Expertite: Recruitment Software born of real-life challenges
Arindam Chandra
Recruitment hassles, lack of productive turnarounds, gaps in customer interactions and a fleet of other problems led us to develop Expertite, a SaaS recruitment software I’m proud of. How we unfolded this mystery is for you to read on.
From a corporate recruiter to a product visualizer, the journey has been exhilarating and gratifying.
Recruitment hassles, lack of productive turnarounds, gaps in customer interactions and a fleet of other problems led us to develop Expertite, a SaaS recruitment software I’m proud of. How we unfolded this mystery is for you to read on.
Summer 2011, I decided to ditch corporate routines and don the hat of an entrepreneur with Autumn Leaf, an executive search and recruitment consulting business. We were a young and enthusiastic team and started off with a small base of customers, helping them with the recruitment of mid, senior and leadership talent. Our rapport and goodwill with our clientele helped us expand our wings and now it was time to scale up. This had us hit the rocks as the way ahead was anything but easy.
Today, as I look back trying to list the obstacles, it feels great to have been able to overcome them.
- Every firm was battling it out in the race to rope in quality talent at minimal time and cost. A market survey revealed that most HR & Recruitment leaders were expected to increase the numbers over the years but in shorter time frames and reduced costs.
- Getting quality talent was increasingly tough and keeping them engaged even tougher. From an initial conversation to a candidate getting onboard, it consumed around 2 – 6 months. The bigger challenge was potential drops in the absence of personalized interactions with candidates at each stage of the recruitment cycle.
- Juggling with the above while ensuring we avoided all possible flaws was a herculean task.
An immediate solution to the above concerns was to increase manpower by having more consultants. However, we soon realized it was unfeasible because it resulted in poor productivity and high costs. The next rounds of experiments were done, adopting popular recruitment solutions that promised high productivity at economical rates. However, we hit the bottom here as well, trying to figure out the best solution to our clients’ core problem - ‘engage and hire quality talent at minimal time and cost, at large scale’.
As they say ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’. So we set upon designing a product that could be a hands-on solution to our recruitment woes. Though a challenge, we decided to take the plunge and put in all efforts towards realizing it.
What followed was an analysis of popular recruitment tools used across organizations and understanding the loopholes. The data was shocking with 80% of a recruiter’s time spent in manual, repetitive back-end activities (sending emails to candidates with job descriptions or interview schedules, blocking calendars, chasing interviewers for feedback, managing tracking sheets etc.). There were several other revelations as well:
- When a recruiter had various open positions, each position required him / her to source potential candidates from different sources, have initial conversations and send emails manually, sharing the job description (JD). This, at times, meant more than 50 emails in a day. The recruiter sometimes had to get potential candidates reviewed by the recruiting manager. This further increased the email count.
- Follow-up calls were the next big challenge. Repeated calls had to be made to ensure candidates received the emails and whether the job opportunity interested them.
- It was a mandate to have all the above data, process updates and candidate status maintained on an excel (tracker) for review. Resumes of potential candidates were sent to the hiring manager with additional information as requested. This increased the data density of the ‘tracker’ further. In short, the tracker was the master sheet that had to be updated manually across fields at all times.
- Shortlisted candidates had to be scheduled for various interview rounds: telephonic, F2F, video etc. This was tedious. The pain continued with recruiters sharing communication on the interview schedules with various prospects, including directions to the concerned enterprise.
The entire process was frustrating and time-consuming. Plus, crucial data stored in different devices and a wealth of information and insights gathered over the period were lost when a recruiter left. This apart, poor candidate experience and loss of brand value were other impacts that the manual process had on organizations.
Recruitment was a nightmare and this shaped the basics of Expertite. Our goals were to:
- Speed up recruitment by at least 25 - 30%, eliminating most of the manual and repetitive back-end activities via automation & real-time intelligence.
- Improve candidate experience by more than 50%, personalizing candidate engagement at each stage of the recruitment cycle. Enhance brand credibility and engage quality talent in the bargain.
- Improve recruiter’s productivity by additional 15 - 20% with one-click task management tools, access to a candidate’s engagement history, intelligent notifications & reminders.
- Reduce overall recruitment costs by 10% through a combination of the above goals.
A bootstrapped initiative, our thoughts took the shape of a prototype and then materialized into a fully functional product. Rigorous testing and feedback loops, enhancements at multiple levels and suggestions from multiple trusted talent acquisition and HR leaders, today, we stand tall on Expertite, a product envisioned by recruiters for recruiters.
This is a shout-out to all recruiters out there who have been sweating it out on the keyboards for hours, slogging with manual processes. Try a 30-day free trial and I bet you are going to love this product.
Follow the link to sign-up:
Companies: https://enterprise.expertite.com/sign-up
Vendors: https://vendor.expertite.com/sign-up