T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market. None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion. There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.
This week I looked at The Resumator! The Resumator is a fairly new company that started in 2009, and is growing like a weed. They are an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) play, based out of Pittsburgh, PA, with an office in San Francisco.
Yep, I did it. I started off with an ATS. Stop! Don’t go, hear me out, this isn’t your momma’s ATS!
I decided to look into The Resumator for a couple of reasons:
1. They specialize in servicing the SMB (small medium business) market – 100-1000 employee companies. I love this space, because I think the HR and Talent Pros in these shops work harder than anyone else!
2. They’re hugely successful. Which tells me, unlike the other 1,739 ATS vendors, they know something everyone else doesn’t. 3,000 plus paid clients, tens of thousands of users, that’s not easy in the SMB ATS space.
I don’t need to go into a ton about what they do. They’re an ATS, I get it, you get it. Most everyone uses an ATS and most people hate their ATS. Why? Well, in one simple word it’s customization. You want it, because you think your shop is special. It’s not, but you force your ATS vendor to customize to you, which causes all kinds of issues with the system. You shouldn’t have done that. That’s why you’re unsatisfied.
The Resumator has one of the more ‘clean’ user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX) I’ve seen. The UI is what you might think of as the ‘design’ of the system. You’ll hear techie types use “UI” and “UX” a ton, don’t get intimidated. Think Pottery Barn versus Walmart. You want Pottery Barn design in your home, but you have a Walmart budget. The Resumator gives you a Pottery Barn ATS UI, for your Walmart budget.
This comes back to their size. Most ATS have poor UI, thus giving you a poor experience, because they don’t have enough users to justify doing really cool stuff that you see in systems for enterprise buyers. They have scale. They use that scale to give you features you don’t usually see in SMB ATS products. One of the cool ones I loved was what they call “Jobnosis“. It basically rates your Job Descriptions and Titles, automatically, versus all the other data from everyone that uses their systems. It then gives you the likelihood you’ll actually find the talent you want, and gives you suggestions to make it better. That is really cool.
5 things that impressed me about The Resumator:
1. They leverage the data from 30,000 daily applicants to educate their SMB clients on what is working in real time. Not giving you ‘best practices’ from three years ago. 2 Million+ hires since launching the product.
2. Their email integration is tight and seamless. This isn’t the case for so many of the ATS products for the SMB space.
3. They’re focused on how your hires perform, after the fact, to help you hire more of the better ones. Again, goes back to their ability to leverage ‘big’ data.
4. Super customer focus. Over 30+ new releases in 2014 alone to improve the UX/UI based on customer feedback on making the product better and faster.
5. Very solid recruiting tools are encompassed into the main product, no extra price, for both passive and active candidate sourcing.
I’ve purchased 7 different ATS’s in my 20 years of HR and Talent Acquisition. I have to say that The Resumator also has one of the less painful pricing models I’ve ever seen, that doesn’t penalize for growth! You pay one monthly fee, as many users as you want, no matter how big your organization.
I keep coming back to the word ‘clean’. The ATS market is junked up with ‘clunky’ products and systems. The Resumator wasn’t one of these. They were ‘clean’ in UI, UX and pricing. Full integration with one of my favorite SMB HR System’s of Record in BambooHR as well! Like Bamboo, these guys really get the SMB space at a different level than most companies.
Next week’s T3 Company will be BlackbookHR’s newest award winning product RNA that was just launched this month at the HR Technology Conference.
Chase Poole and Bill Fox are the two reasons why we decided to stay with The Resumator. They have been patient, knowledgeable, available, and commuted to providing service that has exceeded my expectations.
Thanks Chase and Bill for being awesome at your jobs!
Hi Talia,
I head up Customer Success for The Resumator and I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve had a difficult experience with my team. We have been growing a lot, but that’s no excuse for poor customer service. Please feel free to reach out to me directly and I can connect you with an account manager or support rep who can help. kristen.hayer@theresumator.com -Kristen Hayer, VP, Customer Success
I have been a Resumator client since 2012 and I wish the account managers and support team were as “clean” as the system itself. While I share your opinion of the product itself, Resumator’s behind the scenes functions leave much to be desired.
Talia,
Thanks for your comments. Here is the one truth in all of HR – no one ever likes there ATS! If I speak in a room of one thousand HR/Talent pros, none will be happy with their current system, or believe there is something better out there.
I truly believe this is usually because we try and ‘customize’ our ATS solutions to ‘our’ processes, and not the processes they were designed on. (I’m not saying this is your issue) I do know that The Resumator is growing quickly and like any fast growing company, they’ll have growing pains. Which sounds like more of the issue you are facing.
T