SmartRecruiters Reviews

SmartRecruiters is a candidate management system or ATS system that we use for recruitment purposes.

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

I have been using SmartRecruiters for five years.

SmartRecruiters is a stable solution, and we rarely face downtime.

I rate SmartRecruiters an eight out of ten for stability.

SmartRecruiters is a scalable solution. As an ATS system, it can manage a lot of requisitions that are running in parallel.

The solution's customer support is slow. The solution has a knowledge management database with frequently asked questions. But if you raise a ticket for something outside of the frequently asked questions, it takes time to be resolved.

Neutral

I previously worked with Workable.

The solution's initial setup is quite straightforward.

It took a couple of weeks to deploy SmartRecruiters.

Companies that do heavy recruitment will have a good return on investment with SmartRecruiters.

SmartRecruiters is an expensive solution.

SmartRecruiters is one of the best ATS systems on the market. Since it is expensive, most of the companies might decide not to pay all that money only for ATS purposes. Using SmartRecruiters makes sense for a heavily recruiting company that needs something more sophisticated. Most companies would use an overall HR system like Workday or Workable with one candidate management function.

Overall, I rate SmartRecruiters an eight out of ten.

We are using this solution for a combination of things. We use it for sourcing candidates for posted positions, scheduling interviews, and running offers through the system. We are doing everything our of the system.

The candidate quality was better and having the ability to do everything out of the system. 

The all-encompassing ability to manage the process cohesively out of the SmartRecruiter system was valuable.

The ease of use helped a lot. Frankly, it was easy to use, and the transparency with the hiring manager was also very good. Managers could just look at the system, they could see things, and they could stay current on what was going on.

The sourcing features were quite good. They did a good job of identifying candidates. 

The way the posting interface went out of the system worked quite well, and we always generated a pretty dramatic number of candidates for the position.

It's very easy to use. It only takes a matter of days to understand it and feel comfortable with it.

We are very happy with the customization and the dashboard, and it's very intuitive.

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.

I have been using this solution for the last 18 months when I left my previous job, and nine years prior to that.

Going back to March, we were using the most current version for that time.

This solution is very stable. We had no issues with stability whatsoever.

We can't scale it much more than we did at the company.

We are looking at multiple countries around the globe and having the system operate in each of those environments with any legal considerations that are part of each of those countries.

From a scalability standpoint, it's very scalable.

There were HR people, HR business partners that used the system on a regular basis, and there was a recruiting team that worked on the application daily.

 Hiring managers had access to the system so they could view what was going on with the requisitions. It was an enterprise-wide solution.

It's a global tool. From a business standpoint, for us, it was being used all over the world.

I don't know that we would be expanding it. We are looking at a company with 400,000 associates, so I don't know that you could get much bigger or more comprehensive than that.

Now the only question is, would we be allowed to turn on those additional features that we would have liked to have had? That would be the question of expansion.

Technical support is very good.

I've used all manner of solutions over the years. There are a variety of different solutions that I've worked with. SmartRecruiters was very good in my opinion.

The ease of use of the system would be the reasons we switched to this product, as well as the global scalability. At the time that we went with Smart Recruiters, there were different ETF applications being used globally. This was an opportunity for us to get under one system on a global basis.

The ease of use and the ease of implementation were important considerations and in the company, choosing to move to SmartRecruiters.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We made it complex because we are who we are.

The deployment took months to complete. It probably took longer to deploy because it was who we are, and we were trying to take everything into consideration globally.

Originally it was deployed in Germany, then rolled over to the US, from there to China and parts of the EU. It was a fairly complex rollout strategy just based on the global nature of the organization.

There was a dedicated team that was coordinating the effort on a worldwide basis.

We have a dedicated team and I was involved in the user testing at the time that we rolled out the system.

I didn't have any real issues. It all made sense as we moved through the process. It's really pretty much a plug-and-play solution if you turn on all the different aspects of the system. Our only limitation was that we couldn't turn on all those things.

It was an ongoing series of, "Hey, can we do this?", and, "Hey, are we allowed to do this?", which is why it became more complex just because we didn't turn on all the solutions initially.

