We would customize it. Then we would test it in kind of a Sandbox Environment, posting different positions, try not applying to different positions. We did a lot of testing back and forth for a few months. Then, once we kind of got it all worked out, we ended up just releasing it initially to our Recruitment Team here in the U.S. And then just to more of the Higher Level managers or Executive Level managers to have them get used to it, rather than kind of giving it to the whole organization.

There definitely would be some maintenance, at least once a quarter since we're still working on getting it kind of really straightened out. We have a more technical person who handles that aspect of the product.

I wasn't involved in the pricing part of the deployment and therefore do not know what the company pays for the product, or how often they are charged. I'm also not sure of any extra charges beyond the standard licensing fee.

I was involved in implementing the solution in my current company here, and that was in just this past May or so. This is my first year using it. We're using the web application of the solution. We're using the most recent version of the solution.

I definitely would recommend the solution to other users. What I really like about SmartRecruiters is communication and collaboration between candidates and internal clients or managers. It's a very user-friendly system for end-users and for individuals like myself. I feel like it was easy for internal employees as well to adapt quickly, as long as they used it as much as they should. It's laid out a little bit like a social media platform would be, whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn, which makes the usage very intuitive.

Anyone can easily just be able to jump in and start using it within a day. Overall I would definitely recommend looking into implementing it.

A negative lesson that I've learned is that it does take time to get people to get to that point with new things. Even though it's more fun, interactive type of a product, Iin terms of a tracking system for end-users and myself, it does take time to get everybody up to speed and just able to get the system where you want it, to where it works for our organization to save time. When we're automating our offer letter process inside the system, we're still having to make some updates regarding that, as we have a bunch of different business units that have changing roles and needs, and sometimes it can take a little bit longer to make that change. It still takes a lot of time to get it where you need to be. However, I don't know if that's exactly focused on SmartRecruiters. That can just sometimes be just the way it is for all implementations projects in general.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

The product was used while I was working at a Senior Living Medical Facility that did independent living. The organization did skilled nursing, and assisted living. When I got there, I came into an environment that was haphazard with recruiting. It was a subsidiary of a larger company, and all of the subsidiaries were doing things a little bit differently. Some had an HCM system, an Oracle-based system, and embedded in that Oracle system was Taleo. Others were just posting on Indeed. The community I came to, was going to the Indeed route. As an applicant in the past, when I'd used Oracle, and I've been a user of HR products throughout my career, it takes me 10 minutes to get through a Taleo-based applicant system, being a user of HR products. You have to watch how it parses your resume, you have to watch all of this stuff. I saw the cost that we were incurring on Indeed. And I made a change over to SmartRecruiters.

The company has a lot of Evergreen recruiting. They hire a lot of nurses, CNAs, and some other roles like on the independent living side such as restaurant servers for the dining areas. These were Evergreen roles. I knew I could use their free version, the SmartStart version of SmartRecruiters, and I transitioned away from other options. All the money that the company was spending on Indeed was shifted over to SmartRecruiters, to recruit for those roles. It made everything a lot easier and saved money as well.

What I've found most valuable, especially recently, and throughout the time I've used it, was the fact that, in smaller healthcare companies, this solution fits really well. Often, in smaller healthcare organizations, you don't have the resources, especially if you're a nonprofit. The management is so focused on health care, they're not focused on the workings of HR, and the central apps of the company, or how the resources go towards patient care, and rightfully so in some cases.

With this solution, I was able to add diversity to my recruiting. I was able to source from multiple locations, and I could show where applicants came from. The reporting tools that are on offer, allowed us to expand our reach. We were able to add meaningful diversity into recruiting. 

I've been the most successful at getting candidates from, SmartRecruiters. All of that success came from the reporting that SmartRecruiters gives, compared to the places.

I also reduced the cost of recruiting.  And I was able to convert over to the SmartStart version of SmartRecruiters. Post up to 10 jobs for absolutely free, I was posting to this same exact sources, and even more, because it's spread out a little bit more, but the majority of it came from Indeed, of course.

I put the average cost of recruiting over the next five months by $4,500 per month, which is far less than Indeed, which can be as much as $8500/month. The savings have allowed me to reallocate the money to other things. All of those savings, and I was still getting ht sesame amount of leads a month.

The product has very good integration with other HR technologies. I was on the marketplace, of SmartRecruiters and I engaged in Electronic Onboarding Partners. Due to the $4500 savings I created, I was able to get an entire year's worth of Electronic Onboarding.  

Around 2015 and into '17, I worked at a federal contractor. I had to switch to a different applicant system as I didn't know if SmartRecruiters was OFCCP compliant, which is something that, as a US-based federal contractor, you have to ensure. They should work to appeal to the contractor industry and get the product OFCCP compliant.

I found it to be really easy on Workable (a competitor) to make the application process of uploading a resume and then answering a few questions, and it was also easy to be able to upload or directly type in a cover letter. I basically built a legal application into Workable where I felt very confident that when a person went through Workable, I had copied and pasted over from a paper application with all of the legal portions necessary at the bottom that people had to sign. That's what I could never find on SmartResearchers, The solution is more of a pure applicant system and I couldn't create an actual application.

It would be awesome would be a more robust offer letter functionality. There is some of that in there already, however, maybe if they spend some time and they built a more robust offer letter feature, that could save some time. I've always reverted back to my own personal offer letters and then just attached them into the messaging. If they built something that was a little bit more than an email template, it'd be better.

