During ERE Expo 2008, one of the most buzzed-about vendors was the enigmatic MrTed, an ATS with a respectable global presence who have kept their distance from the U.S. market until now.
MrTed’s CEO Jerome Ternynck has got to hand it to his PR firm, because the build-up to the launch of their new ATS,SmartRecruiters, was impressively widespread. Every industry expert I talked to, from Todd Raphael at ERE, to Jason Davis from RecruitingBlogs, to Susan Burns from Talent Synchronicity, was talking about the MrTed demo they ran through prior to their ERE debut. Their PR reps scoured the internet and targeted every industry leader and blog they could find, even going so far to send emails from anonymous accounts to generate press. Here’s one we got here at Cheezhead:
How have you guys COMPLETELY missed this? A free ATS with some actual MEAT!
http://www.smartrecruiters.com/static/
At the conference, some said the product was terrible, while others said that SMBs will love the idea of a free ATS designed specifically for their needs (it maxes out at 2500 candidates). Here’s a snippet from the MrTed release:
SmartRecruiters is free, limitless and easy to use, with an open architecture that connects users to other recruiters and essential pay-per-use services such as job posts and background checks. A solid set of features allow recruiters to tailor the look-and-feel of corporate career Web sites, front office and online application forms. Recruiters can edit job ads in real-time, rate candidates, screen candidates and track history of actions and interactions with candidates—all for free from within the application. Users never pay for application hosting, installation, maintenance, upgrades, additional users or storage, and the system is so easy, zero training is necessary. SmartRecruiters is EEOC and OFCCP compliant.
Martin Snyder of PCRecruiter was quick to give us his own thoughts on the product. He said, “It’s like running your car on tap water. The question is this: fine, the ATS and all its services cost nothing to the end-user. Who is writing checks to the hosting company? Who owns the disc drives that the data lives on, and how did they pay for them? Who is paying the electric bill? Now what’s probable is that their notion of a business model is that job sites, info providers, background checkers etc. will pay the vendor for the services consumed through the ATS. Not a bad idea, but not free either. Not free because those services have to charge just as much ‘extra’ as they are giving back to the ATS vendor above their normal best deals, at a minimum. Not free because you have to use the services provided. Not free because a 2500 candidate database is tiny. Now it could be a nice product and I imagine it will be OK for direct hire, but I doubt you will be able to seriously recruit with it, but you never know.”
So what do you think? Will MrTed live up to their claims and become an industry game-changer?
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Hi Vanessa, Just a quick note - Smartrecruiters places no limit on the number of candidates in the database. We’ve said it is best suited for companies with as mush as 2500 employees but that doesn’t limit the number of candidates. Thanks. Jerome