TA Transformation has been a recurring theme on this podcast in recent months. A unique combination of macro and micro forces is driving the need for substantial change, compelling TA leaders to respond swiftly and strategically. Technology, particularly AI and automation, is very much at the heart of this transformation.
But what does this mean for established ATS vendors? How are they adapting to the evolving market landscape, and how are their product strategies being shaped to anticipate the future?
My guest this week is Rebecca Carr, the newly appointed CEO of SmartRecruiters. Previously serving as SmartRecruiters’ Chief Product Officer, Rebecca offers insight into the importance of a product-led approach in these rapidly changing times. She also shares her perspectives on the urgency of accelerating the leap from traditional ATS to the next generation of hiring solutions.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The current state of the market
- The growing importance of hiring manager experience
- Why being product-focused is important in the current market.
- Accelerating the leap from second-generation ATS to third-generation hiring platform
- The impact of uncertainty around legislation and regulation
- AI education and adoption
- Advice to TA Leader on designing technology strategies
- What does the future look like
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters smart recruiters is your all-in-one platform but faster smarter hiring making recruiting easy and effortless smart recruiters are making some big changes revamping their user experience adding AI features and refreshing the UI i know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner they understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support so it's exciting to hear that they're making a bunch of updates if you're ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition head over to smart recruiters.com and find out what they're up to trust me your team and your future hires will thank you hi there welcome to episode 647 of recruiting future with me mat alder. TA transformation has been a recurring theme on the podcast in recent months a unique combination of macro and micro forces is driving the need for substantial change compelling TA leaders to respond swiftly and strategically. Technology particularly AI and automation is at the heart of this transformation revolutionizing the industry but what does this mean for established ATS vendors how are they adapting to the evolving market landscape and how are their product strategies being shaped to anticipate the future my guest this week is Rebecca Carr the newly appointed CEO of smart recruiters previously serving as smart recruiters chief product officer Rebecca brings a wealth of insight into the importance of a product led approach in these rapidly changing times she also shares her perspectives on the urgency of accelerating the leap from traditional ATS to the next generation of hiring solutions hi Rebecca and welcome back to the podcast thank you very much really happy to be here an absolute pleasure to have you on the show please could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do sure my name is Rebecca Carr I'm the CEO of smart recruiters we are a talent acquisition suite a global talent acquisition suite with employees we call ourselves smartians and customers all over the world fantastic stuff and I suppose that lots of things that I wanted to talk to you about but I suppose just to give a bit of context to all of this I know you've got a very kind of strong presence in the US and in Europe and in Australia and various other places in the world what are you seeing happening in talent markets at the moment what are you getting from your customers in terms of what's going on as we sort of head towards 2025 if I dare mention that year's name this early in the year yeah the year we hope to see a little bit of change I think everybody all over the world outside of just the TA and software space what I see and what our customers talk to us about is just this very aggressive pullback in spend this eagerness and awaiting to sort of see what the future holds obviously a lot of business have been challenged in this recession that we're sitting in right now we've seen a lot of recruiting teams talent acquisition teams be reduced especially in certain industries like software and tech and as a result those businesses though they remain still hiring they are very very pressed on cost and expense so the amount that they spend in technology seems to have been pulled back fairly dramatically and the number of people using that technology is also being pulled back it is it actually though a very interesting and unique unique problem for vendors like myself to solve in that we are at a moment where we support as smart recruiters the hiring workflow one piece of the business workflow and that workflow which has historically been managed largely by very large recruiting and sourcing teams now requires the inter intersection of hires many more hiring managers interviewers folks that might not have necessarily had that title in the past and they're expecting that systems sort of come to the table with an experience that is very easy and intuitive but also very integrated into their flow of work and so our customers as it relates to you know features and requests have been leaning very much into that openness many more APIs the intersection with teams and slack functionality that makes it very quick for these individuals that maybe don't think about hiring all day long to do hiring and be successful at hiring in addition to their day job because of some of those constraints on resources so I think that's probably a good explanation of what we're seeing as the vendor in the middle of it all and I suppose that kind of really sets up the the next question really well which was you've recently become CEO of smart recruiters before that you were chief product officer in terms of running you know a software vendor well I suppose in any in any industry but particularly in the in the industry that we're in at the moment why is having that sort of chief product officer