Rippling vs. SmartSearch ATS

I highly recommend Rippling for any company, regardless of its size. Many well-known companies trust it, and if you go onto their LinkedIn page, you will likely find that many of your friends and colleagues are already familiar with them. Along with a highly flexible and easy-to-use UI, many other companies use it, making it feel like a small world. Any company that needs software for expense management and payroll and wants consistency should consider using Rippling.

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.

• I did not expect Live Chat Support and Email Support when we moved to Rippling. Their Support team is quick and very knowledgeable. I have had multiple instances where we have gone back and forth on a situation to come to the correct conclusion, never feeling they were trying to just close the case unsolved.
• Being able to manage employees from application to separation is huge. Having a built in ATS that we can hire candidates from directly, and immediately have their payroll, benefits and employee profile setup has saved me countless hours for each hire.
• Rippling allows us to manage retirement plans across the US, Canada and UK with automation and file feeds. Before Rippling I manually managed these in multiple portals, now Rippling does it for me automatically.

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 is hard to think of ways that Rippling could improve. The one area that we did have a bit of a slowdown was in the onboarding process. It was not intuitive and we expect to have some learning curve so if I could say anything needs improvement it would be this area.

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.

Rippling continues to innovate and amaze me with their new innovations and features. Product feedback is taken seriously so I always give it whenever I can and end up seeing results. Rippling is the new wave of HRIS that cannot compare against others in the industry just due to the fact they are super user friendly!

Incentivized

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

Rippling is a great product that has streamlined our payroll and leave management processes. The interface is intuitive, and it’s very convenient to manage everything in one place. While the initial setup was a bit lengthy and the mobile experience can sometimes be a little slow, overall, it’s been a reliable and effective solution for our needs.

Incentivized

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

I like that the availability in using Rippling at any given time is useful to me. Getting on the site freely when I need gives me security of knowing that I can be in control of viewing health insurance and hours information. I have yet to get any errors in using the Rippling app.

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.

Rippling's performance has been great, no errors or glitches yet so far. I am confident that Going from one page to the next and all its complexity usage does not lag or times out, it works effectively and efficiently. While using Rippling and other apps it does not tend to slow it down, works great. No complaints.

Incentivized

When I did have to reach out to Rippling for assistance I was able to get quick help and my problem resolved in a time efficient manner with out any type of hick up. The customer support team is professional, kind and always available. This makes Rippling more welcoming to use on a daily basis.

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

The trainer went slow and and answered our questions.

Incentivized

It's really easy to implement in comparison to other tools or applications. Different key points are easily configured and implemented as per need, having different configurations in systems. Implementation is something which binds the different parameters of an organization in a single row. Implementation of rippling is much easier, quicker, and error free than any other software. I recommend it strongly!

Incentivized

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.

We switched from Gusto to Rippling and I wish we would've done it years ago. Rippling is so much more robust than Gusto and has made the lives of our HR team and each of our employees so much easier! I'd recommend Rippling over Gusto to every organization without any hesitation

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.

I can go on here and see all my hours and pto plus health benefits. I like to have the work handbook handy to refer to legal things. How to work my role within it's limits. Being able to put in my hours and view when they are approved is a huge benefit for me.

Incentivized

• Routine things like PTO requests and document uploads now take a few clicks instead of hours of email back‑and‑forth. I’d estimate I spend at least half the time on those tasks compared to before, which frees me up to actually help employees.
• What used to drag on for days now gets done in a morning - I've just asked them this now. New hires can log in, set up their tools, and start training almost immediately, so they’re productive much sooner.
• Payroll and benefits errors used to pop up regularly, but now I almost never have to fix things or follow up on missing info. That means less stress for me and for everyone involved.
• Having everything in one platform cuts out the “where did you send that?” and “who approves this?” questions. It feels like we’ve reduced our back‑and‑forth by at least a third.

Incentivized

• 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