When we last spoke to Rebecca Carr, she was the interim CEO at SmartRecuiters, a popular ATS. Fortunately, the "interim" title has been removed and now she's just CEO. Of course, that comes with a whole new set of challenges, and we were more than happy to visit with her at the HR Technology conference to check-in on how it all went down, what's the current state of the business and what the future holds. It's a candid look into the inner workings of SmartRecruiters, as well as so other players in the recruitment space.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION (cometh)
PODCAST INTRO: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad & Cheese podcast.
Joel: Here we go. Alright, let's do this.
Chad: Yes.
Joel: We are alive from the SmartRecruiters booth at HR Tech, everybody.
Rebecca: Yes, we are.
Joel: If you're watching on YouTube, you can see our beautiful booth provided by our friends at SmartRecruiters. And what better first was to have...
Chad: Hello.
Joel: The newly minted CEO, Rebecca Carr, who was just on the show with us a few months ago when you were interim CEO.
Rebecca: That's right.
Chad: In Vegas, right?
Rebecca: In May.
Chad: Vegas.
Joel: So, really quickly...
Chad: I'm gonna take credit for that.
Joel: Those that didn't see that or hear that interview...
Chad: That's never happened before, a white man taking credit for something that you've done?
[laughter]
Joel: Not the CEO, man.
Rebecca: I know. It's your podcast.
Joel: Don't mess with the CEO.
Rebecca: Yeah. That's what did it. That split the board over...
Chad: Doubtful. Doubtful.
Joel: You have a historied past, you don't have to go into everything but just give us kind of a quick elevator pitch on you.
Rebecca: On me. HR Tech product leader for 16, 17 years or so. Third or fourth ATS, I think, here at SmartRecruiters. A recruiting tech veteran, for sure.
Chad: Second time with SmartRecruiters too.
Rebecca: Second time with SmartRecruiters. Eight years in total here, eight and a half years in total. Started in 2014, built, deployed the first version of SmartRecruiters, left, came back. CPO for, I guess, six, seven months and then here I am.
Chad: So, what made you come back? What made you come back? 'Cause there's always that thing and the boomerang stories are always really interesting to me.
Rebecca: There's still a lot to solve here. My break was I went to background check, I went to checker and I actually dipped my toe and earned wage access products like payroll fintech products.
[laughter]
Rebecca: Actually very fascinating. At the time, I thought, yeah...
Joel: Okay, fascinating.
Rebecca: But the level of customer connection is missing there, I'm more of a people relationship person and recruiting is that. I started as a recruiter, that was my first job. So, to come back and actually build for that persona was attractive to me. At the time, SmartRecruiters was going through a bit of transition. It was right after Jerome stepped down and I think we were looking to re-emerge as a really strong B2B SaaS player enterprise which is what I love. I love the global nature of this business, I like to travel, I love our customers overseas. Why not? It was a good moment.
Joel: So, you have the honor of being the first interim CEO to become CEO on the show. I'm wondering...
Rebecca: Oh, really?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Do they throw a party? Are there farm animals and wrestlers? What happens when you get...
Chad: Where did farm animals come in?
Rebecca: It's not quite as sexy as you'd think. You sign a piece of paper and then you put a note in Slack and everyone gives it lots of emojis and then you move on because you've been doing the job.
Joel: No birthday cake, no...
Chad: Yeah, 'cause you've been there.
Rebecca: You've been doing the jobs, yeah.
Chad: So, quick question. When it comes down to... We see a lot of... And good, bad or indifferent but just your perspective, we've seen a lot of CEOs come in from other industries that really don't have a base in what we do. And this industry is so much different from marketing or sales. Yourself, Adam Godson, both recruiters, right?
Rebecca: Yep. Yeah.
Chad: Came up through the ranks and now you're both CEOs. What do you think that gives to you? Obviously, the experience, the background, but is it an edge?
Rebecca: I would like to think it is. I mean, customer empathy. I mean, takes one to know one. If you've been in the seat, if you actually understand how this tech works, where the key challenges are, how a recruiter actually interacts with the hiring manager and you've been there and done that, you design tech differently. Hiring is, generally speaking, one of the most democratized processes we have right now. You've got a bunch of recruiters sitting out there that are essentially facilitating hiring managers making decisions, all these interviewers in the fields. It is very, very, very collaborative and yet systems, most recruiting tech systems are designed just for recruiters. And that's a problem, it's break down. And I think what you see from a product like Paradox and what you're starting to see from products like SmartRecruiters is just empowering hiring managers to do more and be more effective and be more efficient so that recruiters can be more strategic.
