Meet Freshteam – a new CRM for recruiters
Today, I’m happy to announce our newest product, Freshteam – a product built for recruiters who are tasked with hiring great teams in fast-growing companies.
In case you are wondering why the company that built Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshsales is launching a new recruitment management software, you are not alone. In fact when the whole world thought that Amazon was an e-commerce company, they went on to launch Amazon Web Services(AWS) because they believed that they had built something really valuable internally that many other companies can benefit from. The story of Freshteam is similar.
But here’s a little context on why we decided to build it.
When we launched Freshdesk in 2011, we were six people in a room. As I write this article now, six years later, we are a global company with 1000 employees and more than 100,000 customers across 145 countries. I often get asked what our secret sauce to this growth is. My answer: it’s our hiring. When most startups struggle to attract good talent, we focused on hiring younger folks who had the aspiration and the talent.
In the early days, almost all of our new hires came through employee referrals. We were able to qualitatively understand the strengths of the candidate rather than rely solely on the interview process. We had every candidate go through multiple rounds of interviews and till we were 200 employees, I personally interviewed almost everybody. We only hired people we felt we would be comfortable working with, and never got swayed by resume credentials or past experience if we did not enjoy our meetings with candidates.
This strategy worked for us but as we began to scale, the volume of our internal referrals grew exponentially. As our brand awareness grew, we started getting a strong inbound pipeline and our recruiters were also busy engaging with passive candidates. Soon our recruiters found it really difficult to manage this volume and provide a good hiring experience.
On an average, it takes three to six weeks to make one offer. For this, a recruiter shortlists about 15 candidates from a pool of around 150 candidates, and conducts between three and five rounds of interviews for each.
From my vantage point as the CEO, I could see that the talent acquisition(TA) team was working really hard to keep us growing this fast. But to hiring managers who needed someone yesterday, it just looks like the TA team is slacking off. When we looked closer, we realized that there was a more fundamental problem.
There’s a popular saying in sales that 80% of a sales person’s time is not spent selling. Instead, they’re updating the CRM, composing emails, performing research to see how hot a lead is, and so on. Just like a salesperson, 80% of a recruiter’s time was spent doing everything but recruiting. They were organizing resumes, finding time on people’s calendars, scheduling interviews, giving office directions to candidates, collecting feedback from interviewers etc. These were operational tasks that shouldn’t have taken up so much of their time. We realized that we may not be the only company to have this problem.
Great recruiters know how to find great candidates. It’s all the other things that they need help with. So, we built Freshteam to help great recruiters focus on the only thing that matters: recruiting.
What’s fresh about Freshteam?
In addition to the standard market features like job posting management and interview scheduling, here are our key differentiators:
- A better way to track and manage internal employee referrals
- Customisable, built-in career site that requires no help from the website team to get running
- 50+ job descriptions out-of-the-box for use so you can stop wasting time writing one from scratch
- Ability to capture qualitative feedback about candidates
- Better candidate relationships through built-in email and a manageable candidate database
- Online collaboration with the hiring team to gather feedback and coordinate schedules through email and calendar sync
Freshteam is completely free for companies with up to 50 employees, and our affordable pricing is perfect for growing teams that need a hassle-free ATS.
Don’t just take our word for it. Sign up for Freshteam and let us know what you think.