Anytime we wanted to do anything, we had to get permission from Germany.

There were quite a lot of limitations and that's one of the challenges.

I wasn't exposed to the pricing. it was handled by the global implementation team.

I would recommend SmartRecruiters to others who are interested in using it.

I would recommend you use the full functionality of the system because it has some great capabilities, you just need to be able to turn on all those features and utilize the system fully.

From my standpoint, and from where I was sitting as a talent acquisition manager, the biggest thing that I have learned would be if you're going to implement the system, implement it wholly.

Don't do a piece by piece, because you want all those capabilities, and unfortunately, you are limited in that because the organization was doing this on a global basis.

We couldn't do everything that we would have liked to have done here in the US.

Ideally, I guess there's a lesson learned. For us, it would be, "Can we please just turn all that functionality right out of the gate?", as opposed to phasing it in over time, or if we can phase it in over time.

I would rate SmartRecruiters an eight out of ten.

I used SmartRecruiters as a recruiter to fill roles at different companies and organizations.

SmartRecruiters helped us get more candidates. This is because we were able to get them from more websites that we wouldn't have been posting on normally. But we did it because it was free.

I used the free version, which I found valuable. It allowed me to post up to ten roles on multiple job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed, and all for free. However, for more than ten roles, you go onto the paid enterprise version.

I'm happy with their customizations and the dashboard. What's good is if you're a candidate, you can create a SmartRecruiters profile, and I think that can be used across different companies when you want to apply to different jobs.

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. 

SmartRecruiter is a stable solution. I didn't have any kind of technical problems at all.

I used ADP Workforce Now and Jobsite before. SmartRecruiters is much more user-friendly. It's much easier for both candidates and recruiters.

The initial set up was very straightforward and very user-friendly. I deployed it in a day, and it was really easy. In fact, when I went to a new company earlier this year, I got it up and running right away, based on my previous experience. It's very easy to use.

For anyone thinking of using SmartRecruiters, I'd say put it up against a few other applicant tracking systems that are really user-friendly, like Greenhouse and Lever, and then see which works best for your organization.

In my experience, it pays not to just use the legacy system that's available at the organization when you come in. Like if you're using ADP Workforce Now and it has that applicant tracking system module, don't just use that because you're paying for the overall system. Go with the one that's going to be the best for both recruiting and your applicants.

If I had the budget, I would have gone with SmartRecruiters as our main applicant tracking system.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SmartRecruiters an eight.

It is fundamentally used for all internal and external resourcing at our company. It is the only tool that we use to manage all of our candidates. We are most likely using its latest version.

The biggest thing is that it has made the process more efficient. We also have integrations into our onboarding tool and our HR system platform, which is SuccessFactors. It has made the hire-to-onboard process a lot more efficient and smoother. It has been a lot easier for the recruitment team to manage all the candidates applying for roles and involve managers where required. It has helped with the approval process when roles are signed off, and it has also been helpful in approving offers through the system. 

It is a really user-friendly tool, and its implementation is quite wide. It is very easy to manage users and build your workflows. Overall, it works very well for the customization of the workflows for us.

The recruitment team has generally found the whole platform useful. We were looking to expand it by using the CRM functions that it has. However, with COVID and recruitment being on the freeze, we weren't really able to make the most of the tool. They are, however, finding it useful to actually build up their talent pools and client candidates to be able to contact them when we kind of have this freeze off.

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.

We went live with it at the end of 2018.  

That is something that we will look at this year. We will look at what more we could do with all of our account managers.

We have about 40 users who do the administration or are part of the recruitment process. Everything related to the customizations where you've got workflows and processes is handled by our HR team. Everything related to offer letters and the workflow of candidates is handled by the resourcing team. We have kind of just joint responsibilities there.

It was being used quite extensively when it was launched in 2018 and in 2019. Last year, its usage has really reduced because of team changes and reduction in recruitment activity because of what was happening because of the impacts of COVID, but it is still the only thing that's being used if we're recruiting.