I began using the solution starting around 2012. I've always used it in relation to various health industry organizatuons.

I started using the product back around 2012-ish when they were just literally in beta test mode. It was absolutely free. They didn't even ask for money. It was a completely free ATS just so that they could have people on it and test out its functionality. 

I've kind-of watched this product mature over the years. Back then, I was working at a nonprofit, I had no money and a budget, so I had to find a solution like that. I've watched them go from that into a very mature ATS that's SaaS-based, it's integrated and it's a global system. I see that they partner very well across the world. I think it's a viable solution for a lot of people. It's quite stable and very reliable.

The solution is definitely scalable. From a small company perspective, you can use it. You can use it from a large company perspective as well. 

For example, one of the other companies that use SmartRecruiters is Sketchers, the shoe company. For all of their retail stores and all their facilities, Sketchers, a very retail-heavy company with hourly employees and home office and store management employees, uses this service. They're quite sizable and it serves them well.

They use SmartRecruiters as an enterprise platform. I've used the enterprise-level version as well. On the backend, in that case, you can add a variety of roles and positions. If you have three or four companies under a parent company, you can set them up as separate recruiting websites and brand them completely differently. It really expands to meet the needs of the largest and most intricate companies. You can have a variety of different entities covered under one product.

In my latest contract, there are 15-17 hiring managers under the product.

How much technical support you get depends on how you engage with the product. If you are using the free SmartStart version, support is limited to you accessing their online help center / knowledge base. The enterprise version, however, does access to a person or a team you can connect with if you need to in addition to the knowledge base.

I've used Indeed in the past. However, it's been rather expensive.

There is a pay per click portion of Indeed, and if a company lets it ride, that can be up for weeks or months and might still be getting clicked and therefore incurring costs to the company. I pulled the history of an Indeed ad once, and it was about $8,000 to $8,500 per month. That is what was being spent on recruiting for a small and medium-sized company with 330 persons in the living facility. That's a lot of money.

I've also used Workable, which I really liked, and Taleo, which isn't as quick or as efficient as this solution. Taleo also doesn't tend to parse the information correctly. It's not as exacting. You always need to make sure every field that needs to be filled is actually filled out. It also makes each user create a username and password even just to apply to a job. The applicant process just isn't as smooth and it can deter applicants from finishing an application, especially due to the fact that the process can sometimes take up to 30 minutes. This solution takes less time and has less drop off of applicants.

The initial setup is was really easy. That's one of the reasons why I went back to the solution when coming over to my latest position. It's very straightforward since it's SaaS-based. It's not quite the right term, however, it's pretty plug-and-play. You just get access to it and it's intuitive. If you've been online on any type of HR software, you can figure it out on your first try.

I was using the free SmartStart version of it. In the past, I've actually contracted with them for the full enterprise version of it, and both times it's easy. As soon as you get access to the system, it's customizable. You can start using it immediately and really just post some jobs and start sourcing people, but you get access to the admin side and it takes a little bit of time to build it out. If you really wanted to build a custom landing page for your hiring, brand it to your company colors, it's all there. It just takes some time to do it.

I never found it too difficult; I found it very easy to do. If you're coming into a product like that, you just need to set aside a little bit of time to adjust it if you want it to appear branded. If you want all of that, set it's best to set some time aside at the beginning, to get into the administration side of it, and set all that up. You can customize your automatic emails to applicants, your interview templates, all the templates, etc. 

There isn't any maintenance needed per se unless you are changing branding styles or job descriptions under your profile.

Back in 2018, when I engaged with their sales, they wanted to charge around $10,000 for an annual subscription. Depending on your organization, that either could or couldn't be expensive. I personally think it's a fair price. However, I engaged them and negotiated a lower price with them. I think I got closer to $6,000. It came with a commitment of three years. 

I don't recall if there were extra costs beyond the main license. Ther might have been for a certain level of extra functionality.

We use an online version of the solution.

I would recommend this to other companies that are looking for a solution that is easy to use and offers speedy applications for users. It's all very intuitive, it's easy to set up, and has a very low level of commitment.

HR technology keeps evolving. SmartRecruiters continues to evolve their technology too. They don't have the biggest name in the ATS industry, however, they definitely are modern.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We used SmartRecruiters as our sole recruitment platform. Basically, we were using an HR system that had a recruitment module before, and it wasn't very good. So, we were using this as a standalone recruitment tool for all of our recruiting needs across five main areas of work. Essentially, managing the whole end-to-end recruitment process.

I used this program in my last role, which ended earlier in 2020.

There were several benefits to using this product. One of them was that we previously had a lot of problems with attracting enough candidates for our roles due to various reasons, but with SmartRecruiters, it made attraction significantly easier.

A lot of our roles would fill directly, just through the auto-posting features that SmartRecruiters has. We significantly saved on agency use and recruitment advertising, et cetera. We filled a lot of the roles directly on our own.

Another one was around visibility. Having access to data and reporting was really good. They've got some inbuilt reports around things like diversity monitoring, source of candidates, time to hire, and all of that is really easy to access. It gave you some really useful insight on where the holes in your process were and where things could be made better as well.