Joel: By many metrics, it's tough being an ATS these days. A lot of competition, a lot of efficiency and most notably, you probably read the story about Klarna who is allegedly...
Rebecca: Just ditching it all.
Joel: Trashing Salesforce...
Chad: Allegedly.
Joel: And Workday. So, I'm curious, your perspective on the current state of things and what kinda threats you see out there to the business.
Rebecca: Yeah. I think that what they're doing is fascinating, it's definitely possible. So, if you think about the way that most people engage with all of these HR tech systems, it's just a big process of a lot of administrative action and the reality is with AI and intelligence, you shouldn't even need to log into any of these tools. If you had a singular interface or agent which you engaged with, you ask questions, you asked it to do things, you would theoretically engage with a Slack, a Teams, an SMS, WhatsApp, some sort of productivity tool within your organization, and it would connect all the dots behind the scenes. More and more, especially... Even you mentioned... We talked about Workday as it relates to Klarna, even Workday is starting to really lean into ecosystem and connectivity because we all can't be something for everyone. So, be a specialist in orchestration, expose those APIs to your end users and let them build interfaces that are adapted to the personas that are engaging with that UI.
Rebecca: It's actually a really interesting idea and I think it's what's gonna have to happen in order to drive adoption because in order for AI to work, you need to have great data and to have great data, you need to have adoption and none of our tools have any adoption. So, how do you create adoption? You create better, more personalized experiences. The more people engage with those personalized experiences, the better and more intelligent it gets. But you have to let go of the UI, we've all gotta stop being so precious about our user experience and our buttons and our colors. I think the threat to most of us is gonna be if you don't get open quickly, if you don't take your platform and make it API-able, you're gonna lose... Is my hunch.
Chad: Well, and data is... AI is pretty much becoming a commodity. Data is where every... That's the super power for every organization and you're an applicant tracking system, so you had better gather that data...
Rebecca: Yes.
Chad: And it better be able to index it incredibly well. I mean, it's one of the things that we've seen over the years, and I'm sure you've definitely seen, customers asking for all these customized things that really kind of screw with their data at the end, not to mention, you being able to prospectively aggregate a lot of that data to understand what the ecosystem actually looks like, so all of your nursing or all of your high volume or what have you, how can we change that so that we can say, "Okay, Mr. Customer, Mrs. Customer, these are the standards that we're putting in place so that we can actually leverage that data better?" Because the data is what matters, we need that clean data.
Rebecca: Well, it's an interesting question 'cause when you were saying that, my first reaction was one of the things that screws up SmartRecruiters data sets the most is actually internal mobility. And people look at me and they're like, Why? Why internal mobility? And I'm like, oh, because you have this very thoughtful recruiting process, you put it in the workflow, it changes at the country, at the region of the job level, great, and then you open a job and someone internally goes, Oh, that project manager job, I really want that. So, what do they do? Instead of applying, they go on Teams and they Slack the hiring manager and they have a whole conversation...
Chad: Back door it.
Rebecca: And then they interview offline, no one even knows, their CV is not even in the database, they end up deciding they're gonna move forward with that person, they have a different comp, a different benchmark than even with the job did, but they're great, they're high performers, like, we really want them to have the job. So then, they make the decision, they hire them, what do they do? They throw the CV into the applicant tracking system against the job, they move it to hired, they have no skills that are relevant to the job description you just said and no interview feedback, no notes, and then suddenly, poof, the AI goes, "What the hell just happened to me? You gave me nothing to work with there, what's going on?" And I think it is about that one fact like, why didn't that internal candidate want to go and engage with the hiring manager through the ATS?
Rebecca: Something was broken about that experience, so I think it starts with building experiences that are adaptive to the culture and community of the organization that are. As a good example, we use Slack almost entirely here at SmartRecruiters. If I knew that there was an internal job and I could just forward that directly through Slack to the hiring manager, by doing that, it picked up a signal that I was interested and immediately added my employee profile to my ATS and then my discussion with them was recorded as notes, my system is learning and gleaning some information but it's because I'm bringing that to the flow of work of the employee that is there. And so, our systems are not designed to do that today, it's something that we all as vendors need to lean into.
