Recruitee: Smart hiring on the cloud co-Founder Interview

In the US around 5 million people are hired into new roles every month. Traditionally in larger corporations HR teams have tended to manage this, but new tech that streamlines hiring processes means hiring managers and department heads have greater power.

Recruitee is a cloud recruitment tool that allows teams to handle vacancies and candidates more easily, streamlining processes. The SaaS tool, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Perry Oostdam and headquartered in Amsterdam, aims to create an ecosystem of innovative HR technology. Here, he explains just how they are doing this.

How does Recruitee help to serve the social side of tech?

Perry Oostdam

With Recruitee, teams and companies can hire and manage their teams effectively from one place. Teams hire faster and more efficiently when every member works together. They save time, money, and got the control of doing hiring with their own team.

Hiring is a complex process, much more so than you would think. It’s easy to get mixed up in emails, to-do’s, reminders. A lot of first-time founders and companies who have never hired before struggle with the various tasks this entails. If you don’t have a good process in the first place, it’s going to be more overwhelming. If you leave hiring to just the founders, or the HR person, it’s going to be even more overwhelming. It doesn’t make sense to have one person dictate who the others will work with on a daily basis. One costly mistake of having a tiresome, lonesome, inefficient hiring process is that the time-to-hire per vacancy can go up to 6 months.

Can you discuss what sets you apart from your competitors and what is the overall goal of your company with regards to the customers you provide goods/services for?

We’re in a crowded market, but we can be different by making truly intuitive software that companies want to use. We think that we’ve got what it takes to become a recruitment player that really takes the lead in innovating in this industry. As an example, we’re very open in what we do. We launch new features every month and clients can see our roadmap. We ask for their feedback on a daily basis. We try not to compare ourselves to other companies. If you move fast enough, you don’t have time to look backwards. And we aim to become a company that is not seen just as recruitment software, but as a type of HR ecosystem of innovative technology.

Does your professional background as co-Founder qualify you as a leader in your industry? How?

I founded Recruitee with my long-term business partner Pawel Smoczyk. Together we have launched a number of companies, including GeoRun, a location-based game that allows users to pick up virtual items with their smartphones – a bit like Pokemon Go. After about two years we realized we no longer liked the direction of the company. We had started GeoRun with the idea of creating a scalable product, and along the way it had transformed into an agency, working for clients. We spent two months brainstorming new concepts. Then, just like Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson illustrate in their book Reworkable, we decided to take a look at our own needs.

We had always struggled with hiring; overflowing inboxes, excel docs and jam-packed agendas made this a nightmare. We’d searched for online solutions to help simplify this process and we found some handy tools but nothing that really satisfied what we were looking for. So we focused on creating a tool that our team would use and Recruitee was born.

What motivates you to produce high quality goods/services for your customers and what has been their feedback towards your company or towards you as the co-Founder?

We believe that the way companies hire will fundamentally change – instead focusing on team collaboration. We are beginning to see this shift, our customers tell us that they want the relevant departments to handle the hiring process, and Recruitee technology makes this possible. There will always be the need to hire and in recent years HR tech has come a long way. But we think that a truly effective tool should be intuitive and we are constantly striving to improve our solution. Many of our customers have come from previous client recommendations, so we’re taking this as a good sign.

Does your product, service, or background fit in to an overall trend? How?

Traditional organizational hierarchies and structures are changing with the rise of holacracy and remote work. Having a platform everyone can access, where each person has a voice is crucial. This means remote workforces, or shift workers, anyone on the team can be involved in the recruitment process. Communication is simpler, and hiring can be done smoothly and efficiently, never relying on just one person to get it done. Recruitee celebrates collaboration and provides a way for teams to work together.