You might have spotted the press release last week from SmartRecruiters talking about how they have raised $30M in funding to “Accelerate Replacement of Legacy Enterprise Applicant Tracking Systems”. My first thought was jeez $30million is a hell of a lot of money and my second was what does this actually mean for recruiters.
Rob Symons is the VP, UK & Northern Europe for SmartRecruiters and he is truly passionate about his business and how they plan to expand its global reach and product footprint. He sent me a great email which talks about how what they are doing could impact the recruitment marketplace.
The ‘Talent Acquisition Platform’:
We fuse together CRM (candidate marketing/candidate relationship management), with a ‘next gen’ collaborative ATS, including native job distribution, social recruiting (social apply, social job sharing etc.), referral management and most importantly an ecosystem of 300+ pre integrated technologies. We approach the business issues recruiters face as a ‘platform’ which also ensures that we are not limited by our own innovation and resources. Of course everything we do is mobile responsive and we provide an excellent user experience across desktop, tablet and mobile for all users.
The UK is ‘ripe for disruption’ and consolidation:
The UK market does not have a ‘clear market leader’ anymore. People are tired of legacy ATS solutions which deliver a poor user experience, are hard to integrate and deliver a clunky candidate process. These issues drive recruiters outside of the system just to get their job done. As a result, the data around resourcing in incomplete or plain wrong which impacts decision making and ongoing optimisation of resourcing. By comparison, our platform is loved by users which drives better adoption and has native analytics and increasingly, predictive insights (e.g. which job board is likely to work well for this role).
Recruiting at risk of being lost in HCM:
I have a huge concern that the current market direction of ‘HCM Suite’ with the recruiting module being a ‘weak afterthought’ will reduce organizations capability to execute their recruiting strategy.
The large ERP players ‘buy up’ the once innovative recruiting market leaders who are then left ‘dying on the vine’ whilst their owners tackle bigger questions of integration to try and find value between modules, re-writing code to tackle the fact they are supporting multiple code lines and to remove technical debt. Most of these HCM technology stacks are ‘ancient’ by todays standards.
Some HCM providers have built out their recruiting offering – but in most cases they are immature and diluted by the broad focus of the vendor. Therefore recruitment teams are at risk of getting an inferior, slow moving solution as a result of organisations inadvertently buying a weak recruiting module as part of a bigger HR technology purchase. The simple fact is HR is predominantly internally focused, whereas Recruiting is predominantly externally focused. Recruitment owners need present a strong business case to ensure they have the best solution possible to succeed in a competitive market.
Recruiting ‘THE’ strategic lever to drive business value:
There is a great article by Boston Consulting Group which highlighted that Recruiting has a 3.5 x impact on revenue when fully optimized. This is more than any other HR process, so why do companies continue to prioritize core HR systems replacements over modernizing recruitment? HR is a system of record. It stores data and adds little value to the business. The positive impact that is felt by successfully hiring a top performer from a competitor is far reaching.
Simply put, we focus on one thing ‘Hiring Success’ – ensuring our customers have the best capability to source and secure the best talent to make their business more successful.
So SmartRecruiters wants to be the catalyst to enable organisations to drive more business value. What do you think?
