In the grocery store you can buy a pack of 10 hot dogs, but if you want to enjoy them on buns, you’ll need to buy two packs to cover your meaty bases. Whereas at 7-Eleven, you can simply buy two hot Big Bites and two buns (and you can even dress them). Sometimes you make choices based on fixed sizes, and sometimes you want a specific product to meet a specific need.
Employ, the recruiting software company, is doing what the hot dog and bun companies have so far refused to do: sell solutions to meet customer needs rather than simply offer out of box products based on assumptions.
A few of the most popular applicant tracking systems (ATS) are owned and run by Employ. The company’s new CEO, Steve Cox, joined in April and dove into the company’s product offerings and explored the market, wherein nearly every Fortune 500 employer relies on ATS for hiring.
“Before I joined [Employ] there was a very clear position: It was JazzHR for SMB. It was Lever for midmarket. It was Jobvite for enterprise,” said Cox. “We’d acquired these three companies, branded them under Employ. We’ve done very little to integrate the people, integrate the technology, and then think about how we could better serve the talent acquisition population as Employ.”
The deeper Cox dug, the more he understood the complexity of individual hiring needs of every client, and it led to a repositioning of the products based on solution needs and pain points.
“Our customers are not small, medium, and large,” he said. “We actually have customers that span everything from micro businesses, up to Fortune 100 businesses on each of our platforms. When we started to dig deeper, what we realized was that large companies don’t always have complex hiring requirements. Small companies don’t always have simple hiring requirements.”
For instance, although a physician’s office or small health clinic would be categorized as an SMB, one might need extra recruitment marketing functionality to recruit specialized talent or a more robust hiring solution to comply with regulatory requirements in the industry. Conversely, a large fast franchise corporation might have a global footprint and hundreds of thousands of employees, but most hires happen inside the store-level and the process is fairly simple.
Employ is working with customers to craft a recruiting and hiring solution that meets their specific business needs. Doing so required a shift in how the company thinks of its three key products.
- JazzHR. No longer a product for SMBs, but a solution for simple, foundational hiring.
- Lever. Its “scalable” offering.
- Jobvite. Not just for large enterprises, but a product for complex recruiting and hiring processes.
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“One of the things that we found that really resonated with us is that a lot of talent acquisition professionals felt that all of the ATS providers offered all-in-one solutions. They didn’t believe that there was such a thing as an all-in-one solution, and I think that for me was a real turning point,” Cox said.
The right solution for Employ customers begins with one of the base ATS platforms, combined with other modules and integrations with more than 600 partner organizations to deliver a bespoke solution that meets the individual needs of the customer.
Employ recruited more than a dozen new customer success managers to the team and is currently developing a framework to help its customers understand their hiring needs and how its products can help them meet their unique goals.
“We are the only provider in this space that can truly go out to a customer of any size, and ask them what business problems they need to solve through our ATS platforms, for our module that we add on to them, and our 600 integration partners. We can truly create a custom solution to meet their needs,” he said.