Headquartered in the heart of San Francisco, CA with offices globally, SmartRecruiters is a leading provider of talent acquisition software for businesses and candidates. SmartRecruiters’ mission is simple: make hiring easy. For businesses, that means providing a seamless recruitment experience and for candidates, helping them efficiently apply to and hear back from potential employers.
John Hooper, now manager of revenue insights and analytics at SmartRecruiters, puts it this way: “giving candidates a great experience is what differentiates us, our goal is to create a frictionless candidate experience.”
Most people have experienced interview ghosting in the past—you’ve had several great rounds of interviews but don’t really know where you stand and don’t ever hear back. SmartRecruiters is solving that problem while also providing enterprise HR teams with the tools to manage job postings and candidates.
John joined SmartRecruiters as a customer success manager (CSM) in 2015, around the time their product management team implemented Pendo. The product team sought to gain actionable insight into product analytics and in-product guidance and feedback capabilities, including account/end-user and custom segment-level granularity. Ironically, John realized that their customer success org knew very little about where they stood with customers who were actually using the SmartRecruiters platform every day.
Anecdotally, SmartRecruiters felt they had a strong sense of customer sentiment. They deployed a few Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to their existing customer database via email but had no formal timing or process in place. The added challenge was that their reach was generally limited to buying committees info captured in their CRM. As a result, SmartRecruiters experienced low response rates and statistically insignificant results; just a few hundred respondents. This rudimentary process gave them no way to automatically deploy NPS surveys on an ongoing schedule to trend sentiment over time, and ultimately they found results unreliable and not an accurate reflection of customer health or propensity to churn.
„Wir brauchten einen umfassenderen Überblick darüber, wie die Endbenutzer das System tatsächlich empfinden, insbesondere bei einigen unserer wichtigsten Kundenbeziehungen. Das Erfassen von Stimmungen ausschließlich über die Kontaktperson war nicht repräsentativ dafür, ob die Endbenutzer das Produkt tatsächlich mochten“, teilte John mit.
Recognizing the opportunity to gather better insight by directly surveying users in-product, John jumpstarted a pilot program using the Pendo native NPS functionality to gather end-user sentiment. By delivering NPS surveys to every user at the perfect time, while they were actively using the SmartRecruiters platform, they saw a 1300% increase in the number of responses and were flooded with thousands of responses that were both incredibly valuable and drastically different from SmartRecruiters’ prior efforts. The team used this newly-captured data to identify patterns across individual users, as well as NPS promoters and detractors, and built a targeted user experience inside their product for these groups.
„Die Datenpunkte gingen ein, und wir hatten über 2.200 Antworten. Damit waren unsere Erwartungen bezüglich des Volumens weit übertroffen. Da wir die Umfrage über Pendo statt über ein Online-Umfrage-Tool verschickt hatten, konnten wir viele verschiedene Datenpunkte sammeln und hatten Einblick in das mit jedem Teilnehmer verbundene Konto.“
They immediately found a direct correlation between negative account-level responses and customers who recently submitted termination notices. Reflecting on this new insight, SmartRecruiters realized that having a pulse on customer sentiment and providing proactive interactions with particularly at-risk accounts could reduce customer churn to less capable competitors. Armed with this new knowledge, they implemented a quarterly cadence of Pendo NPS surveys to measure trends over time for several interesting use cases.
John developed 8 ways to segment NPS feedback to dramatically improve product, customer success, and sales strategy:
1. View overall customer base to get a sense of how we [SmartRecruiters] are doing across all customers and end users.
2. View only promoters to help CSMs identify, cultivate, and inspire acts of advocacy, like inviting customers to submit online reviews.
3. View by CSMs to identify CSMs who are associated with higher NPS scores and investigate what skills they use to drive more effective (and satisfactory) customer training and enablement.
4. View by account/user to help CSM follow up with appropriate messaging; positive responses (see #2) and negative responses to explore ways SmartRecruiters can improve.
5. View by subscription type (free version vs. paid vs. fully-functional premium) to understand sentiment across all three and to help sales drive upsells.
6. View by user role (e.g. admin, read-only, employer roles, candidate) to help steer and prioritize the product roadmap based on satisfaction levels.
7. View by industry and company size to see if certain markets offer additional sales opportunities (see image).
8. View by NPS survey quadrant to help CSMs prioritize (and de-prioritize) accounts based on the intersection of ARR and NPS score (see image).
Gathering this data allowed SmartRecruiters to shine a light on the challenges within their customer base and product experience. The data gave them the insights they needed to build an improved user experience. They now have a scalable solution for gathering high-value feedback on a regular, ongoing basis. John noted, “Pendo has enabled us to build a lot of momentum around customer engagement within our platform.”
Das NPS-Programm von SmartRecruiters war ein voller Erfolg und hat einen Mehrwert im Hinblick auf das Produkt, den Kundenerfolg und die Vertriebsorganisationen geschaffen. Die Teams nutzen die NPS-Antwortdaten bereits, um ein Produktstatusmodell zu erstellen, das die Abwanderung besser vorhersagen kann. Außerdem werden sie für die Priorisierung der Produkt-Roadmap genutzt, um Koordinatoren und Interviewer besser zu unterstützen und es gleichzeitig dem Vertrieb zu ermöglichen, sich auf die „Best-Fit“-Märkte zu konzentrieren und gezielt Kunden anzusprechen, die am ehesten zu einem Upsell bereit sind. John kam zu dem Schluss, dass die Partnerschaft zwischen SmartRecruiters und Pendo weiterhin „insgesamt einen großen Einfluss auf [unsere] Einnahmen“ hat.
SmartRecruiters was founded in 2010 and in the eight years since their cloud-based Talent Acquisition Suite has become a favorite among global, enterprise recruiting and HR teams, as well as the hundreds of thousands of applicants who have applied to new jobs through their system.