The most valuable feature is the way that they've set it up for collaboration. Recruitment is obviously a team sport for want of a better phrase. A lot of the other systems that I've used, it's been quite tricky to actually get comments and feedback from people via a recruitment system - people tend to do things off-system, but SmartRecruiters made it very easy for the managers and the candidates and everybody else that's involved in recruitment to actually use the system and to share feedback on candidates and share decisions, et cetera, as well.

The interface is definitely user-friendly. Before we decided to go with SmartRecruiters, we did a final round of testing with users between this and another solution. The feedback that I got from hiring managers and from people that were applying as if they were candidates said that it was the most user-friendly system that they've experienced in this type of system.

One thing that stuck with me, the feedback that I got from somebody was he basically said it's like they've looked at all of the other systems, stripped out all the rubbish that you get with them, and then they just give you what you need and it's very clear what you need to do on each page.

With respect to listening to what the users want, they have a forum where people can suggest new ideas and vote on them, and they push those ideas through fairly regular releases.

When I was working on it, I found a couple of minor niggles around workflows and the customization of them. However, my understanding is that they have now fixed them.

There were some issues with integrations around other HR systems and each one had to be custom-built, which took a little while to get set up and running. While they have some integrations pre-built, we were using an HR system that would have need an integration building from scratch. It's not really their fault but it can slow things down.

I guess the only other thing is that they don't do, technically, a full end-to-end. In terms of candidate onboarding, et cetera, they don't do onboarding themselves, but they have the marketplace where there's a selection of integrated vendors that you can choose from, but then you obviously need to develop a relationship with those vendors and sign a contract with them and pay for it separately. The system that I'm using now tries to be a "one size fits all" solution for everybody and they only have one solution, whereas, with SmartRecruiters, they give you the choice of a couple of different vendors via their marketplace.

If I had to choose one thing for them to work on, it would be having a more integrated onboarding solution.

With respect to stability, we had no problems with bugs or freezing. There were occasional downtimes, which were unplanned unscheduled downtimes. I think that was just a blip along the way, but towards the end of my time using it, it was a fairly constant thing.

It was never particularly long, at perhaps 20 to 30 minutes max downtime, but it was annoying at the same time. They do have status updates and they'll email you as soon as they know that something's up and they work on it and they give you fairly constant updates.

As the recruitment manager, I was using it on a daily basis and we were using it for all of our recruitment. My plans were to continue using it, maybe look at expanding out and using some of the marketplace vendors to cover off the other parts of the process that we were doing manually. However, I left that organization and have begun using a different product.

We did have the opportunity to scale because we used it beyond our original use case. It was originally bought for our day-to-day recruitment needs for the core company, but then we also have a couple of affiliate companies that have their own brand and identity. Because you can set up additional companies under the existing license, we ended up supporting them.

Then, we also used it to replace another software system that we were using in a different part of the business. We were effectively using CRM for recruitment purposes and paying large sums of money for it when we didn't really need to. We tweaked the process and ended up using SmartRecruiters for that as well.

We had about 250 users, which included myself and HR colleagues, being six or seven of us. The majority of users were hiring managers and all kinds of interviewers or short-listers, as well as candidates.

In terms of configuration and adjusting process flows and look and feel, it's very good.

With the single sign-on problem that we had, we ended up having their head of technical support in San Francisco, join us on a call to sort stuff out, which was really appreciated. On a day-to-day basis, they've got a really responsive team in Poland.

They're very accessible and very responsive.

I have deployed a couple of different recruitment systems and this was the easiest one, by far. Since I have left that organization, I have been using another well known ATS. They both do basically the same thing but in very different ways.

My current system has been around for approximately 20 years. They have tweaked it and developed it for a while, but you can tell that the core product has been around for a while and it's not quite as slick and streamlined as I found SmartRecruiters.

The initial setup was easy, compared to other similar solutions that I have worked with.

It took us a little while to deploy, although that was more on our side. We had some internal IT issues around single sign-on, which took us longer than planned.

SmartRecruiters were really, really good in terms of offering support while we were trying to work out what was wrong on our end. Had it not been for those, we probably could have launched in about six weeks or so, but it ended up being approximately two and a half months in total.

I led the deployment on it from my side, but then I had support from IT colleagues, et cetera. SmartRecruiters provided a dedicated implementation consultant, who was excellent. 

The solution is hosted by SmartRecruiters, so all of the maintenance is done by them.

We absolutely saw ROI, and it was massive. In terms of cost savings and time savings, that's probably the two main ones.

There were implementation costs in the first year to get everything set up and running, and then they have various modules on top, which are optional and available at an extra charge.

From my perspective, there was not a lack of functionality. They have modules for large parts of the system that they will charge for separately. There were certain things that we didn't pay for, so we didn't have access to These included things like a candidate relationship management database and I think they have various AI tools as well, but that's 'opt-in' if you want it.

In my previous role, when I was using SmartRecruiters, we were a registered charity in the UK, so they offered a fairly significant discount on that, which was really appreciated. Had it not been for that then it definitely would've been out of our price range.

By comparison, it's close to the same price as what I'm paying for my current solution in my current organization. With that charity discount, it definitely makes things more palatable. I think otherwise in terms of the market, where they sit in the marketplace, they are definitely towards the higher end of things.

In my experience with this solution, there were not many downfalls to it.

This is a product that I would recommend. My advice to people would be to just be as prepared as possible. Do your reading. They provide a lot of setup documentation and things that they need from you, so they give you everything, but they will do handholding as well.