experience kind of so important in becoming a CEO and sort of driving the business forward yeah well I'll be honest I mean and I say this as a you know whole-hearted CPO that has been in this industry for over 15 years as a product leader tech has has been a bit disappointing HR tech and TA tech over the last I'd say 18 24 months has has felt a little bit stagnant I think we had this we had this first wave of talent technology that was you know the teleos of the world that were just sort of started bringing to the internet this application tracking process these this collaboration between teams this collecting of feedback there was a second generation that sort of came out around 2010 as cloud products really started to evolve and adapt quickly and accelerate quickly and those experiences were more beautiful so those workflows those very clunky workflows from before became more beautiful and intuitive and self-service but that was in 2010 and were in 2024 and a lot of those workflows from the past have not adapted really well to what the market and our customers need they're seeing this acceleration around AI technology they are being asked to adopt within the recruiting workflow especially given the level of efficiency that it could offer them and a lot of vendors like myself and many of my competitors are trying to respond very quickly by incorporating some of that technology into the old workflow that existed before so that same beautiful experience we're trying to layer this on really really fast unfortunately as I speak to a lot of CEOs and vendors in this space that's I don't think that's going to be enough because it still requires that those end users as I mentioned before those hiring managers those interviewers come to the table log into the ATS and start to engage with it to take advantage of those features and so the the market is really at this like very interesting inflection point where I think that second gen applicant tracking system that even smart recruiters as become needs to take a pretty giant leap forward to that third generation of hiring platform and it will be the the vendor that does that first that really leans into that first that I think accelerates their growth and is able to capture additional market share to do that though requires product leadership because that starts with great product that starts with differentiated product that starts with understanding the problem and coming up with creative solutions and I've been actually quite encouraged obviously myself as a product CEO that I'm starting to become surrounded by a lot of other product CEOs if you look at the the you know I'd say the the most differentiated and accelerated technologies that surround us from the the tech wolves to the paradoxes to the to the hired scores to the eightfold like all those technologies that are starting to leverage some of this new this these new behaviors to sort of bring that kind of value back to the hiring workflow they're all led by very product first CEOs and I think it will be a sort of a new day as we leap into this third generation and start to see new products that really rethink the way people think about hiring which is critically important to everyone but the last thing most people want to do in their day unless you're a recruiter and that's your your job why do you think that sort of last 10 years has been the way that it has why have things not evolved as quickly as perhaps they should and why are these kind of second generation of 80s is why is it kind of so far away from perhaps what people need right now so I suppose a bit of a retrospective question about what's happened over the last few years I think so like you could boil it down to a couple big areas like one being the cloud I'll start there the migration to the cloud though I think of it as many many like decades ago it feels like to me people are still on that journey some of the world's large largest organizations are still on that journey and that transition was a very dramatic one a very heavy one a very expensive one for a lot of organizations I think made that transition to the second generation a t s that I mentioned longer than it may be needed to be so that that that sort of meant that the the number of companies the total market share that really started to to adopt that type of technology sort of very slowly let's just say from like the 2005 2006 is maybe really only came online in like fully to like the lion share of those individuals came online maybe you know 2016 2017 2018 and there's a lot of change that goes to rolling out new systems especially hiring platforms that engage so many users within your organization that by the time that you implemented rolled them out built those processes it you were looking at a couple years for many of these businesses so we're we're here now we have a large portion of the the companies around the world now fully embracing cloud technology these these application these ats workflows that are adaptive and beautiful and engaging and there's there's good tech out there on the market but while all of that was happening the way that we thought about hiring and work changed dramatically I mean while all of that that I was describing was happening the rise of gig happened and the way that people thought about building and deploying products changed the type of technology the acceleration of new technologies like AI as a good example was all happening in parallel and it feels like now we're very we're very much scrambling to get to that next level I'd say there's also we were living in a talent economy for a really really long time you were sourcing you were trying to find you were spending a lot on on hunting for great people and people expected great candidate engagement and expected incredible experiences there was a lot of money behind a lot of these brands especially over the like prior in the 2020-2021s and they were spending a lot on driving those experiences as we've gone into this recession the side is switched so to speak there's a lot more talent out there that is applying to jobs and willing to do a lot more to get themselves in front of organizations and that's changing the core