The Resumator is a newly-launched applicant tracking system specifically designed for small businesses. Founder Don Charlton sat down with Cheezhead to talk about product features, why this one might be different, and the funding they’ve accrued since the company’s inception.
So what exactly is the Resumator, and what sets it apart from the multitude of applicant tracking systems on the market?
The Resumator is an on-demand, Web-based service for small businesses to post your jobs and managing the incoming resumes. By inserting one line of code into your web site, you can move away from collecting resumes by email and begin using our incredibly easy tool for recruiting.
In addition to helping you find great candidates, The Resumator very well may be the first ATS that also helps you find great job boards. As soon as you create a new job, our built-in job board recommendation engine analyzes the job details and immediately recommends local, niche, free and big job boards for advertising your job. And as activity (applicants, job forwards, etc.) come in from those boards, we aggregate the quantitative and qualitative data and make it available to everyone, allowing the best job boards to float to the top.
Our system can help a cash-limited company find multiple job boards that deliver better-qualified candidates for half the price of say a Monster or CareerBuilder. Post to 3 boards instead of one. In addition, we automatically post every job to Indeed for free. Simply Hired and other free boards coming soon.
Every resume is processed and its text is fully searchable. We feel our candidate screen wastes zero real estate and enables you to handle virtually all aspects of candidate management from one screen, including internal comments, soliciting feedback from external people, group-aggregated ranking of candidates, and instantly adding/editing the open positions a candidate is qualified for.
How many resumes can it hold?
We believe it’s unlimited and plan to offer it that way. Unlimited resumes. Unlimited jobs. Unlimited users. We use Amazon Web Services to provide reliable, scalable storage for original resume documents, and we also use web services to process the stripping of text from resumes for indexing. This reduces the load on our server, which as we grow we know we’ll need to scale out so resume searching speeds do not degrade. We expect scaling to be a big part of growing into a big business.
So why launch an ATS now?
We don’t feel the industry as a whole focuses on usability and providing an affordable yet robust option to smaller businesses. Today’s low-end ATS are weak in features, and the high-end ATS systems are ridiculously priced for business that have 2 to 50 people. We thought there was room for a de facto option for any small business or startup to use our service.
Have you received any funding?
Yes. We are a self-financed startup that is in the final phase of closing an initial seed round of funding. We can’t announce until we sign on the dotted line, but that will happen in January. We then want to focus on attracting just a few angel investors—nothing too big.
What’s the revenue model?
All businesses will pay a $59 monthly subscription fee (after a 30-day free trial) for unlimited resumes, users, and jobs. So subscriptions are our current revenue model. This year we’ll be adding automated postings to job boards and charging a small fee per board. That’s the number 2 way, which could be quite lucrative if we can create a framework to mange the process.
We’ll then be adding a whole other side to The Resumator candidate accounts. So candidates can manage their resume in one place, and businesses can search a directory of candidates. Candidates will use the service for free, but they’ll see ads (#3 way). Businesses can browse unlimited resumes, but get this: to view the next resume, the employer has to provide a pithy comment on the current resume. So the candidates get feedback instead of just rejections.
Cheezhead readers can sign up for the beta by going to the site and entering in the code “cheezhead.”
Popularity: 9% [?]
January 6th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Welcome to the wide world of ATS Don and I wish you much success: exactly to the extent that you whack on our competitors and not us !
eQuest offers a service to rank/suggest job boards based on the job content which is integrated into many ATS offerings. $59/month is not that far off the per user rate of many ATS systems (big and small), and most small organizations under 100 people don’t have more than 1 or 2 people doing staffing.
As usual, no discussion of the distinction between direct-hire recruiting and third-party recruiting esp. in the context of actually recruiting rather than just posting to boards and responding to submissions.
Finally I think Don made a great choice by including the function within the name of the product- its a little cute, but far better than those crazy names that mean zero if you have not been branded already.
January 6th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Thanks, Martin,
To answer your questions, The Resumator is built for direct-hire. Many small businesses manage their own hiring, and we want to help them. Many times ATS tries to work for both recruiters and employers, and unless you design a system that removes the features that recruiters need, you end up with frustrated employers.
I wish you the best as well.
Cheers,
Don