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 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 (though on a much smaller scale than AWS).

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 is our secret sauce to this growth. 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, even if they lacked the experience.

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 relying solely on the interview process. We had every candidate go through multiple rounds of interviews and till we were like 200 employees, I almost personally interviewed everybody. We only hired people we felt comfortable working with and never got swayed by resume credentials or past experience if we did not enjoy our meetings with candidates.

This strategy really 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, with the tools at hand. This showed in the number of complaints that I received from employees who had referred candidates or managers who were struggling to close open positions.

For some perspective, on an average, it takes about 3 to 6 weeks to make one offer.

To make this one offer, a recruiter talks to about 12–15 candidates and conducts about 3–5 rounds of interviews for each candidate. These 12–15 candidates, they shortlist from a group of about 120–150 candidates.

From my vantage point as the CEO, looking at the numbers, I could see that the talent acquisition(TA) team works 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 another 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 our recruiters’ 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. …operational tasks that shouldn’t take 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. That’s their job. 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. Take it out for a spin? Sign up for Freshteam and let us know what you think.

Originally published at blog.freshworks.com on August 18, 2017.