There's quite a lot of research internally, which is what I discovered from the example I was saying about the delayed implementation. They make it as easy as possible, but there's a certain amount that you have to do at your end at the same time.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using SmartRecruiters is that technology can only take you so far. You can have an excellent system like SmartRecruiters, but if your internal processes are broken, then it's only going to take you so far. It's great to have, but you have to have the internal systems and processes in place as well to really make the most of it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

As an HRIS analyst, I am working in the SmartRecruiters system on a daily basis. I have admin access, and I am also doing configurations in the system. 

We are using this solution for recruitments. We gather candidate data in the system and move them through the hiring process. We are using the latest Enterprise version of this solution. We most probably have a SaaS version.

By using this system, we are able to measure the processes. We get a lot of data from this system. We couldn't get this kind of data from the system that we used previously. We can see the time to hire and take measures to reduce the time to hire as well as the cost of the hire. We can also see how many job boards we are using and how many hires each agency that we are using can provide. It is also GDPR compliant, so we know that we are aligned at the data privacy level.

It has a lot of good features. We post all of our jobs through the system, and they have a marketplace where you can share the job post with the job boards they're working with. It is integrated with all the records about from where the applications are coming. We have all of our candidates gathered there. We can set up our own hiring processes depending on the type of job and then move them through the process there.

It is also possible to involve hiring managers and give them access so that they can also track the candidates and have a look at TBE and interact in the system, which is very useful. We also use SmartRecruiters for job approvals before posting the job as well as for offer approvals before sending an offer. We have everything in the system itself, and everything is being tracked, which is very good for us.

It is a reliable system, and you can use it for the full cycle of recruitment. You can really adapt it to your processes. When it comes to the configuration, it is easy to configure. Something that is good with SmartRecruiters is that they are always working on improvements. Every quarter, they have different enhancements or product releases, which is something that we appreciate.

One of the areas that we would like them to improve is the self-scheduling feature. They have a self-scheduling feature that can be made a little bit more automated when it comes to scheduling. We are trying to use it, but it doesn't feel very user-friendly. This is something that could be improved. 

They have launched WhatsApp connections in the system, where instead of sending emails, you can WhatsApp candidates directly from the system, but currently, it mainly works in a few countries. Spain, where I'm based, is not one of them. If we use the system, the phone number for the candidates would be from the UK, and we don't think that would be the best. This feature is good for some countries, but not for all at the moment. It was first launched in the USA and then in a couple of countries in Europe. It is not yet launched fully in Europe.

Reporting is always something that can be improved. Even though it is working well for us, its reporting can be better. Currently, it is a little bit complicated when it comes to reporting. It has a few pre-made reports that are easy to access, but if you want more details, you need to build your own reports. In order to do that, it is a bit tricky to learn and understand how it works. Even though you have help agents and support for help, it takes some time to learn, but it is not impossible. We have very recently made some integrations with Tableau. We are building dashboards in Tableau where we can get daily updated reports, and they are definitely helpful. That's something we would recommend.

SmartRecruiters has recently implemented an inbox. You can have an inbox where you can see all your conversations, but currently, it is not filtering between the recruiters, so you see everyone's emails in there. They have already announced that they are working on the filtering feature for a specific inbox to make it more personalized per recruiter. This way the recruiters can have an overview of their own work.

We have been using this solution for a little bit more than one and a half years.

In general, it works well. Every now and then, there might be a performance issue in the system, but normally, as soon as that happens, SmartRecruiters sends a message saying what the issue is, and they follow up continuously until it is resolved. It normally gets resolved quite quickly. It doesn't happen very often, so it feels very reliable.

Because we had different milestones, we got support to onboard different brands. We had four milestones, and SmartRecruiters helped to support the first two. I did the onboarding for the other two myself. It worked very well. Now when we have new companies coming on board within the organization, I do the full onboarding myself.

The whole company has access to it at different levels. Every employee has access to the system in order to look for internal vacancies and cover for our people. We also have hiring managers and recruitment teams. They have a little bit more advanced access. They can access different jobs. Each country has a recruitment team, and in each recruitment team, there are some admin users and the recruitment team itself.

We don't have any support in Spain itself. If we need help, we have our Customer Success Manager. We can also create tickets within the system. As soon as we have an issue, we create tickets within the system, and they can find or receive the ticket, and then they come back. They normally respond very fast. If they are able to resolve the issue immediately, they regularly follow up about how it is going. We get a good response from them.

Previously, we were using Lever, but that was only for our country. Each country was using a different solution. Because we are such a big company in many different countries, we wanted a solution that works for everyone. We wanted to have one system for every country so that we have access to everything. We also wanted to advance the reporting possibilities. Once we started with SmartRecruiters, we all went to the same system. We have a global platform for everyone.

I personally like Lever, but SmartRecruiters is a bit more advanced. SmartRecruiters can give us what we need. We stopped working with Lever almost two years ago. I don't know how they progressed after that, but generally, it was a good system.

The initial setup was quite straightforward, but it took some time. Our organization is large. We operate in many different countries and have many different brands within the organization. Therefore, we divided it into different milestones. While we were going live with the system, we were also going through an IPO, so it was a bit complex but not because of the system itself. It was probably more internal complexity. The system setup was quite straightforward. We also got really good support during the process.

