Smartly Designed, Dead Simple Recruiting Platform. For the win.
January 15, 2016
Smartly Designed, Dead Simple Recruiting Platform. For the win.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Recruiterbox
I was managing the software procurement as well as participating in the recruiting process. This was in a professional training & coaching organization (prior to my current role). We needed to fill twenty positions within a 30-45 day window (not easy, for a small company). The tool was used by three hiring managers. It solved the problem of managing a high volume of candidates, and shepherding them through the screening and interview workflow.
- There's a "social footprint" kind of feature that scrubs popular social media tools for content, and aggregates this on the candidate page for a complete view of the candidate's personal brand. That was neat.
- The email and calendar integration was well done. Most people want simple communications (the ability to respond to a candidate from the email client on your mobile device, without the hassle of logging into a platform). The ability to discreetly communicate with the candidates, while maintaining the tags and communications thread on the candidates page was gold. It reminded me a lot of central desktop by how smartly it was executed.
- Increasing reach by blasting the job to multiple job boards (this was included in one of the subscriptions). Great timesaver.
- The interface isn't dazzling. But it's clean. Perhaps there's some opportunity to sexy up the UI.
- The labeling was a bit awkward, and doesn't work so cleanly when you forward a candidate to the data store, via the application email. For example, you can add the candidate manually using the web-based UI, or you can forward an application from your email client to an email alias. Also, the conversion from email-to-"creation of candidate profile" was not entirely great. But it was close enough to get the name logged in there. You just have to properly label and format the profile later, if you want the candidate repository to be well sorted and easily searchable.
- You cannot transfer jobs from one account to another. What I mean by this is: If you have multiple organizations within a single tenant, you can move the position within that tenant. But let's say you and a colleague signed up separately, and want to merge candidate databases and job settings. It's a no go. You'll have to do a bulk import. Which kind worked out to be an imperfect migration for us.
- Increased efficiency. Huge timesaver (the organization's hiring managers were previously managing interviews mostly via email).
- Positive and (slightly negative) culture shock. Slightly negative means there were just a couple of early hiccups before everyone understood how to use it. For example, having an internal discussion about the candidate was possible (there was an internal notes section in the web portal just for this purpose) but because of the very uniform appearance of the layout on the candidate page, if you're not paying attention, it can be easily confused with the candidate thread--and thus lead to a misfire. No bueno. The positive side of this is that it inspired greater adherence to process.
- It boosted the quality of the candidate experience. It's certainly a credibility booster when you have (and use!) a tool that helps you to be more responsive and orderly in how you engage talent. It's important to honor the candidate's time as well.
We evaluated and tested a few tools that are offered by a few job boards (Dice, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, SimplyHired). We then purposely targeted startups and early-stage companies that had fresh/creative approaches to talent management (platforms created by what might be the kind of candidate for which we were screening). We did a sandbox in Foundry (eventually acquired by Dropbox), in Zoho Recruit, and in one other one that starts with a 'C' (name escapes me now). Recruiterbox won the day.