This is something they have improved on. It was a bit of a bugbear for us to get in touch with the support team. It was all done by Salesforce, and it was very difficult to track tickets.

We're UK-based, and I think that most of their team is based in America, which can delay solutions. They could be a little bit more responsive, and that's the feedback that we've given to SmartRecruiters as well, but overall, they're quite good. If it is something to do within the platform, they are usually very quick. The difficulty has been where we've had the integration issues.

It was something new. I don't think we had any way of managing the recruitment process online before introducing this.

I was not there for the deployment, but generally, based on the feedback, the whole implementation process went really well. They had a lot of support. The only thing that is tricky is the integration with other systems.

I am unsure what the other options were.

It is good for what we need, and it works well for us. I would recommend it, but if you are going to link it with other solutions, be aware that a bit of work might have to be done there.

Looking at more AI things like the smart assistant, it looks brilliant for what it is. We haven't been able to make the most of it. At the moment, the majority of our base is working remotely, and we do have a recruitment freeze so that has reduced our engagement with the system. We are mostly using email and Zoom for all the communication, depending on the region and the preferred mode of interview, but it is still the only tool that we use to manage all of our candidates.

They've got lots of things on the roadmap for quite a young company. Things could be more efficient, and they're doing all they can to keep up with the change in the market and what we are experiencing, especially over the last year.

I would rate SmartRecruiters an eight out of ten.

As an HRIS analyst, I am working in the SmartRecruiters system on a daily basis. I have admin access, and I am also doing configurations in the system. 

We are using this solution for recruitments. We gather candidate data in the system and move them through the hiring process. We are using the latest Enterprise version of this solution. We most probably have a SaaS version.

By using this system, we are able to measure the processes. We get a lot of data from this system. We couldn't get this kind of data from the system that we used previously. We can see the time to hire and take measures to reduce the time to hire as well as the cost of the hire. We can also see how many job boards we are using and how many hires each agency that we are using can provide. It is also GDPR compliant, so we know that we are aligned at the data privacy level.

It has a lot of good features. We post all of our jobs through the system, and they have a marketplace where you can share the job post with the job boards they're working with. It is integrated with all the records about from where the applications are coming. We have all of our candidates gathered there. We can set up our own hiring processes depending on the type of job and then move them through the process there.

It is also possible to involve hiring managers and give them access so that they can also track the candidates and have a look at TBE and interact in the system, which is very useful. We also use SmartRecruiters for job approvals before posting the job as well as for offer approvals before sending an offer. We have everything in the system itself, and everything is being tracked, which is very good for us.

It is a reliable system, and you can use it for the full cycle of recruitment. You can really adapt it to your processes. When it comes to the configuration, it is easy to configure. Something that is good with SmartRecruiters is that they are always working on improvements. Every quarter, they have different enhancements or product releases, which is something that we appreciate.

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.

We have been using this solution for a little bit more than one and a half years.

In general, it works well. Every now and then, there might be a performance issue in the system, but normally, as soon as that happens, SmartRecruiters sends a message saying what the issue is, and they follow up continuously until it is resolved. It normally gets resolved quite quickly. It doesn't happen very often, so it feels very reliable.

Because we had different milestones, we got support to onboard different brands. We had four milestones, and SmartRecruiters helped to support the first two. I did the onboarding for the other two myself. It worked very well. Now when we have new companies coming on board within the organization, I do the full onboarding myself.

The whole company has access to it at different levels. Every employee has access to the system in order to look for internal vacancies and cover for our people. We also have hiring managers and recruitment teams. They have a little bit more advanced access. They can access different jobs. Each country has a recruitment team, and in each recruitment team, there are some admin users and the recruitment team itself.

We don't have any support in Spain itself. If we need help, we have our Customer Success Manager. We can also create tickets within the system. As soon as we have an issue, we create tickets within the system, and they can find or receive the ticket, and then they come back. They normally respond very fast. If they are able to resolve the issue immediately, they regularly follow up about how it is going. We get a good response from them.