In terms of the implementation strategy, because we had so many different brands within our organization going live, we had divided the implementation into different milestones. We had the milestone one, where there were five different organizations within the organization that went live. We had weekly meetings. We also had a worksheet that included tasks that we needed to complete in order to move forward to the next step. We had different project teams in each country.

We did it in-house. We had a project team, and we also got support from SmartRecruiters. For its maintenance, we have the admins. We have people operating in so many countries. We have IT communities with many users, and we have regular meetings just to discuss the maintenance. I am also one of those people who are fully responsible for adding new features to the system. 

We have some integrations working with SmartRecruiters, so anytime we need to configure something, we need to make sure that we don't break the company integrations. I am the one who is doing that. It is mainly our setup when it comes to integrations. It is not from the SmartRecruiter's side. It is more like we have an integration with payroll and workday. In order to set them up, it is a bit tricky, but with the right systems, it is possible to set them up, and that makes it run smoothly. It is running smoothly.

We work within digital marketplaces, so there are more digital marketplaces that we are going to onboard or merge together this year. That means that they eventually will need to start using the system. 

Based on the data that we see in the system, we have managed to reduce the time to hire. We also now know the number of referrals we are getting, what we need to improve, and what we are doing well. This is something we couldn't do before.

I haven't been so involved with pricing, so I don't have all details, but I know that we are paying per head when it comes to different countries. There is an additional fee for new features that they release. If it is something that we would like to use, we need to pay some extra for it.

I would recommend this solution. It is a good solution. It works for small companies and large enterprises. It is easy to configure, and you can really adapt it to your own business.

I would rate SmartRecruiters an eight out of ten. There are small improvements when it comes to different features, but this is not because the features aren't good. This is because we want to personalize them or adapt them even more for our organization.

We use this solution to offer a quick and simple way for people to apply for jobs or just browse the job opportunities. We are using its Enterprise version.

We wanted to give the best experience for people who are applying or just browsing the job opportunities. We wanted to put candidates in a center, and SmartRecruiters was a good match.

It is very easy to use. Before deploying it in the enterprise, we don't need to provide training to our users to use the system. If you have a Facebook or social media account, you would know how to use it. 

It provides almost real-time job publication. The moment you publish a job from SmartRecruiters, it goes to the respective channels. It has also helped us with GDPR compliance.

Job publishing and application tracking are the most valuable features. You can keep the flow of a candidate's application into one system. The whole collaboration can also be done within the system, which means that you can schedule interviews and add your feedback and ratings there. You can also communicate with the candidates. 

The analytics part of it is also very valuable. It is a useful feature that we use quite a lot. We don't really use other features such as recruitment marketing or CRM candidate relationship management in SmartRecruiters.

We require greater flexibility for customization with our employer branding. Currently, it is very much driven by the SmartRecruiters design. We are using a SaaS solution, so we are powered by what is in the core product itself. A disadvantage of being a SaaS solution is that there aren't many customization options because you are literally buying it out of the box. You use whatever is offered to you in a box as much as you can, and that might be a problem sometimes because customizations are not achievable. They should definitely improve and provide more flexibility for customizations.

For a large organization like ours, they can provide more flexibility on the authorization side of things. They could create a much more flexible way of access and separate the IT or help desk access when they need to go into the system and do some fixes. Currently, it is set up in a way that that you have access for everything or nothing, which is not useful in terms of the separation of duty that we have. There are also other things like matrix, where we can have a better and deeper kind of analysis.

We have been using it in our company for four years.

We are quite happy with its stability. We don't have a lot of incidents where things don't work or people are having issues with the system in general. It is very much stable.

It is very easy to scale up, but that's based on the assumption that the core product in itself meets all variants of needs that we need from, let's say, a country. We have scaled it. We have onboarded a new organization in Mexico. We did the configuration ourselves. It was pretty straightforward, and it didn't take a lot of time.

We have three main categories of users. We have recruiters, hiring managers, and we also have interviewers who are related to the recruitment process. We also have a need for admin access. In total, we have about 2,000 users.

We have reviewed and renewed the initial agreement with them last year, which means that at least for another two years, we'll be continuing with and using SmartRecruiters. In terms of the usage of the product, we currently have a dip because of the COVID situation. A lot of hiring is frozen. So, the usage really goes up and down depending on the cycle of the business, but we are ramping this up because we are really expanding when it comes to our digital resources. There might be more users who are actually going to use the system, but we are not going to expand it in terms of the functions. 

We work on a franchise system. I'm from the franchise organization, and we also have retailers who are franchisees. There are stores in the Middle East that use SmartRecruiters. It is also used in stores in Southeast Asia, Mexico, and Latin America. There are other markets like the Netherlands, for example, where we have organizations that use SmartRecruiters because they are a part of the franchisor. We also have retailer organizations that use other systems.

We do have support escalation, but we don't really have a lot of incidents. They work quite well. We also have very regular updates from the customer success manager. We have a very close collaboration with them.

We were using IBM Brassring Connector. SmartRecruiters' ease of use, experience, and data compliance with GDPR were the main reasons for switching to this.

Its ease of use and ease of configuration are the big selling points. It also provides a better experience for our users. When we onboarded this solution, the main reason was about the candidate experience. We wanted to offer a quick and simple way for people to apply for jobs. Our old system was not as agile and quick from a user experience point of view. 

