Why I Joined SmartRecruiters and the Hiring Success Movement

I recently made a decision and a career choice, which some considered to be bold. I made a decision to join SmartRecruiters as their Chief Sales Officer. So why did I join? There are really 3 primary reasons:

The People
The Product
The Market Opportunity

People: This is a very talented and incredible team from the top down, with a crystal clear vision and a well defined set of values that everyone in the company rallies behind. Each of the Leaders of SmartRecruiters previously built and scaled businesses into multi-million and multi-billion dollar valuations. I’ve had the good fortune to be part of some amazing technology growth stories and they always start with great teams of people. We have that here.

Product: We all know that recruiting is competitive and with any competition there are winners and losers. With the current pace of technical disruption in the market you cannot afford to be unsuccessful in your hiring. The legacy applicant tracking system was never designed to make recruiting better or achieve any level of hiring success. SmartRecruiters has taken a completely re-imagined view of recruiting in creating the Hiring Success Platform. One look at it and you’re blown away by how simple it is to use yet so powerful as an enterprise class recruiting platform.

Market Opportunity: There is no doubt in my mind that the next $1B+ company in the Human Capital Management category will be in the recruiting space. There’s a reason investors are chasing so many deals in the talent acquisition technology segment. SmartRecruiters President and COO Brett Queener spent the last 10 years growing salesforce.com. When I met him and Jerome (CEO) we all agreed that there are so many similarities in the current ATS market and the CRM market that Salesforce so successfully disrupted during his tenure. There is absolutely no question that SmartRecruiters represents the next generation of recruiting application and that’s something every buyer in this space is looking for.

Let me close by saying the amount of disconnect between what a successful recruiter needs vs. what they are forced to use in an applicant tracking system couldn’t be bigger. And as talent acquisition’s profile in the enterprise has been elevated over the past 10 years a majority of companies have added bolt on solutions to their ATS in an attempt to meet critical business needs. Examples include solutions for sourcing (CRM), job distribution, mobile candidate interfaces, scheduling, social employee referrals, database search functionality, and the list goes on and on. While there are so many issues with this approach, the biggest fundamental challenge is that the ATS was never really engineered to deliver any amount of success in recruiting.

At SmartRecruiters, we’ve built a Hiring Success Platform that encompasses all of these things plus a lot more, on a single, unified talent acquisition platform that can scale to meet the demands of the largest of employers throughout the world.

If you are ready to stop tracking applicants and start collaborating enterprise-wide to hire great people, I invite you take a look at SmartRecruiters. It might be one of the best decisions you make this year.

Wishing you a successful 2015!