Jerome Ternynck

A conversation with Jerome Ternynck, the CEO of applicant tracking tool SmartRecruiters. Sponsored by Emissary.ai and Workhere.com FULL TRANSCRIPT Chris Russell: The RecTech Podcast is sponsored in part by our friends at Emissary.ai, the text recruiting platform. Your next superstar is in demand and on the move. Emissary is the easiest way to connect with them faster and more effectively wherever they are. So if you haven't embedded texting into your recruiting process yet, what are you waiting for? It's definitely something that's as a channel, today's employers need to communicate more effectively with there candidates and prospects. Go to emissary.ai and schedule a demo today. Chris Russell: We're also sponsored by our friends at WorkHere.com, the hyper-local candidate delivery tool through geo-fencing app platform. You can reach more people through their online ads with pinpoint precision where they live, work and shop. WorkHere will advertise your jobs on the screens candidates use the most, their mobile phone. And messaging is then delivered into the social mobile apps they use most often. Head over to WorkHere.com and be sure to tell them heard it the RecTech podcast. Chris Russell: All right, so today's audio is an interview with Jerome Ternyck, CEO of SmartRecruiters, one of my favorite ATS's out there. The first one I ever used actually as a recruiter. I sat down for him at their San Francisco offices for a 30 minute conversation, and I think you're really going to enjoy this one. He was very open and honest and authentic as he always is and enjoy the audio. Chris Russell: Okay. I'm here with Jerome Ternyck, CEO of SmartRecruiters in their San Francisco offices on Bush Street and had a chance to come down here after the TA week events and come see Jerome. He's always been inviting me out here and finally got a chance to make it to San Fran and SmartRecruiter. So Jerome, first of all, it's great to see you again and how's life today? Jerome Ternyck: Likewise. Thanks for having me on the show. And yeah, life is good. Life is good. You're actually catching me today on January the 30th which is exactly 24 hours before the end of our fiscal year so we're busy signing deals left and right, rushing into the end of the year preparing budgets. And I think on Friday evening everybody will be resting for weekend. But just for the weekend, because we have our Hiring Success conference coming up in two weeks on Feb 11 and 12. When we'll have a thousand people coming here and so we're excited. It's busy time here. Chris Russell: Yeah, definitely. Quick history lesson for people who know me. SmartRecruiters was the very first ATS I ever used as it recruited back in 2014-ish around there. I picked them because they seemed to be a modern platform back then, and they still are. They had an app and things like that at the time, which were pretty new. I've always kind of admired SmartRecruiters from afar anyway, and also as a user in that time. But just give the audience a sense of where you guys are now in terms of customer base and employee-wise and things like that. Just give us a quick overview. Jerome Ternyck: Yeah. So we started the company in 2011. We spent four years in R&D and really what we were building, what we aimed [inaudible 00:00:03:36]. Okay, what is a generational successor to applicant tracking systems? Applicant tracking systems were born out of we need to automate the file cabinet. Resumes were paper based; the internet arrived. Oh my God, candidates can fill in forms, and I can track them in a system. But this whole idea that people are actually tracked as applicants in a system like even the name is wrong. Applicant tracking system doesn't say hire amazing people system. Jerome Ternyck: And having build myself an ATS between 2000 and 2010 when I started SmartRecruiters, I was like, okay, really getting ready. Take a blank sheet of paper and what do we want to get out here? And so we landed on three core things that are talent acquisition suite should do. One, it should help me attract candidates. That speaks to marketing and how you attract candidates and advertising and referrals and good website and good candidate experience. And there's a whole lot of things that need to be done in the area of CRM and marketing and so on. Jerome Ternyck: Second, we said managers have to use it and we have to double down on collaboration because recruiters cannot be successful if the managers aren't playing with them in their system. And so we focused on collaboration, hiring manager engagement, scorecard scheduling, making more that process like super smooth and efficient. And third, it's about recruiter and recruiter productivity. And recruiters nowadays, they're being asked to move mountains, but they have tools and technologies from decades ago. Chris Russell: They're being held back. Jerome Ternyck: And they're completely held back, absolutely. So giving recruiters all of their data processes and suppliers in one system where they can be in control and compliance. And so those three things, recruiter productivity, hiring manager engagement, and candidate experience is what we designed to spend ... we spent almost four and a half years just developing the product. We launched it in 2015 so that's five years ago now. And we've now since then signed just shy of a thousand enterprise customers. We have several thousand smaller companies using our platform on various capacity, but really the enterprise segment a thousand customers, this is where we actually make our money. Our revenue are made there. Jerome Ternyck: Some big names, we have companies like Visa, Bosch, which has like 400,000 employees. Even LinkedIn uses us now as their [inaudible 00:05:56] as they're implementing Twitter. So really large progressive companies that are using SmartRecruiters. We have 300 employees worldwide. We raised $100 million of equity money from various investors, Salesforce being one of our investors. So we're really looking at hey, recruiting is not this administrative automated function as we thought in the past. It's actually a fairly sales and marketing oriented function. It's a competitive advantage to companies would do it well. What's the platform that does that? And this is what we deliver. Chris Russell: Excellent. What do you think of the overall activity happening in the market itself as far as HR tech goes, all the mergers and acquisitions you're seeing bigger players group up smaller players to be an all encompassing platform. What's your overall sense of where we are now in HR tech? Jerome Ternyck: I think we're in a very, very exciting time of HR tech. And that is on two counts. On the core HR, there's a replacement cycle happening with enormous efficiency gains and automation opportunities and that charge is led by Workday in core HR and there's much more happening there. And I think there we're really seeing a very classic replacement cycle of old school HR systems. Jerome Ternyck: On the recruiting side, we're actually seeing a real shift of market because we are going away from, Hey you apply, you are screened and then maybe you get the job. We're going into this is a full scale sales and marketing function and TA leaders are becoming marketers, marketers in campaigns, in nurturing, in sourcing, in referrals, in how they organize it. It's more collaborative. So there's a whole set of a new generation of TA leaders that are actually emerging. Jerome Ternyck: And it's interesting because in HR tech, the world here divides between two types of tier leaders. Those who are going to be swallowed inside the HR system. And it's basically oh you use Taleo, I know this recruiting system from work there. SAP is not better, but you've been on Taleo for ages. Just shut up and keep, keep your life. And that's basically saying recruiting is an admin process. I don't care about winning the best talent, I'm just processing resume here and fillin