Chad: Yeah. And a very rigid and very instead of fluid.
Rebecca: Yes. So, that flow of work though is super important. The more you can bring those activities to places where people are already operating, the more they're adopted. The more insight that just naturally falls into the system, the better the intelligence, the better the matching and then all those other tools like a recruiter being matched an employee to a job just fall into place. Yeah.
Joel: Yeah. You touched a little bit about the marketplace, vendors, new products and services, there are more companies that make it easier to build apps onto marketplaces. Just curious about your trends, what you're seeing, the amount of growth, any kinda cool technologies that you're seeing being built onto SmartRecruiters that we should pay attention to.
Rebecca: Yeah. It's actually... Some of the coolest and most interesting to SmartRecruiters are the people doing things that are workflows we know won't ever go away but they've just made that workflow a lot better and a lot cleaner for everyone else. So, as a good example, we have a partner in the Netherlands that is essentially building a new agency portal. Who likes agency portals? Nobody likes agency... I have an agency portal, we haven't touched it as a product team in 10 years.
Chad: Wow.
Rebecca: But agency recruiting is just what happens especially in certain markets. We've got...
Chad: Especially Europe.
Rebecca: Probably 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 agency hires that are made a year through our platform. These types of apps and experiences are things our customers latch on to immediately and provide impactful business value and also better learnings. I think some of those are the ones that are ultimately gonna benefit from this moment of consolidation in HR tech 'cause someone like me, it's an easy value-add. I can sunset my code from the past that I was never gonna invest in any way, I can give better experiences, I can drive better adoption. A really cool, cool thing but there's a bunch of little ones like that. We're working with a lot of partners that use design systems to embed in our UI, so Visier is doing this with us right now, HiredScore is using some of our stuff to embed. So, those people that are, again, not just saying to me, "Hey, I want an iframe in your UI which isn't gonna help anybody, I actually wanna find a way to funnel my data to you through a user experience that people are going to engage with." I'm finding that they are getting the most attention from some of the big vendors. Yeah.
Chad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Iframes are definitely the proverbial hammer on a crew.
Joel: Shout-out to HirePort.
Chad: Horrible.
Joel: We didn't see that coming.
Rebecca: We didn't see that. I find it pretty fascinating.
Joel: Visier and...
Chad: Yeah, HirePort.
Rebecca: Yeah, little ones.
Chad: So, Amazon Q just came out and they're talking about actually having developers to be able to go in and do updates, virtual developers, robot developers to be able to do updates, moving backwards, and that takes a lot of a technical team's time to do all that technical debt, that maintenance, so on and so forth. Where do you see this going? 'Cause now that's the first iteration going backwards. Obviously prospectively, moving forward, where do you see... As a tech CEO, where do you see this going? And what does that mean for development and your development team?
Rebecca: Well, I'd say as a CEO that sits there and talks about investment profiles all day with my board, there's more and more pressure to do two things that are a bit counterintuitive. One, be an innovator, drive more innovation and two, reduce or improve RND efficiency. RND spend is a percentage of revenue, there's a lot of pressure to drive down and down and down with the assumption from these investors that you're going to go and invest deeply in AI products first and foremost in the RND function. And there's a lot of cool stuff that is coming out, we're starting to deploy a lot. And despite all of the product investments, some of the things that we're gonna be coming out within the next couple of months, we are actually not growing our RND team because we're finding ways to implement tools and technologies that replace three, four or five heads in RND. So, what it's actually doing, it's allowing people to move fast and innovate but also improve their business profile. So, suddenly your Rule of 40 company becomes a little bit easier if you're not having to keep throwing an engineer at the problem.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Yeah.
Rebecca: And I think there's gonna be an expectation from the investment community that people do that a lot more. It's certainly something that I was used to and was ready for the sales and marketing efficiency conversation, but the level of depth to which investors also have RND experts and former CTOs that are leaning into this exact problem and pushing it on their portfolio companies is more than I expected.
Joel: Oh, the investor community... Oh.
Chad: Oh.
Joel: You're a good-sized organization, you're global.
Rebecca: Yep.
Joel: Diversity, equity and inclusion has taken a bit of a hit in organizations in the past year, some companies publicly abandoning it. Just curious about your take on that, how you make sure that you keep SmartRecruiters diverse, a lot of flavors and make sure that you stay on track to keep that.