SmartRecruiters also works for compliance, data management, and handling of sensitive and private information. 

The initial setup was actually straightforward. It was probably because we made a conscious decision to standardize the processes as much as possible. There were not really many country-specific or organization-specific processes, which definitely made the configuration a lot easier to do. 

There might have been some integration points that were a bit of a challenge at the beginning. When we procured this, they didn't have as many language options as they have now. The translation work was a bit of an issue with integration for us, but we custom-built that. So, in general, it is easy, except when it comes to certain integrations that are not within their marketplace.

It took us a year to roll it out because we decided to roll it out in phases, but you can actually do it within three to six months if you really want to be very quick about this. At that time, we were still experimenting with whether we want to do it agile or not.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we rolled it out in phases by country. We also had to work together with the product deployment team of SmartRecruiters at that time. For example, when we wanted to launch it in Russia, we had to wait for SmartRecruiters to comply with the Russian server requirements. We also had to shift it according to SmartRecruiters, and we worked in tandem with them to define our waterfall model.

To configure it, we worked together with SmartRecruiters, who were our consultants to do some of the configurations. We had a very lean team. We mostly needed people who would give us business inputs about the ways of working. When we talk about the technical or functional configuration side of things, we had less than five people.

Our tech team here for SmartRecruiters goes to various locations for the purpose of requirement gathering, training, and initial introduction. They only go to our key stakeholders.

In terms of maintenance, SmartRecruiters handles the product updates on a quarterly basis. Its maintenance is taken care of by them. We don't have to do any maintenance in that sense.

I don't really have any numbers because we don't measure it that way, but it is definitely a positive ROI. From a cost perspective, it makes sense, and it is very agile in terms of service and support.

In terms of the use and the ways of working, it is very easy. We have got a lot more attraction from people using the system, which definitely is one of the good things about the ways of working that have been improved. The eagerness of the population to use it is high.

They are pretty competitive. As the product matures, it has much more functionality and different pricing models. It can relatively cost a lot more if you want to use additional features, but, in general, it is competitive in the industry.

We work on a yearly license agreement based on the company size. There are the support costs, which are a part of the additional cost based on the percentage of the licensing fee. So, it has a license plus support cost. Then, of course, there are other add-on options that we can purchase and procure whenever we want to based on certain negotiated arrangements.

My advice is to try to stick as much as you can to what the product has to offer and keep it simple. If you do that, SmartRecruiters is really ideal and quick to deploy. Sometimes companies or organizations are reluctant to change their processes because they have been familiar with them for many years. 

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that sometimes being simple or a different way of working makes sense for a situation. In terms of the recruitment activities, the young people like how SmartRecruiters actually supports them in their application process. It makes them feel modern, relevant, and current because the application process is so simple and cool, which really makes a lot of difference for companies. The first impression does count when people apply for jobs.

They are becoming very strong in this market. In fact, I know them when they were a startup. I saw them at a conference when they first launched the idea. So, I've seen them grow. I also believe in what they are working on in terms of their product development and their thinking of the hiring success. That's the word they use, and SmartRecruiters as a solution supports that.

I would rate SmartRecruiters a nine out of ten.

We are using this solution for a combination of things. We use it for sourcing candidates for posted positions, scheduling interviews, and running offers through the system. We are doing everything our of the system.

The candidate quality was better and having the ability to do everything out of the system. 

The all-encompassing ability to manage the process cohesively out of the SmartRecruiter system was valuable.

The ease of use helped a lot. Frankly, it was easy to use, and the transparency with the hiring manager was also very good. Managers could just look at the system, they could see things, and they could stay current on what was going on.

The sourcing features were quite good. They did a good job of identifying candidates. 

The way the posting interface went out of the system worked quite well, and we always generated a pretty dramatic number of candidates for the position.

It's very easy to use. It only takes a matter of days to understand it and feel comfortable with it.

We are very happy with the customization and the dashboard, and it's very intuitive.

It wasn't a pain point with SmartRecruiters. It's more of a pain point with our company, turning on all of the features. 

We were really looking for the field application part of the system for college recruiting.

The company was reticent to turn that on. So we couldn't use the system on college campuses, for example, when I was going to career fairs. That was one issue. 

The artificial intelligence capabilities with SmartRecruiters was not used, either. We, in the US, would have liked to turn it on, but the company in Germany wouldn't allow it. 

There were limitations with the system that we would have liked, not in the time, but our company in Germany really dictated that. We couldn't do everything in the system we would have liked to.

Part of the solution is not fully open on a global basis.

SmartRecruiters became a global tool for the business and the company has operations worldwide.

We in the US would have loved to have had a pre-college recruiting application, had their artificial intelligence capability, and some of those other things that are part of the SmartRecruiters system, but we couldn't do it because of global considerations the company had in place.

From our standpoint, again, we didn't have access to all the features. I really wanted to have the field application and artificial intelligence capability. They are already in the system, we just couldn't get past some of those international hurdles that we have at this point.

That was the limitation or what I would've really liked to have seen, but I don't even know how I would have worked necessarily because we didn't have access to it.

I can't really say what the next generation would look like because it couldn't support the first generation that I wanted.

I have been using this solution for the last 18 months when I left my previous job, and nine years prior to that.

Going back to March, we were using the most current version for that time.