Previously, we were using Lever, but that was only for our country. Each country was using a different solution. Because we are such a big company in many different countries, we wanted a solution that works for everyone. We wanted to have one system for every country so that we have access to everything. We also wanted to advance the reporting possibilities. Once we started with SmartRecruiters, we all went to the same system. We have a global platform for everyone.

I personally like Lever, but SmartRecruiters is a bit more advanced. SmartRecruiters can give us what we need. We stopped working with Lever almost two years ago. I don't know how they progressed after that, but generally, it was a good system.

The initial setup was quite straightforward, but it took some time. Our organization is large. We operate in many different countries and have many different brands within the organization. Therefore, we divided it into different milestones. While we were going live with the system, we were also going through an IPO, so it was a bit complex but not because of the system itself. It was probably more internal complexity. The system setup was quite straightforward. We also got really good support during the process.

In terms of the implementation strategy, because we had so many different brands within our organization going live, we had divided the implementation into different milestones. We had the milestone one, where there were five different organizations within the organization that went live. We had weekly meetings. We also had a worksheet that included tasks that we needed to complete in order to move forward to the next step. We had different project teams in each country.

We did it in-house. We had a project team, and we also got support from SmartRecruiters. For its maintenance, we have the admins. We have people operating in so many countries. We have IT communities with many users, and we have regular meetings just to discuss the maintenance. I am also one of those people who are fully responsible for adding new features to the system. 

We have some integrations working with SmartRecruiters, so anytime we need to configure something, we need to make sure that we don't break the company integrations. I am the one who is doing that. It is mainly our setup when it comes to integrations. It is not from the SmartRecruiter's side. It is more like we have an integration with payroll and workday. In order to set them up, it is a bit tricky, but with the right systems, it is possible to set them up, and that makes it run smoothly. It is running smoothly.

We work within digital marketplaces, so there are more digital marketplaces that we are going to onboard or merge together this year. That means that they eventually will need to start using the system. 

Based on the data that we see in the system, we have managed to reduce the time to hire. We also now know the number of referrals we are getting, what we need to improve, and what we are doing well. This is something we couldn't do before.

I haven't been so involved with pricing, so I don't have all details, but I know that we are paying per head when it comes to different countries. There is an additional fee for new features that they release. If it is something that we would like to use, we need to pay some extra for it.

I would recommend this solution. It is a good solution. It works for small companies and large enterprises. It is easy to configure, and you can really adapt it to your own business.

I would rate SmartRecruiters an eight out of ten. There are small improvements when it comes to different features, but this is not because the features aren't good. This is because we want to personalize them or adapt them even more for our organization.

Our primary use case with SmartRecruiters is as a recruitment or a talent acquisition platform.

Our version is fully managed by SmartRecruiters.

In terms of how SmartRecruiters has improved our organization, we didn't have any global solution in place prior to implementing SmartRecruiters. We worked very individually through Excel sheets or something like that. Once we implemented SmartRecruiters, it meant that we were able to have a consolidated global overview of all the recruitment activities. Another feature that is very, very important and developing very rapidly with SmartRecruiters is its ability to draw data and analytics about the efficiency of how our recruitment is doing.

When we were choosing a solution, the features that were most important for us to have were that it is user friendly and functional, which is definitely the case with SmartRecruiters. Our organization is located in developing countries where the bandwidth and internet stability are not the strongest and SmartRecruiters accommodates this challenge. It was a very big plus that we are able to use the system even in these locations.

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.

I have been using SmartRecruiters for three years.

In terms of stability, it is very, very high. I would say even 99%, because in three years we have maybe once experienced, for a very short period, that the system was not fully accessible. And that was resolved by SmartRecruiters within a couple of hours.

SmartRecruiters is absolutely scalable. To be honest, I don't have the exact limitations. I'm not sure if there are actually any limitations on the system because we have at the moment around 20,000 applicants, maybe more than that. So as far as I know, there are no limits on the number that can go into the system.

There are different profiles within the system. As for the standard employees, it's around 1300. One thousand three hundred total employees out of which we have around 30 recruiters and about five admin people.

With small issues the response is very, very efficient. Normally the solutions for the simpler things happen within 24 to 48 hours. With the more complex things, we had solutions within a few days.