problem statement of these technologies too the problem statement for a long time was giving great experiences to your end users but more importantly your candidates so you saw a rise of great candidate engagement technology during that 2016-17-18-1920 that whole world realm now you have a great candidate engagement products lots of candidates engaging with them but you've got a you've got a funnel problem on the other side and fewer people to manage that funnel and so the technology that was so focused on that other piece for a long time now needs to really shift its focus in my opinion to the higher and bringing new technology to the higher and that just wasn't part of the strategy for a long time because those problems didn't exist to the same extent that they do today I mean you really highlight a unique and interesting using that word time we're currently in because we have AI kind of setting setting the pace in terms of what's what's possible as you say massive changes in the talent markets increasing expectations about good looks like and then we've come out of this pandemic where a lot of the sort of larger organizations that you that you mentioned have been able to you know make technology changes and do things at a pace that they didn't even ever believe was kind of possible so and I think there's probably at least three other things that I've missed out there in terms of the forces that are kind of driving things at the moment do you think that is going to lead to much faster progress moving forward as we kind of move into whatever the the next generation of solutions looks like I hope it does I'll put one caveat in there that is there's there's kind of this very big looming topic that every certainly all of our customers ask a lot of questions about and as a vendor I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about and that is the regulatory requirements around technology are still very nascent as a vendor I want to start experimenting and leveraging some of this technology aggressively and and have in very closed and siloed environments that are walled off and an effort to sort of understand what level of impact that they could bring but it feels like we're in a moment that has a lot of moving targets as it relates to what is and is not acceptable and some choices that vendors will need to make that are actually fairly dramatic in their product strategy so as a good example I just actually before I logged on with you was having a conversation with my SVP of product and my SVP of engineering and we were talking about some of the new investments that we're launching this fall and some of the consent workflows for candidates around around the the use of those technologies and the level of transparency that we bring to them on what we're doing on the back end now there's four or five different approaches that are being thrown at me all of which have pretty significant impact on how long it takes us to bring the product to market but there isn't actually an answer that is very clear on which one we should choose because we're still in a bit of a holding pattern on some of these these AI acts that are evolving and like actively being discussed within these in these global governments so I do think that that there is I guess you could say like I wouldn't say holding us back but certainly like making this moment a little slower than I think it could be that being said once it comes I think it will be easy for customers and companies around the world to immediately see and measure the value of that technology and make it very simple for them to want to leap to adopt it within their business much more so than maybe what you saw in the past I talk about that first generation to second generation transition making something more beautiful in self-service and perhaps more cost-effective being in the cloud is certainly all great value add but when you talk about like bringing real value to the hiring manager who wakes up in the morning maybe they have an employee resigned and they just need someone now and you can do that for them that quickly with limited interaction and clicks and otherwise that that value is so deeply felt by those end users that I think it will force companies to change a bit faster but we need to drive education first around what's happening around us what the use of those technologies means what vendors have to do to apply them to your environment candidates need to be educated on what this means and how this changes the way that they're evaluated so that we got to get that that's step one and as soon as we get that right and we feel like there's clarity and comfort I suspect the change will be relatively quick and I think that's really interesting because I think what you're really kind of underlying there is just how important it is to to understand technology to have technology kind of rooted in in leadership at the moment maybe maybe more important has been for a really long time no for sure I I mean I I oftentimes talk to my company about how context is king a lot of decisions get made I mean as a CEO of a company I sit here in and make a lot of decisions and have hard conversations exciting conversations and I've always sort of been the type of CEO and CPO that leads with very very deep levels of transparency across my organization not because the message is always easy for those individuals to hear but because just knowing gives people comfort it gives them the opportunity to react for themselves to ask the questions they need to know like if it's if smart recruiters is the right place for them or otherwise that same mindset and behavior can be applied to this moment as it relates to the adoption of technology people need to understand and have the context around what is happening around them so that they can adopt and roll out technology in a way that's comfortable for them and at the speed that's comfortable for them and skipping over it and just saying well hey if you buy my tech today you're you're going to see time to higher decrease by 400% so here's an order form well well I like okay great that sounds very ambitious it would be what I would say but like tell me why tell me how