PCRecruiter is a web-based recruiting platform. It supports candidate sourcing and placement via candidate tracking, job advertising, CRM, applicant tracking, and salesforce automation.
$85
per user/per month
SmartSearch ATS
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
SmartSearch is a web-based talent acquisition and staffing management software. Features include job posting to job boards and social media outlets, resume parsing, and automated workflow. SmartSearch advertises robust customer service and implementation assistance.
N/A
Pricing
PCRecruiter
SmartSearch ATS
Editions & Modules
Basic
$85
per user/per month
Basic
$85
per user/per month
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PCRecruiter
SmartSearch ATS
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discounts available based on number of users, affiliations, length of contract, and other needs.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PCRecruiter
SmartSearch ATS
Features
PCRecruiter
SmartSearch ATS
Recruiting / ATS
Comparison of Recruiting / ATS features of Product A and Product B
For presenting candidates to clients, PCRecruiter has had rave reviews from clients. It's easy to look through a candidate's profile and provide feedback. Like I said earlier, if it could retain real-time information on a candidate, it would be more effective, not having me have to resend a candidate to a client every time there is something new added to a candidate profile. It would be great to have templates for candidate letters so we wouldn't have to write our own. It would be nice if the parsing feature was more effective in pulling over all the information - as often I have to add in information or make adjustments on parsing.
If you have a recruiting organization that needs flexibility and a wide range of options to address an ever changing landscape than this is your system. It does not try to pigeon-hole recruiters into a single recruiting model. It allows you to customize how your organization does things but also allows you to control where you need to control. We have been using SmartSearch for more than 24 years. We started out on one of the first versions because we liked the company and the direction they were taking. SmartSearch has not always been the tool with the flashiest features.... but it has always had some of the best features. They have always been of the cutting edge of the next technology and have the tools and features that make SmartSearch a complete solution. We have not seen anything else out in the marketplace that has encouraged us to change.
All client and candidate activities are tracked and documented in one place. This makes it very easy for our team to work collaboratively. For example all email correspondence is written to client or candidate record, sales calls, follow-up, etc. are all contained in one place.
We like the ability to customize fields and the work flow. We have created specific data field that are relevant to some of the niche markets we work. This has allowed us to quickly slice and dice our data for marketing and recruiting campaigns.
The Bulk email feature is very easy to use and we incorporate it into most of our marketing and recruiting campaigns and since it is fully integrated we see all of the activity associated with the client or candidate.
The RSS feed of jobs has allowed us to easily integrate with social media. when a position is posted into PCR it is automatically fed to multiple social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and twitter.
We use the calendar and Rollup list function to organize all of our recruiting and marketing campaigns. Rollups simplify the planning part of our business.
The metrics reporting is great. We are in a metrics driven business and with PCR we have automated most of the reporting such as interviews/hires, attempts/presentations, presentations/ interviews, etc.
Customization - the team at SmartSearch always tries to find a solution that works for our company specifically.
Customer Care - the team actually cares and is concerned about the well-being of our business. They help us solve issues as if they worked for us and this feeling is felt at every level of the organization beginning with their President.
Technology - I have used multiple ATSs and demoed many, many more. SmartSearch has superior technology for staffing firm; the technology that helps us recruit and fill jobs faster.
Listening - the team at SmartSearch actually listens to us and our concerns whether it's regarding a feature for an upgrade or simply solving an issue we are facing.
Common Sense - there have been many times in our relationship when we have asked about a feature and we hear "that makes sense, we will make that change for all of our customers"...listening is rare and they do it well.
There's some room for improvement with candidate status. If you change a status, you have to refresh your screen for that to appear. It's a minor thing.
It would be nice to hide certain bits of information on the web posting, but keep that information in the requisition for our records, ie, salary range, etc.
I am very hesitant to renew my subscription to PCRecruiter because it feels outdated. Competing applicant tracking systems are making huge strides in compatibility and mobile accessibility while PCRecruiter has remained stagnant in its progression. The system is functional, and serves as an excellent database, but severely lacks in advancement opportunities
While I do not have experience with SmartSearch's competitors, I would renew my use of SmartSearch simply based on the up-front costs of implementing the program. It would be better to continue with a program that is sufficiently meeting my needs than it would be to incur the same up-front costs to implement something else.
As the past VP of Recruiting for a boutique search firm. I trained many recruiters on the PCR system. All were using the system like a pro in a week to 10 days tops. PCR does everything a recruiting team will need without being overly complicated to learn or navigate.
There are so many facets of SmartSearch, that to know everything about it is nearly impossible. While it is mainly straight forward, there is a lot. After using the program for a while, you become pretty comfortable with the basics and can start adding some of the other features.
I have had little to no downtime with PC Recruiter (except for planned maintenance). Whether I am using it on my laptop or the mobile versions (iPad and Android based phone), I am able to get to my information quickly and easily
My license for SmartSearch goes back to 2004. It has always been available for me - don't remember a single time it was not available in all of those years.
I gave it this rating because I find that even though they are great support, they don't help to improve the situation because often it is out of their hands. It is that the website is down or some other issue that they can not readily fix. While helpful, I think some changes need to be made for this software to work better.
Once you get the 1 person on the phone they are very knowledgeable and tend to solve the problem. The issue is there are not enough resources to handle all the clients. Their primary clients are "recruiting firms" and I think that is where most of the their support resources go
Using the basic functions of SmartSearch is an easy implementation. But consider carefully what your organization needs to really drive placements. Because we only did a basic implementation first, we were caught off guard when later trying to implement more functions and realizing that the capabilities were limited or were difficult to learn and implement and realizing that tech support was not going to be consistent.
I still keep using some of these, but PCR is my main place for profiles, since I can find someone on Linkedin, enrich it with another tool and keep it all in one place, PCR Recruiter. Its versatility when it comes to adding information and documents, organizing and visualizing content is incomparable.
We have looked at multiple alternatives over the years at both Gates and our collective experiences prior to joining Gates. In our opinion, SmartSearch is the right choice for our business today. We have been able to scale it globally and conduct all of our major requirements for our applicant tracking system and that works for Gates. We also feel like we are an important partner to SmartSearch and they work with us and we feel like our feedback is important to them. I have worked with a number of ATS vendors prior to SmartSearch and pre-Gates. That is not a universal approach in this space and is a unique value prop from SmartSearch.
Time savings: PCRecruiter saves our company countless hours of time by allowing us to search company & candidate info from our desktop.
Cost savings: PCRecruiter saves our recruiters time by allowing them to search for qualified candidates by keywords. This has eliminated the need to search through resumes and applications to find candidates. This has also made our recruiters more productive. PCR allows us to work smarter not harder.
PCRecruiter pays for its self by giving your company an advantage over your competitors. Your team will be filling open job orders while your competition is looking through file cabinets.
I am not involved in the budgeting or finance for recruiting software, so cannot speak directly to any numbers for ROI. However, SmartSearch personally saves me several hours a day in organizing candidates, thus saving my company substantial amounts in productivity.
The lacking ability to tag additional recruiters throughout the hire track process means whoever onboards the hire has to ensure that a "split" is marked when completing the NHS. Failure to do so can result in quite a lot of lost time from HR to get the mistake fixed.
