Lever vs. SmartSearch ATS

Managing pipeline and candidate communication is easy through lever. Keeping it all in one place allows the hiring teams to be in the loop real-time. The reporting is clunky and basic, however, and without a 3rd party tool, sourcing from the lever database is difficult. Also, it is very easy to have duplicate candidates since the alerts Lever gives are often incorrect

Incentivized

If you have a recruiting organization that needs flexibility and a wide range of options to address an ever changing landscape than this is your system. It does not try to pigeon-hole recruiters into a single recruiting model. It allows you to customize how your organization does things but also allows you to control where you need to control. We have been using SmartSearch for more than 24 years. We started out on one of the first versions because we liked the company and the direction they were taking. SmartSearch has not always been the tool with the flashiest features.... but it has always had some of the best features. They have always been of the cutting edge of the next technology and have the tools and features that make SmartSearch a complete solution. We have not seen anything else out in the marketplace that has encouraged us to change.

• Great integration: Keeps a list of Outlook email communication along with LinkedIn and other data sources
• Is fairly lively, not too much lag between screens even though it is looking through a lot of data.
• Has excellent reporting on how well each email message is working.

Incentivized

• Customization - the team at SmartSearch always tries to find a solution that works for our company specifically.
• Customer Care - the team actually cares and is concerned about the well-being of our business. They help us solve issues as if they worked for us and this feeling is felt at every level of the organization beginning with their President.
• Technology - I have used multiple ATSs and demoed many, many more. SmartSearch has superior technology for staffing firm; the technology that helps us recruit and fill jobs faster.
• Listening - the team at SmartSearch actually listens to us and our concerns whether it's regarding a feature for an upgrade or simply solving an issue we are facing.
• Common Sense - there have been many times in our relationship when we have asked about a feature and we hear "that makes sense, we will make that change for all of our customers"...listening is rare and they do it well.

• It would be nice if we were provided a more detailed summary of why our referrals were not selected for a position.
• The feedback feature that interviewers can give on candidates is great, but it is sometimes hard to find again after completion.
• If there is a mobile version, better marketing/awareness on this would be helpful.

Incentivized

• There's some room for improvement with candidate status. If you change a status, you have to refresh your screen for that to appear. It's a minor thing.
• It would be nice to hide certain bits of information on the web posting, but keep that information in the requisition for our records, ie, salary range, etc.

While I do not have experience with SmartSearch's competitors, I would renew my use of SmartSearch simply based on the up-front costs of implementing the program. It would be better to continue with a program that is sufficiently meeting my needs than it would be to incur the same up-front costs to implement something else.

Incentivized

It isn't difficult to use for the applicant processing, but [I feel] if you want to pull reports or use their tools, good luck!

There are so many facets of SmartSearch, that to know everything about it is nearly impossible. While it is mainly straight forward, there is a lot. After using the program for a while, you become pretty comfortable with the basics and can start adding some of the other features.

Incentivized

My license for SmartSearch goes back to 2004. It has always been available for me - don't remember a single time it was not available in all of those years.

What support? - Add a ticket and get links to [I believe] their unhelpful user guide. Add a charge if you want better support - afterward just got those links faster...

Once you get the 1 person on the phone they are very knowledgeable and tend to solve the problem. The issue is there are not enough resources to handle all the clients. Their primary clients are "recruiting firms" and I think that is where most of the their support resources go

Using the basic functions of SmartSearch is an easy implementation. But consider carefully what your organization needs to really drive placements. Because we only did a basic implementation first, we were caught off guard when later trying to implement more functions and realizing that the capabilities were limited or were difficult to learn and implement and realizing that tech support was not going to be consistent.

I think Lever stacks up fairly well and is right above the midpoint. iCIMS and Greenhouse provide a larger, more Enterprise style product for huge scale, so I'd put the two of them above Lever at this time, but we chose Lever over Greenhouse for a reason. I just don't know if we'd be able to scale to the size we'd want to long-term with their product suite. Compared to the others listed here, and many others, I would take Lever every time.

Incentivized

We have looked at multiple alternatives over the years at both Gates and our collective experiences prior to joining Gates. In our opinion, SmartSearch is the right choice for our business today. We have been able to scale it globally and conduct all of our major requirements for our applicant tracking system and that works for Gates. We also feel like we are an important partner to SmartSearch and they work with us and we feel like our feedback is important to them. I have worked with a number of ATS vendors prior to SmartSearch and pre-Gates. That is not a universal approach in this space and is a unique value prop from SmartSearch.

• We have an ATS now and did not have one before
• LinkedIn integration is better than others I've seen
• Spend too much time researching unhelpful user guides since their support is terrible
• Lots of frustration with post implementation support
• Integrations break, tools don't work and settings fail which could lead to other issues

• I am not involved in the budgeting or finance for recruiting software, so cannot speak directly to any numbers for ROI. However, SmartSearch personally saves me several hours a day in organizing candidates, thus saving my company substantial amounts in productivity.
• The lacking ability to tag additional recruiters throughout the hire track process means whoever onboards the hire has to ensure that a "split" is marked when completing the NHS. Failure to do so can result in quite a lot of lost time from HR to get the mistake fixed.

Incentivized