Company: SmartRecruiters
Website: www.smartrecruiters.com
Founder: Jerome Ternynck
Headquarters: San Francisco
Year Founded: 2010
Investors: Angel
Employees: 10
Twitter: @Smartrecruiters
Brief Company Description: SmartRecruiters’ free recruiting software makes hiring easy for business by leveraging the power of free open software, social networks and job sites.
By Jerome Ternynck
SmartRecruiters provides free online recruiting software that meets the needs of small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Our job posting and applicant-tracking Software as a Service (SaaS) platform has over 10,000 companies, with 200,000 job seekers and 25,000 job openings already processed, proving that our approach to recruiting gets results.
Throughout my career, I have been passionate about developing solutions that work to eradicate unemployment globally, through innovation in HR software. I started my first recruiting company at age 22 in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell. I then turned my attention toward the recruiting software industry in 1999 by pioneering one of the first global enterprise SaaS platforms.
Here at SmartRecruiters, we’re committed to changing recruiting through innovation and access. For most businesses, recruiting today is lengthy, painful and expensive. Why are more than 4 million jobs left vacant, while 10 percent of the workforce is unemployed? That needs to change. Recruiting needs to change. We live in a connected world in which hiring should be easy—especially for small-to-medium businesses that are the backbone of our economy.
A recent conversation with Josh Bersin, president and CEO of Bersin & Associates, a leading research and advisory firm in corporate talent acquisition, bears this out. He says that more than 80 percent of the small businesses they survey (those with fewer than 2,500 employees) indicated they are struggling to find great talent. In fact, the slowing economy has actually made this problem more difficult as small companies are flooded with resumes and often understaffed to deal with the deluge of applicants. He believes that by bringing advanced recruitment technology to small businesses at no cost, SmartRecruiters can dramatically help companies better find great talent, leverage social networks, and improve their quality of hire in a highly affordable way.
How it works
Companies can post jobs to leading paid, free and niche job boards with one click. SmartRecruiters’ recommendation engine provides analytics that help hiring managers decide which sites are likely to provide the best results. This allows hiring organizations to substantially improve both the speed and quality of its job posting process.
Managers and HR staff can promote jobs on social media sites and tap into the power of their networks on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Managers can review applicants and take action using robust applicant tracking features. Managers can generate detailed reporting to measure sourcing effectiveness and cost per hire. Managing the applicant tracking process in one place makes hiring more efficient.
The hiring team can share, rate and review candidates throughout the process, enabling cross-departmental input and decision-making. Feedback is collected and consolidated in real time. SmartRecruiters’ unique social collaboration tools promote team-based decision-making.
The company can also use SmartRecruiters to easily display jobs and collect applicants from their own corporate website and Facebook fan page. Hiring organizations get a professional, branded career site that consolidates its applicants in one place.
SmartRecruiter’s approach is different from large enterprise recruiting solutions that charge licensing fees or monthly subscriptions. From the beginning, we were focused on bringing the robust capabilities for recruiting, tracking and hiring that large corporations use to small-and-medium businesses. Our goal has always been to level the playing field and make it easy for small businesses to close the hiring gap. SmartRecruiters makes its revenue from the paid job listings that businesses are already buying—much the way travel sites generate their revenue from the service providers.
The company’s go-to-market strategy includes leveraging social networks and the power of online communities—the very same networks used by their customers—to spread the word about the free service. Currently seeking Series A funding, SmartRecruiters has begun a major public relations push as part of its initial launch. We recently announced the release of our free Facebook careers app, for instance, which now lets companies turn their Facebook fans into hires.
Early market reaction has been very favorable. “SmartRecruiters’ recruiting software has really helped organize, streamline, and effectively manage our busy Internet recruiting process,” said Fred Holt, VP Human Resources at Photobucket. The company, which hosts uploaded images and videos, also leverages SmartRecruiters site architecture to create its own branded Careers page.
SmartRecruiters – www.smartrecruiters.com
