SmartSearch: Customer-Centric HR Technology Providers

Doug Coull, Founder & CEO

The employees of a company are paramount in forming its core characteristics. With better HR technology, the essential yet elaborate task of hiring people becomes smoother and less tedious. California-based company, Advanced Personnel Systems, Inc., makers of SmartSearch^® is an HR technology provider that delivers intelligent solutions to make the hiring process, effortless. In a recent interview with Doug Coull, Founder & CEO and LJ Morris, CTO and Partner of SmartSearch, we discussed how SmartSearch could help clients with solutions that can affect the hiring process for brands.

Can you give us an overview of your company?

Advanced Personnel Systems is fundamentally a technology company that puts in a considerable amount of focus on the people. Being a privately held company, we are genuinely beholden to our clients. Our greatest strength lies in the close relationships that we cultivate with our clients. Thereby, we are not answerable to anyone except our clients. We go beyond mere vendor-customer relationships and instead value and view our customers as partners. Our clients look at our organization as an extension of their organization, which has led us to significant success.

The people of an organization ultimately become the identity of that organization. The advent of social media and AI has given birth to a myriad of tools that assess the skills, ideas, and personalities of people. Therefore, we provide the kind of tools that help brands to expand their reach in the hiring process. Further, we also aid businesses in targeting people with the right professional qualifications and the right cultural, psychological, and emotional makeup that fit in an organization’s structure.

Our SmartSearch system manages most of the aspects involved in the hiring process and streamlines all the communications. We help the clients in narrowing down with whom they should target to hire as employees and simplify the entire process starting from the candidate perspective which eventually saves them a lot of time. The SmartSearch software performs tasks like document signing, on-boarding, and other candidate-related works very efficiently. We have a feature in SmartSearch that lets users send out group messages and text messages with job interest links to people that massively speeds up the hiring process.

SmartSearch^® is an HR technology provider that delivers intelligent solutions to make the hiring process, effortless

This is a core feature which has gotten incredible feedback from our clients. Additionally, the SmartSearch system also ensures that our clients are following compliance and staying legal.

Could you tell us what separates SmartSearch from other competitors in the HR space?

Our aim has always been to provide quality over quantity; we want to be the best software provider but not necessarily the largest software provider.We are a true software company as we spend most of our money on developing new technology and in support of that technology. Most companies in the HR space spend most of their money on marketing and promoting themselves. Our development roadmap focuses on the clients’ needs, which makes a striking difference regarding our delivery methods. We also have our service centers and use cloud technology to a certain extent, whereby we use the best of both worlds to provide very reliable, secure services.

LJ Morris, CTO & Partner

We operate in an Agile development environment, and it aids in keeping pace with the technological changes and demands of our customers. With the Agile development construct, we flush the market with many innovative ideas and various technical improvements.

Could you provide us with a case study where you have helped your clients?

One of our clients had problems in initiating communications processing and requested our help with the automation. So, we studied their goals and came up with an auto-matching technology. Therefore, as soon as they add a job description, the auto-matching technology identifies matches based on specific candidate skills within their industry and sends text messages to these people with links to view job details. So, within minutes of adding a job, they get qualified people lined up. Hence, we streamlined the process, which used to take up days for our client and reduced it to mere minutes and seconds.

What does the future look like for SmartSearch?

Our primary focus and investments are on AI currently, and we are looking ahead to expand our internal infrastructure. A significant number of communication tools are lined up to be added to our products. In possessing a powerful CRM, we are adding more tools, which will enable e-mail campaigns and analytics. Additionally, we have done a lot of research on using the apt colors on our interfaces thereby making the user experience smoother. Our interface is continually being enhanced which will improve recruiter experiences.