tell me what the risk is and if you can do all that very well and also give them that result that's a very easy thing for that customer to buy into but context is king and that's and that's what I think we have been very focused on thinking about in this second half of the year and with our launch this coming fall and frankly I've spent some time with other CEOs in the industry talking to them about how we should all be focused on this as a way to just move the market where it needs to be together because I think we all have the same the same aspiration which is we want to actually solve the problem of hiring hiring smarter and faster but that it takes a village and there's there's still a lot of work to be done from a customer you know buy a perspective if you're a TA leader at the moment looking at technology and your technology strategy is part of a transformation strategy that I know lots of people are currently currently working on it's a very confusing time it's very confusing in terms of I mean you know obviously in terms of you know where things are going but you know the sheer kind of array of different providers out there and types of technology and startups and established businesses merging with each other and people relaunching products and all these kind of things or would your advice be to people trying to navigate this kind of environment I mean what are the sort of the core principles perhaps that they should be bearing in mind when they're designing you know a tech strategy and looking at vendors who might help them deliver on that yeah there's a lot going on out there especially as it relates to consolidation which can be very confusing there there's there's really cool tech that's smaller that's being bought up by larger companies there's even bigger organizations that are being acquired by by large hcm there's companies that are struggling in this market maybe because of their financing situation I think there's a couple things I would I would say generally speaking when I talk to most chief people officers heads of TA they do have a budget for to think about this problem most of them have said you know I when I planned my year I obviously had to reduce expense in some of these areas as a result of maybe our lower hiring needs or us reaching and continuing to reach for further profitability in a moment like this that's a bit uncertain at the global scale but I've always held a budget in my back pocket that I will have in an effort to experiment and lean into a technology that brings me what I need in solving a core problem I've a lot of times what I've said to them is that's great the first thing you should do before you spend one dollar of that budget is look at your business and try to figure out what are the biggest priorities for you in terms of real problem statements is it that you have too many disparate technologies and those integrations are weighing you down is it that your none of those technologies are facilitating the outcome you need the most which is just you need people faster is it that you have a data problem like something like there's an inconsistency of data across your technologies and that that data is making it hard for you to understand what your problems are but as soon as you sort of come to the table with a clear set of priorities there are vendors out there that can very quickly say hey based on that set of priorities we're probably not the best match for you right now because we're not going to work as effectively as we would until you solve that problem like ask that question challenge them on giving you that feedback against a list of very clear priorities be willing to experiment you don't have to roll out everything to everyone in the whole world on day one most vendors like myself have ways in which we can experiment in pockets we have a willingness to partner with companies on making them successful in very small capacities before they have to like lean in with that full investment and I would I would encourage you to maybe take that the that list of one or two priorities and immediately start to think through a list of vendors where you would want to experiment so that you can really understand the value you can ask your questions and you can do so in a very closed and and siloed environment and then I'd say the next thing is is expect design partnership from your vendors your vendors including smart recruiters are learning too we don't have every answer as I as I mentioned there's a lot of unknown that sits around us especially as it relates to regulation and compliance but also how businesses are we are going to respond on the other side of this recession what they are going to need the most what new types of emerging businesses will come out of this moment is all very unknown to us as well so what we want and what we need is real deep collaboration I would I right now is a good example I were I mentioned we're launching something in the fall we have designed partners in our customers that are spending 30 to 60 minutes with us a week like validating some of the things we're finding spitballing new ideas and seeing product as it's being built iterated on over and over and over again that level of involvement will really like allow you as a as a customer to be in control of your own destiny and vendors unlike what they might have been in the past you know they launched twice a year or four times a year with new tech based on a discovery that they did with you a year before that time is behind us we're in a moment of deep adaptability and agility at from a product and design standpoint take advantage of that lean into that with these vendors and be a big voice at the table we want it we need it we appreciate it so that would be maybe some things I'd say to do more of you've kind of really underlined there that how uncertain perhaps moving towards the future is at the moment when it comes to technology that said smart recruiters and vendors like smart recruiters are pretty much inventing the future when it comes to TA technology right now what does that future look like where do you think we're going to be in a couple of years time and how is that going to be different