The initial setup was indeed very straightforward and the cooperation with SmartRecruiters was also very efficient. They support any issues that may pop up very efficiently.

I would say it was three or four weeks maximum to implement, maybe not even that.

There were three people involved on our side, a couple of HR advisors and the senior IT Support person. We also got help from SmartRecruiters during the deployment process. Our direct accounts manager was constantly on call and the tech support was basically supporting us throughout the process.

In terms of ROI, I think the main return is from increased efficiency within our recruitment activities, requiring less time and resources to successfully complete the recruitment cycle.

Before choosing SmartRecruiters, we had a whole selection process by a selection committee where, according to our procurement requirements, we needed to review a minimum of three solutions. But I think we reviewed in total about 10, which was shortlisted to the last final three. Then we checked the proposals and the way these providers matched our requirements was given a score.

SuccessFactors was one of the top four that our people thought was workable.

For us, pricing was very important. In principle, they are all very similar, but SmartRecruiters, with all the features and requirements that we had for our talent acquisition or recruitment assistance, was very compatible because of what it offers. Feature-wise, compatibility, and price-wise. Especially when we told them that we are a nonprofit organization, SmartRecruiters accommodated us more in their contractual conditions.

The advice is that definitely we would recommend SmartRecruiters. In our case everything has gone very smoothly and we find it very efficient. SmartRecruiters is definitely developing very rapidly with the times, introducing many new features that other customers suggest.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give SmartRecruiters an eight.

We could say eight to nine, but eight definitely. There still is some room to keep improving the little tweaks. Let's put nine because they are really good at implementing the requirements of the customers. But there still is room for a little tweak, which they take into consideration, but it must have support from other customers, as well.

I use SmartRecruiters to collect resumes of the applicants who apply through our company's website or other websites like LinkedIn or Monster and analyze their keywords. 

SmartRecruiters uses AI and machine learning algorithms to identify the keywords that I am looking for. With the help of that, I am able to go through a lot of resumes. It saves a lot of time and makes it easier to find specific candidates with the right skillset. By getting data and communicating better with candidates, I could answer questions for clients in a better way.

I found the core product quite useful. It is easy to use and quite user-friendly. They have also got other options, such as CRM and HRS. They have other versions such as smart distribute, which is an HRS type of system to analyze and get permissions needed from the applicants. In terms of pricing, SmartRecruiters is much better than its competitors.

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.

I started using this solution a few weeks back.

From what I've experienced, it is a reliable solution.

I haven't scaled it yet. Probably in the future, we will scale it up and try something.

In terms of the number of users using SmartRecruiters, we have six people within the HR team in our company. We have talent acquisition, the hiring manager, and the recruiter.

I did call them twice, and their response has been quite good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

I didn't use any solution previously.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was not that difficult. The deployment took around 45 minutes.

At times, I did it myself, and if I needed some assistance, I asked the team. 

In terms of device maintenance, it requires weekly maintenance and updates, and we have an IT desk analysis team that takes care of it. They help with the services, and sometimes, if there is an issue with the hardware, they assist in that as well.

We have seen ROI from using SmartRecruiters. We saved a lot of money because previously, we had to use different software, such as equipment software, CRM software, and HR software, which was quite expensive for the company.

SmartRecruiters is much better than its competitors. Considering the type of features and services it provides, it is probably one of the best solutions in the market. Others may offer a similar price, but their services won't be that good or the user-friendliness won't be that great. 

The licensing works based on how many users are there in a company. If you are using other functionalities, like CRM and HRS, the price increases.

My advice would be to explore and try different alternatives. It is the time to actually experiment and try a new type of provider out there in the market. It is not all about the pricing. It is about the functionality, return on investment, and amount of time you save in getting a service provider that provides everything at an affordable price. The type of software that is available now is really great. It has changed a lot over the last couple of years. Considering that we are working from home nowadays, it is important to rely on software.

I would recommend this solution. In terms of what SmartRecruiters offers and in terms of CRM or HRS and other things, I find it quite good.

I would rate SmartRecruiters a nine out of ten.