May 2013 | by Sue Weekes

Smart Recruit Online is offering a one-stop shop for SMEs, with the help of third-party technology tools

A new software-as-a-service (SaaS) based platform is bringing together a range of best-of-breed tools and services to provide the SME [small and medium-sized enterprises] direct recruiters market with a one-stop shop for recruiting. 

Mark Stephens, founder and director of Smart Recruit Online (SRO), told Recruiter that the firm had carried out a “scientific” assessment on the type of platform that would constitute the most effective base to run a recruitment service. “Our optimum demographic is an SME which hires between five and 30 people a year,” he explained. “They are less likely to have a full-time recruiting person and unlikely to have purchased any software to manage their recruitment.” 

Employers pay a fixed fee per month, which begins at £24.95 for an SME user (there is also a free basic service) and then buy job posting credits. Advertising is posted out to a network of more than 3,500 job boards and social media sites, and then the SRO campaign management tool evaluates the applications that come in and presents them in order of suitability on a single dashboard. The system incorporates Burning Glass intelligent CV parsing and matching technology. Applications are saved in a talent pool and every time a new job vacancy is loaded, it automatically tells the user whether they already have suitable candidates in the database. 

SRO was originally formed in 2009 in response to the demand for fixed fee recruitment services during the recession. Stephens, a recruiter, believes that while such services responded to the changing behaviours in recruitment at that time, many were flawed because they relied too heavily on human resource from the provider. He reckoned the answer lay in building automation into the process. “If this model is going to work for the client, it has to work for the people providing the service as well and we realised that technology could help,” he said. “We have a light-touch human element that monitors what is going on and intervenes as and when required. We’ve looked extremely closely at the behavioural and customer service aspects of what we are offering.”

Among the third-party tools integrated with the system are TheJobPost, the agency selection and management service (see Recruiter, March 2013) that allows an employer to select three agency recruiters to work on their vacancy. Users will shortly be able to buy additional services such as video-interviewing provided by Tazio, psychometric profiling from Prism and Safe Screening’s CV validation service.

While aimed at the SME market, corporate licences are available from £99.95 per month. There are no limitations to the system for larger scale recruiting, claimed Stephens, who said that a corporate may demand specific aspects of the system rather than the full range of services. “For example, they could use the posting feature and we could customise an API [application programming interface] for them, so applications can be fed directly into their own candidate relationship management system.”

SRO is currently in the final stages of beta, and future plans include development for the mobile environment and an international launch. It is already available in 16 languages.