to where we are now most of the recruiting workflow is highly administrative if you think about it screening interviewing filling out job fields choosing the boards you want to post to creating offer letters creating offer forms adding uh adding feedback and reviews to a system if you can imagine that is it that that is what the ats does today um if you add on sourcing that's you know setting up campaigns and sending them out and all of that jess ai can do all of it it's the truth we really it really can to what extent and to what level of transparency and uh to how that all maps to regulation we already talked about but it it fundamentally technology can do all of that what technology can't do is connect people build relationships with people um and as a recruiter and a sorcerer in my former life that's the part of the job i enjoyed the most so in the future i think what's going to end up happening is recruiting sourcing hiring teams you will spend time selling people on your brand your vision spending time with them understanding if they're a fit for your business not not just and skill which is also something that with great data can can be accelerated but like as as people building something together and showing up every day and and working toward a vision evaluating people there is is going to be um i think a primary focus of the role and you will interact with agents and assistants that do everything else for you so that you can spend the appropriate amount of time doing that our our founder Jerome used to always say and it was my favorite smart recruiters t-shirt back in the day uh you are who you hire well you are who you hire if you can get to know them if you if you know they're a good fit for your brand and uh we don't sometimes spend enough time doing that because we spend so much time doing everything else so i see a very lightweight user experience around hiring that is companies interacting with a single agent that connects to many agents and different technologies around the ecosystem and that agent does all the heavy lifting and the time they spend hiring is really around speaking to people connecting with people selling on a vision that type of thing um now for higher volume more decentralized roles ones that are more gig-like in nature frankly the agent will be able to do it all and just and it already sort of does if you think about it when you go to the extremes of gig like the ubers in the lifts of the world like those workflows you get hired almost instantaneously that will that will continue to penetrate you know the the more permanent workforce i'm sure over time but for the roles that will always need some level of evaluation i still think agents will be very pervasive they will just be so as a partner a helper an assistant to the person evaluating someone and they will spend all their time doing the the leg work that we all don't love to do so final question smart recruiters hiring success events are back from september onwards in in various different locations what are you looking forward to the most about hosting those kind of events again well frankly i i love connecting with people i love being in person i get my energy from being in person with people so these these events have always been my favorite part of the year at smart recruiters i am very excited about connecting with customers we're also having our our customer advisory boards in each of our our big regions uh this fall uh sharing some of the discovery and validation and solutioning and education that we have collected over the last many months as i mentioned we're launching our products so just getting feedback from the market our customers our prospects on that is always very helpful in getting it early so that we can continue to iterate and adapt and react to that feedback without it needing to take a year or two that that's always good good stuff and um frankly our speakers and and and the folks that are going to be coming are all very engaged very excited about what we're doing and i love to hear some of their stories i speak to customers all the time but i always find myself learning something very new in almost every presentation and i i bring those those stories back to the company and back to other customers and use it as a moment to just continue to learn and evolve as a CEO and as a as a business Rebecca thank you very much for talking to me yeah thank you for having me my thanks to Rebecca you can follow this podcast on apple podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice you can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting future feast and get the inside track about everything that's coming up on the show thanks very much for listening i'll be back next time and i hope you'll join me this is my show so
TA Transformation has been a recurring theme on this podcast in recent months. A unique combination of macro and micro forces is driving the need for substantial change, compelling TA leaders to respond swiftly and strategically. Technology, particularly AI and automation, is very much at the heart of this transformation.
But what does this mean for established ATS vendors? How are they adapting to the evolving market landscape, and how are their product strategies being shaped to anticipate the future?
My guest this week is Rebecca Carr, the newly appointed CEO of SmartRecruiters. Previously serving as SmartRecruiters’ Chief Product Officer, Rebecca offers insight into the importance of a product-led approach in these rapidly changing times. She also shares her perspectives on the urgency of accelerating the leap from traditional ATS to the next generation of hiring solutions.
In the interview, we discuss:
The current state of the market
Rethinking hiring
The growing importance of hiring manager experience
Why being product-focused is important in the current market.
Accelerating the leap from second-generation ATS to third-generation hiring platform
The impact of uncertainty around legislation and regulation
AI education and adoption
Adaptability and agility
Advice to TA Leader on designing technology strategies
What does the future look like
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