Rebecca: Yeah, no. I mean, we still see some of our customers asking for add-ons or partners within the ecosystem to measure and understand but certainly not as much as it was like two, three years ago. At SmartRecruiters, it helps just by investing in representation. People wanna work for people that they see themselves in and I think that means starting with a strong leadership layer. I can tell you as a female CEO as a good example, the amount of individuals that sort of come and say like, How do I develop? How do I get that skill? It's not something I've seen in my last three, four companies. But you could say the same for racial, ethnic, any of the categories that one could invest in. And for me, it's about recruiting and finding balance. You're not gonna rip or replace your bench every single month but when you have the opportunity to like being very holistic about your interview process and when you do that, you see a lot of natural momentum within your organization and we have certainly seen that here at SmartRecruiters.
Chad: So, I wanna get back to the ecosystem again real quick 'cause you smile really brightly when we talk about the ecosystem.
Joel: It is a bright smile, isn't it?
Chad: Yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Joel: It's a CEO smile.
Chad: So, we've seen a ton of companies go to a marketplace ecosystem kinda scenario. Some of them thrive and some of them just... It burns, crashes and burns...
Rebecca: Yeah.
Chad: What's the difference between those two models? Why are some thriving and why are some not thriving, and why will SmartRecruiters thrive?
Rebecca: Well, and SmartRecruiters has actually not thrived in the marketplace world at every moment of its existence. We have over 400 partners that sit out there and I would argue we failed at doing it really well. Even though we have great integrations and we can claim that there's good capability there, we haven't had focus around why we have a partner and the value that they bring and how that partner competes and speaks to our world. Everyone has just... It's been agnostic. Everybody can integrate in the exact same way. The reality is there are certain problems I wanna solve and there's certain problems I definitely don't wanna be solving.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Rebecca: And to be very clear with my partner ecosystem about where I have that line and then seeking to pick the best ones like actually... Not just saying I'm an open door, but who's the best people analytics platform I can do? What's the best skills matching platform that I can go to choose?
Chad: Well, you have to be very clear with your CTO too because if I know CTOs, they wanna build everything. Just about. Right?
Rebecca: Well, yeah. Or there's like... I have this conversation with some my product leaders all the time as we think through channel and opening up a partner, a partner integration that we think is gonna drive revenue. Well, the more diluted you become there, 500, a million, 1.5 million from this one, that one, that one, yes, it adds up but it's wildly distracting. Who are gonna be the people that you can lean into that are gonna build with you, not just take my API and consume it, but build with you, build an experience that actually aligns to your mutual product strategies and then go to market with you in a really effective way? Not every partner is willing to do that. It takes relationship building, it takes a lot of time and evaluation of sort of where you each wanna go, what your road maps look like, how you tell the story together. And so, I'd say focus is gonna be the big difference between those two. There's a spray and pray versus targeting, I'm gonna go back to JobBoard analogies.
[laughter]
Joel: Love it. Love it.
Rebecca: There you go.
Chad: It always goes back to that.
Joel: Yeah. It always goes back to that. So, 2025 is right around the corner...
Rebecca: It is.
Joel: I know as CEO, you're the visionary, you're the big picture. Give me some of your goals and objectives as we go into 2025 and feel free to drop the IPO date.
[laughter]
Rebecca: Goals for '25. So, we're in growth mode, we're in transformation mode. In the next couple of weeks here, we're gonna be doing an announcement which we're really excited about. Really like our 3.0 vision for what this company can be. There's a lot of urgency in this space around driving change and we say where AI-powered software for superhuman hiring. I think you're gonna see that in the product that comes to market. We've gotten a lot of interest in some strategic partners that I think we're gonna lean into and have really deep connectivity too. That's awesome. I'll take that as an opportunity to make the mutual ICP of our brands really successful in this new world. So growth, growth, growth. We're on fire. You might see some new markets in there, here or there. I don't know.
Chad: Ooh.
Joel: Hello. Hello, [0:20:08.9] ____ tease.
Chad: Expanding the footprint.
Joel: Such a tease.
Rebecca: Well, globals are our bread and butter. That's like... I mean, it's hard to be a strong player and multinational, like the...
Chad: Well, talk about that though 'cause it is. Going from France to Germany...
Rebecca: Is hard.
Chad: Well, incredibly hard. You've got two countries incredibly close to each other that are totally different from a culture standpoint and I would assume also from a partnership standpoint, the partners that you guys bring in place, not to mention also the experience that you provide to your customer, so talk a little bit about that 'cause that's not easy.