This solution is very stable. We had no issues with stability whatsoever.

We can't scale it much more than we did at the company.

We are looking at multiple countries around the globe and having the system operate in each of those environments with any legal considerations that are part of each of those countries.

From a scalability standpoint, it's very scalable.

There were HR people, HR business partners that used the system on a regular basis, and there was a recruiting team that worked on the application daily.

 Hiring managers had access to the system so they could view what was going on with the requisitions. It was an enterprise-wide solution.

It's a global tool. From a business standpoint, for us, it was being used all over the world.

I don't know that we would be expanding it. We are looking at a company with 400,000 associates, so I don't know that you could get much bigger or more comprehensive than that.

Now the only question is, would we be allowed to turn on those additional features that we would have liked to have had? That would be the question of expansion.

Technical support is very good.

I've used all manner of solutions over the years. There are a variety of different solutions that I've worked with. SmartRecruiters was very good in my opinion.

The ease of use of the system would be the reasons we switched to this product, as well as the global scalability. At the time that we went with Smart Recruiters, there were different ETF applications being used globally. This was an opportunity for us to get under one system on a global basis.

The ease of use and the ease of implementation were important considerations and in the company, choosing to move to SmartRecruiters.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We made it complex because we are who we are.

The deployment took months to complete. It probably took longer to deploy because it was who we are, and we were trying to take everything into consideration globally.

Originally it was deployed in Germany, then rolled over to the US, from there to China and parts of the EU. It was a fairly complex rollout strategy just based on the global nature of the organization.

There was a dedicated team that was coordinating the effort on a worldwide basis.

We have a dedicated team and I was involved in the user testing at the time that we rolled out the system.

I didn't have any real issues. It all made sense as we moved through the process. It's really pretty much a plug-and-play solution if you turn on all the different aspects of the system. Our only limitation was that we couldn't turn on all those things.

It was an ongoing series of, "Hey, can we do this?", and, "Hey, are we allowed to do this?", which is why it became more complex just because we didn't turn on all the solutions initially.

Anytime we wanted to do anything, we had to get permission from Germany.

There were quite a lot of limitations and that's one of the challenges.

I wasn't exposed to the pricing. it was handled by the global implementation team.

I would recommend SmartRecruiters to others who are interested in using it.

I would recommend you use the full functionality of the system because it has some great capabilities, you just need to be able to turn on all those features and utilize the system fully.

From my standpoint, and from where I was sitting as a talent acquisition manager, the biggest thing that I have learned would be if you're going to implement the system, implement it wholly.

Don't do a piece by piece, because you want all those capabilities, and unfortunately, you are limited in that because the organization was doing this on a global basis.

We couldn't do everything that we would have liked to have done here in the US.

Ideally, I guess there's a lesson learned. For us, it would be, "Can we please just turn all that functionality right out of the gate?", as opposed to phasing it in over time, or if we can phase it in over time.

I would rate SmartRecruiters an eight out of ten.

It is fundamentally used for all internal and external resourcing at our company. It is the only tool that we use to manage all of our candidates. We are most likely using its latest version.

The biggest thing is that it has made the process more efficient. We also have integrations into our onboarding tool and our HR system platform, which is SuccessFactors. It has made the hire-to-onboard process a lot more efficient and smoother. It has been a lot easier for the recruitment team to manage all the candidates applying for roles and involve managers where required. It has helped with the approval process when roles are signed off, and it has also been helpful in approving offers through the system. 

It is a really user-friendly tool, and its implementation is quite wide. It is very easy to manage users and build your workflows. Overall, it works very well for the customization of the workflows for us.

The recruitment team has generally found the whole platform useful. We were looking to expand it by using the CRM functions that it has. However, with COVID and recruitment being on the freeze, we weren't really able to make the most of the tool. They are, however, finding it useful to actually build up their talent pools and client candidates to be able to contact them when we kind of have this freeze off.

The major improvement area is how it integrates with other systems. That's where we've had some sort of pain points. They've done a lot of work with their development team in setting up integrations with other types of software which we use, but we have found some glitches there. This is probably where they need to do some work. Sometimes, when it refreshes or there is any sort of update in SmartRecruiters, it has a direct impact on the integrations that we have with other tools. We are not always notified when that takes place. We have had HR say to us, "We've just hired this guy. He is not there in our on-boarding tool or HR system at all. What's going on?" That's when we realized that the integration is actually broken. When we have other solutions, it would be very helpful to have knowledge articles for such integrations.

We have found some of the templates that we want to use and some of the customizations that we do around the offer letters and the contract letters to be a little bit more difficult, which hasn't made this process any more efficient than it was. We still have to do a bit of manual intervention there. I don't know if it is just our company, but we need to have different clauses and things in place. We have stopped using DocuSign as well, and we are trying to look at other ways of doing that. They are aware of this.

We went live with it at the end of 2018.  

That is something that we will look at this year. We will look at what more we could do with all of our account managers.

We have about 40 users who do the administration or are part of the recruitment process. Everything related to the customizations where you've got workflows and processes is handled by our HR team. Everything related to offer letters and the workflow of candidates is handled by the resourcing team. We have kind of just joint responsibilities there.

It was being used quite extensively when it was launched in 2018 and in 2019. Last year, its usage has really reduced because of team changes and reduction in recruitment activity because of what was happening because of the impacts of COVID, but it is still the only thing that's being used if we're recruiting.

