Freshworks launches applicant tracking software Freshteam

Freshteam enables recruiters deliver superior candidate experience. It will be available for free for companies with less than 50 employees.

India’s SaaS sensation Freshworks has announced the launch of Freshteam, a recruitment management software for businesses. It’ll help companies organise their talent acquisition function, engage with candidates, and align the human resources organisation to business goals. The product also claims to provide flexible hiring workflows.

This is the fifth product offering from Freshworks after Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales and Freshcaller.

Notably, Freshworks announced its eighth acquisition less than a month ago. However, none of the acquired companies were involved in the making of Freshteam, and the product was developed from scratch by the in-house team.

Earlier this year, Freshdesk rebranded itself as Freshworks, an umbrella brand that will bring together the company’s entire business offerings. The company has raised $149 million in funding so far and counts CapitalG, Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global among its investors.

The back story

Freshteam is built on the experiences gained by the talent acquisition team at Freshworks as it scaled from six employees to a 1,000-plus-strong global workforce. Starting with analyzing a day in the life of a recruiter, Freshworks realized the similarities between the talent acquisition teams and sales teams.

GirishMathrubootham, CEO & Founder of Freshworks, says,

During the early days of Freshworks, it was a big challenge to get candidate experience right. Recruiters have a tough job of simultaneously managing candidates, interviewers and external staffing vendors for every opening to deliver the best hiring experience. Our talent acquisition team needed a unified way to manage all the touch points of the candidate life cycle, much like how customer interactions and sales leads are managed through a CRM.

Freshteam aims to help recruiters manage multiple stakeholders and expectations. According to a study by Harvard Business Review, 80 percent of employee turnover occurs due to faulty hiring decisions. Recruiters spend most of their time in executing operational responsibilities than concentrating on building a quality pipeline and recruiting, which, in turn, affects the end-to-end-hiring process.

Features of Freshteam

Recruiters can manage the entire recruitment process under one platform. They can also use social media channels, contextually collaborate with hiring teams, engage with candidates directly from the application tracking system (ATS), get organised by building candidate databases that help archive candidate profiles, and leverage a mobile-friendly version to be connected on the go.

Some of the features of Freshteam from a recruiters' perspective are:

• Track and manage internal employee referrals
• Customisable career site that requires no help from the website team to get running
• Fifty-plus job descriptions for use to avoid writing it from scratch
• Ability to capture qualitative feedback about candidates
• 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.

To encourage SMBs to focus on their hiring experience, Freshteam will be available for free for companies with less than 50 employees. In future product releases, Freshteam will integrate with other Freshworks software.

The market

Organisations find it hard to choose between an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and a recruitment CRM. Some believe it’s more or less same, while some point out the major differences in the two. Freshteam, though an ATS, has similar functionalities of a recruiter CRM.

Zoho Recruit is one of the leading players in this segment that includes UltiPro and BambooHR. However, Freshworks is counting a lot on its existing customer base (using their other products) of more than 100,000 to find great value in Freshteam. The move will increase the horizon of play and the market size for Freshworks.

Freshteam website