How SmartRecruiters put in-app training in their users’ hands

SmartRecruiters offers a top-tier talent acquisition platform for talent leaders, but a tool is only as powerful as the quality of the processes it’s used to manage.

Jared Best, SmartRecruiters’ director of business and strategy consulting, wanted to find a way to provide customers with a model of what exceptional talent acquisition looks like, and empower them to easily put those best practices into action.

That eventually took the form of the “Definitive Guide to Hiring Success,” a playbook for organizations looking to improve their talent acquisition processes. But, Best wanted to go further. He wanted to walk beside the customers as they implemented the concepts and guide them to those positive outcomes.

“There’s a lot of complexity to that,” Best said. “You’re talking about an end-to-end talent acquisition process that spans multiple teams, multiple functions, and touches every facet of the business.”

Best’s team stepped in at that point, offering strategic consulting and advice from day one, and Pendo became a key tool in these efforts.

Oftentimes, this consulting led to conversations with users who were requesting changes to the product to fill what they perceived as gaps in functionality. “There was a lot of ‘We need you to change your product,’” Best said. 

What those customers perceived as product gaps, however, were more commonly gaps in how the organization was carrying out their TA process. Best’s team had been using Pendo to make in-product announcements, offer contextual onboarding and support, and collect NPS, but they also recognized the potential for using it to bridge those process gaps on a customer-to-customer basis.

The issue? Custom point solutions of that sort can be difficult to scale. The team quickly realized they were building an unsustainable support model. That’s where Pendo’s Reseller Partner Program came in.

The Reseller Partner Program is Pendo’s in-app training product that allows users to give their own customers the ability to offer white-labeled in-app messaging and guidance to improve their onboarding, boost adoption, and track the impact of their training.

The team used Pendo to build out SmartTips, giving their users the ability to take training through in-app guidance into their own hands. SmartTips helps SmartRecruiters users deliver in-the-moment tips and guidance to ensure quicker time-to-value, bring change management to life, and curate guided experiences that lead end users to the best possible outcomes, Best said.

Now, customers can identify their own process gaps, build bridges themselves to ensure internal users are successful, and ensure they are getting the high ROI out of their implementation. 

“SmartTips allows them to scale that capability and bring life to their process from inside of our product,” Best said.

Securing buy-in

Since Best’s team was already using Pendo to offer those in-app point solutions, he was in an ideal position to pitch SmartTips to leadership and secure buy-in for the project: He’d had numerous conversations with talent leaders already using the product where they’d asked him to build a Pendo lightbox or tooltip guide into their instance to address friction points and other challenges. The business case was clear.

“I’d had visibility into our use of the Pendo product and saw the value proposition of how we were using it to solve very specific customer challenges,” he said. “Using Pendo to build [SmartTips] would allow them to own the maintenance side of it as well and be nimble enough to change when their processes change or things in the market change. It would take a non-scalable process and get it into our customers’ hands.”

Once live, SmartTips became an intriguing differentiator for SmartRecruiters in sales cycles, Best noted. 

“It allowed us to offer a sophisticated solution in the moment for any number of questions customers might have,” he said. “We could say ‘We’ve got the best-in-class talent acquisition platform on the market, and by the way, we take it a step further: We’re going to help you manage things like adoption, training, and engagement.’ Who wouldn’t want that?”