What needs improvement with SmartRecruiters?

With SmartRecruiters, compatibility with other HRIS systems is an area with certain shortcomings that require improvement. SmartRecruiters is a tool that we use as an ATS platform in our company, but we manage the employee lifecycle with the help of SAP, and I don't see the integration of SmartRecruiters with SAP happening quite seamlessly, making it an area where improvements are required.

The solution's reporting feature could be improved because it is not very strong.

There are a couple of areas of improvement. SmartRecruiter lacks certain features in terms of usability. For instance, we cannot move candidate profiles, interview feedback, notes, and activities related to one candidate when transitioning from one job to another. We have to manually copy and paste everything for that specific candidate. This is a significant drawback. Additionally, the filters are not accurate. The results are inaccurate when filtering multiple criteria, such as country and hiring manager. This level of inaccuracy is unexpected for an application, especially for smaller organizations. It should have been corrected easily. Moreover, the CRM module lacks video reporting capabilities. These are some the biggest improvement I would like to see.

One thing that has been a bit of a struggle is getting tech support. It is a little more difficult to get support from SmartRecruiters. They want you to have your own in-house person to help you with any issues, whereas with both Lever and Greenhouse, you can just click a button at the bottom of the screen and chat with someone almost instantly.

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.

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.

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.

At times when resumes come in and while analyzing keywords that I look for based on role/field, they don't show up or mention something else with grammatical error due to autocorrect, using varying English language (by country) on a word processor software that as a recruiter and applicant wouldn't think of at times and is not noticed. They should be more inclusive in analyzing and flagging words that mean the same but spelled differently.

SmartRecruiters' on-click application process could be better. When candidates would apply for jobs, they would do it with just a one-click through SmartRecruiters. But we couldn't get all the information that we wanted, the information we would normally get if they were to apply through our internal application system. After they put in an application, we sent them a short form in an email asking them to complete our full application. That was a little bit of a second step for candidates because they had to do more work.

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.

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.

SmartRecruiters is very complete but it's a little bit complex to use. Initially, there's a lot of information to take in. For me, as a talent acquisition analyst, it was easy. I used to use the platform all the time, so it was easy for me, but the managers who I worked with, although we had the same experience, they complained about the amount of information they had to put into the system. We would open a new position, for example, I could proceed with the recruiting process, but for them, it was a little bit complex because they didn't use it on a daily basis — it's a little bit complex to understand the platform. There's a language barrier — for me, I'm Brazilian so Portuguese is easier, it's my mother tongue, but the platform was only in English. We ran into some serious issues related to language barriers. Our main problem was that it wasn't that user-friendly. There should be a little bit more information and documentation. Maybe it was a request from BIC to have all these spots to fill in with information, or maybe it was the platform; I am not really certain. Either way, there should be more documentation to turn to. With Guppy, the platform that I use today, it's easier because it's in Portuguese. The experience itself, it's easier, it's more user-friendly than SmartRecruiters.

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.

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.

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.