Rebecca: Yeah. And frankly, I remember when Jerome made the call to go invest here deeply, it was like 2015 or so, I thought he was crazy. I was like, oh, my gosh. Here's the founder like shiny object syndrome, more like we're falling in that path, ended up serving us very well as a business because we doubled down in functionality that was unique to some of those markets that is actually very complicated and deep and hard to roll back on if you're just adding it to an already very robust system. It's allowed us to differentiate, it has required that we put a lot more people in some of these markets. So, you can deploy SmartRecruiters, you can be sold to implement used support totally in French, totally in German today. That is a challenge when it comes to sales and marketing efficiency but we've figured it out, actually. We figured out how to work that motion at scale and it has been something that's allowed us to surpass some of our competitors that have tried to enter those markets, so I don't wanna lose any ground there. I think it's actually something we continue to lean into and so as we think through our next generation of products, very focused on that ICP like enterprise global multinational is important. We have to check that box.
Joel: What are some of the greatest threats to the business in 2025 that you see?
Rebecca: I'd say generally speaking for our most of best of breed ATS, it's the sweet pressure that comes from the Workdays, the SAPs, the [0:22:15.9] ____, especially in our non-ICP. So, when we originally built the business, it was just, "We'll take every customer, obviously." it was a start-up. You're seeing the people where our product strategy hasn't entirely aligned get a lot of pressure from this way. Think about brands in software and tech and otherwise, Workday is grabbing significant market share, SAP SuccessFactors, we're seeing a lot of Oracle Recruiting Cloud come back in deals, things like that. And it is because these teams are being pressured to drive efficiency and if you've got a free recruiting module and you're not hiring a lot, justifying and finding that value prop is hard for some of these teams. So, we're actually leaning a lot into content around how to have that conversation but yeah, the pendulum is swinging back to suite and that's something we're constantly thinking about.
Chad: So, what can SmartRecruiters do to be able to help TA professionals, HR professionals, have that discussion with the C-suite? Because we talk about time to hire, cost per hire, CEO doesn't care about that, doesn't care. They wanna know how it impacts the bottom line and we have the data to be... We just have to take it further. So, it's really on you, not that you don't have enough on your shoulders already, but it really is on you to be able to help them in a couple of different ways. Have that data, that data all the way through and it's a TA, so talent acquisition and talent management but have that data and then to be able to create a narrative to pitch, so that's why we need SmartRecruiters because we're actually gonna put butts in seats to be able to drive revenue so that...
Rebecca: Big theme.
Chad: It's gotta be.
Rebecca: Productivity and efficiency. That's the conversation even my CFO is having with all of my teams. Productivity and efficiency, how can you deliver a lot more with less? I don't wanna add one more body but I need to grow, what are we gonna go do? And that is probably the number one reason why people need to be looking at automation AI, how their vendors are implementing it that challenges... We expect this from our customers but if you're not a SmartRecruiters customer, the amount of pressure you should be putting on your vendor to go solve this problem because your CFO is not gonna give you any more money to buy an add-on product. So, how do you think about getting the most out of the vendors that are in your ecosystem today?
Rebecca: And for me, that's about telling an automation and AI story with our new products which in some cases are just part of our core suite because that's what recruiting needs to be versus go write me another 10X check on what this is gonna... Like, this is what it's gonna give you... I'm sure over time, will be premium opportunities for us to invest but at the end of the day, in order to sort of retain and grow our existing base, we need to give them more productivity and so we're telling that story the challenging piece being, in order to tell that story, people need to adopt the tool. So, you see vendors like SmartRecruiters putting a lot of early AI products into the space or into the product so that they can get data so that they can start to tell the story proactively with their customers and then they can layer on more and more experiences that are gonna just amplify that message.
Joel: That is Rebecca Carr, everybody, newly minted CEO at SmartRecruiters. Rebecca, for our viewers and listeners that wanna know more about SmartRecruiters, where do you send them?
Rebecca: Smartrecruiters.com.
Joel: Easy enough.
Rebecca: Easy enough.
Joel: Another one in the can, chat. We're live from HR Tech in the SmartRecruiters booth. We out.
[music]
PODCAST OUTRO: Wow. Look at you, you made it through an entire episode of the Chad & Cheese podcast or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away and like Chad's favorite western, you can't quit them either. We out.
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