Item: SmartRecruiters
Rating: 2
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SmartRecruiters

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SmartRecruiters is used across the organization by recruiters, interviewers and hiring managers. It's our corporate ATS. [It] enables us to track and manage our requisitions, communicate with candidates, collect feedback, advertise positions. The only business problem I see it addressing well is collecting resumes and posting jobs. Other than that, it's a pain in the neck to use.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Posting jobs
Advertising jobs

Cons

Where to start: the ability to communicate with a candidate who has applied to multiple jobs on a per job basis. You can only communicate with a candidate one job at a time. The "Leads" category is basically useless.
The ability to create professionally crafted email templates is challenging as very few fields are available to insert in to the email templates.
The workflow is anti-productive. Very few things you can do enmasse, like changing a status for multiple candidates.
Navigation between candidates and requisitions is cumbersome and in some cases, impossible. When you have to use a "back button" to get to where you where you want to go or if you have to return to the "home page" to navigate to area that's not available on your current page, or if it takes 5 plus clicks to navigate quickly, you know that navigation is not well thought out.
Search capability is very limited and the results are very poor, gotten to point that I don't use it to search for skills. Even searching names can be challenging. The ability filter on multiple categories of data is limited.
Analytics are very poor. Requisitions that have been filled still show as "open"
The ability to pull up a closed requisition and see an overview of the candidate process is not an option. You can't see how many candidates were applied, screened, interviewed, hired. All you can see who is hired and who is rejected. You have to leave the candidate in the final status and not reject them to keep them in the last stage that the candidate went through. If you reject them, then they are categorized as rejected and you are unable to see at what stage the candidate was rejected without going to the candidate's record and reviewing the notes. This is pretty standard capability in most ATS I've used over the years.
I could spend all day on this... but this is enough.

Return on Investment

I'm not a manager, so I can't answer this question.

Alternatives Considered

Lever, Sonic, Jobvite, SilkRoad Recruiting and Greenhouse

I didn't select SmartRecruiters. Lever has better search, communication, and candidate management interfaces. Sonic has great customability. Jobscore workflow is intuitive and very easy to use. Jobvite's candidate experience is top notch. Taleo's metrics and reporting are very good. I would not choose SmartRecruiters if I needed to buy an ATS. There are better systems out there. I will say that they are trying and the product is continuing to improve, but it's not there yet for larger organizations.

Likelihood to Recommend

Start ups that don't care about process, scalability, user experience, candidate experience, or metrics. In other words, this system is fine for a small company that isn't doing a lot of hiring with 1 or 2 people using it. Functionality is not at the level for more complex recruiting organizations or where metrics is key.

SmartRecruiters Feature Ratings

Comments

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Nick Ricciardi
commented 9 years ago
Nick Ricciardi [10:54 AM] Thank you for taking the time to review us and your candid feedback. Smartrecruiters key mission is to provide all of our customers, from small start up, to local bay area tech firms, to global enterprises with the ultimate candidate and internal user experience. While a few of the items mentioned above are actively being developed and on our 2017 roadmap, many items mentioned are also currently available features. Our product has grown a ton over the last year so please reach out to your Customer Success Manager to address these concerns and how we might be able to solve them. Thank you again!
Marie Touchon
(Vendor Representative) commented 7 years ago
Thank you for taking the time to review us and for your candid feedback. We take your feedback very seriously, and have actually made some serious improvements based on what you and some other customers have said. Smartrecruiters’ key mission is to provide all of our customers with the ultimate candidate and internal user experience. Regarding the email templates you can go to the settings on the ‘Admin’ page and go to ‘Email Templates’ in the Templates list. There you can edit SmartRecruiters’ default email templates or create additional templates. Regarding the hiring managers being given access to an email, any hiring manager who was given access to the job can look at the entire conversation, thus allowing more clarity. The email addresses are still the same but the development team is working on it. Regarding the interviews dates and times, you do have the freedom of timezone choice, which ensures accuracy. You can see on your Job’s Profile all the information regarding the job, for instance how many candidates are in the following stages: In-Review, Interview, Offered, Hired, All Active, Leads, Withdrawn and Rejected. It also gives you insights on the sources, the top candidates and the Job Boards used. The ability to pull up a closed requisition and see an overview of the candidate process is now possible. One of the Spring 2018 updates is the ability to extract the new candidate status history endpoint from the public API (which you can export on demand to a csv file). Other 2018 updates include new candidate filters (you can now search by status, candidate fields, or by recruiter), and we now have user management filters (you can configure and search you user base easily instead of having to scroll down until finding what you need), there are some additional data points for the report builder, and for interview scheduling you can now select the appropriate interview substage. Another helpful tool is the certification training by SmartRecruiters, happening quarterly, to help you understand our system better. If you are no longer a customer: I know you did not have the best experience with SmartRecruiters, but I’m confident that with our product updates and improvements based on your feedback, we could really turn that around. Our thousands of happy customers would agree :) If you are interested in learning more about what is new, I would love to get you on a call with our team. Let me know, and have a great week! If you are still a customer: I am glad to see you are still a customer of ours and using our product. If you are having trouble with it, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or reach out to our support team. You can call us at 1-415-659-9130 and contact us through this page: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/about-us/contact-us/. You can always visit the help-center as well. I hope the fact that you are still using the product means you enjoy it now. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help!

SmartRecruiter has potential - just not there yet.

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