This is something they have improved on. It was a bit of a bugbear for us to get in touch with the support team. It was all done by Salesforce, and it was very difficult to track tickets.

We're UK-based, and I think that most of their team is based in America, which can delay solutions. They could be a little bit more responsive, and that's the feedback that we've given to SmartRecruiters as well, but overall, they're quite good. If it is something to do within the platform, they are usually very quick. The difficulty has been where we've had the integration issues.

It was something new. I don't think we had any way of managing the recruitment process online before introducing this.

I was not there for the deployment, but generally, based on the feedback, the whole implementation process went really well. They had a lot of support. The only thing that is tricky is the integration with other systems.

I am unsure what the other options were.

It is good for what we need, and it works well for us. I would recommend it, but if you are going to link it with other solutions, be aware that a bit of work might have to be done there.

Looking at more AI things like the smart assistant, it looks brilliant for what it is. We haven't been able to make the most of it. At the moment, the majority of our base is working remotely, and we do have a recruitment freeze so that has reduced our engagement with the system. We are mostly using email and Zoom for all the communication, depending on the region and the preferred mode of interview, but it is still the only tool that we use to manage all of our candidates.

They've got lots of things on the roadmap for quite a young company. Things could be more efficient, and they're doing all they can to keep up with the change in the market and what we are experiencing, especially over the last year.

I would rate SmartRecruiters an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case with SmartRecruiters is as a recruitment or a talent acquisition platform.

Our version is fully managed by SmartRecruiters.

In terms of how SmartRecruiters has improved our organization, we didn't have any global solution in place prior to implementing SmartRecruiters. We worked very individually through Excel sheets or something like that. Once we implemented SmartRecruiters, it meant that we were able to have a consolidated global overview of all the recruitment activities. Another feature that is very, very important and developing very rapidly with SmartRecruiters is its ability to draw data and analytics about the efficiency of how our recruitment is doing.

When we were choosing a solution, the features that were most important for us to have were that it is user friendly and functional, which is definitely the case with SmartRecruiters. Our organization is located in developing countries where the bandwidth and internet stability are not the strongest and SmartRecruiters accommodates this challenge. It was a very big plus that we are able to use the system even in these locations.

In terms of what could be improved, there are a couple of things. First of all, some features are not as straightforward or user friendly to implement. There might be a little bit more of a straightforward way, per position, to be able to create some sourcing questions for the applicants or knockout questions, or things like that. This is a little bit more complex, but there is also a reason behind it for SmartRecruiters.

In principle, what also works very well with SmartRecruiters is that you are able to share the ideas that you find useful for further development on the platform. They are especially good if the idea is supported by other customers. SmartRecruiters actually picked this one up quite quickly. So in principle, as long as we make the effort to communicate with SmartRecruiters, they are very good at looking and reviewing, and if it is important, quickly implementing some features that are there for improvement.

I have been using SmartRecruiters for three years.

In terms of stability, it is very, very high. I would say even 99%, because in three years we have maybe once experienced, for a very short period, that the system was not fully accessible. And that was resolved by SmartRecruiters within a couple of hours.

SmartRecruiters is absolutely scalable. To be honest, I don't have the exact limitations. I'm not sure if there are actually any limitations on the system because we have at the moment around 20,000 applicants, maybe more than that. So as far as I know, there are no limits on the number that can go into the system.

There are different profiles within the system. As for the standard employees, it's around 1300. One thousand three hundred total employees out of which we have around 30 recruiters and about five admin people.

With small issues the response is very, very efficient. Normally the solutions for the simpler things happen within 24 to 48 hours. With the more complex things, we had solutions within a few days.

The initial setup was indeed very straightforward and the cooperation with SmartRecruiters was also very efficient. They support any issues that may pop up very efficiently.

I would say it was three or four weeks maximum to implement, maybe not even that.

There were three people involved on our side, a couple of HR advisors and the senior IT Support person. We also got help from SmartRecruiters during the deployment process. Our direct accounts manager was constantly on call and the tech support was basically supporting us throughout the process.

In terms of ROI, I think the main return is from increased efficiency within our recruitment activities, requiring less time and resources to successfully complete the recruitment cycle.

Before choosing SmartRecruiters, we had a whole selection process by a selection committee where, according to our procurement requirements, we needed to review a minimum of three solutions. But I think we reviewed in total about 10, which was shortlisted to the last final three. Then we checked the proposals and the way these providers matched our requirements was given a score.

SuccessFactors was one of the top four that our people thought was workable.

For us, pricing was very important. In principle, they are all very similar, but SmartRecruiters, with all the features and requirements that we had for our talent acquisition or recruitment assistance, was very compatible because of what it offers. Feature-wise, compatibility, and price-wise. Especially when we told them that we are a nonprofit organization, SmartRecruiters accommodated us more in their contractual conditions.

The advice is that definitely we would recommend SmartRecruiters. In our case everything has gone very smoothly and we find it very efficient. SmartRecruiters is definitely developing very rapidly with the times, introducing many new features that other customers suggest.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give SmartRecruiters an eight.

We could say eight to nine, but eight definitely. There still is some room to keep improving the little tweaks. Let's put nine because they are really good at implementing the requirements of the customers. But there still is room for a little tweak, which they take into consideration, but it must have support from other customers, as well.