SmartRecruiters saves 20 hours a week by proactively demonstrating trust with Vanta

The company

Helping businesses get the talent they need to succeed

SmartRecruiters is on a mission to transform recruiting by helping teams track, select, and hire new employees. With more than 4,000 customers globally, SmartRecruiters is making a significant impact on how teams hire.

In recent years, SmartRecruiters has found success moving upmarket and selling to enterprise companies. It’s already gained over 1,000 enterprise customers, with momentum only growing. In the process, SmartRecruiters quickly learned just how deeply enterprises care about the data and privacy practices of their suppliers. Detailed security reviews were coming up in every deal, and SmartRecruiters’ security and go-to-market teams saw an opportunity to streamline this process — and accelerate deals. 

The Global Pre-Sales team at SmartRecruiters is responsible for making it easy for prospects to say yes. That’s why they wanted to find a better way to complete security questionnaires and share critical security documentation with prospective customers. 

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The challenge

Providing critical security information throughout the sales cycle

As SmartRecruiters grew, the team realized that prospects wanted to do their own research before meeting with a salesperson. They didn’t want to go through multiple sales conversations in order to get a basic understanding of SmartRecruiters’ security posture.

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As customers got closer to signing, they would send security questionnaires to ensure that SmartRecruiters’ security posture meets their standards. While these questionnaires varied in formats — spreadsheets, forms, and customer portals — they often asked a similar set of security questions. For SmartRecruiters, this meant their sellers had to send multiple questionnaires to the security team, who would then have to manually respond one by one. It was far from efficient and often required multiple follow-ups that would slow down deals.

“Prospects were interfacing with our data privacy and security teams very far into the sales cycle, and it was often this step that delayed the sale. Our security teams were constantly on calls with customers answering the same questions over and over again," says SmartRecruiters.

It became evident to SmartRecruiters that they needed a public-facing destination for prospects and customers to do their diligence on SmartRecruiters’ security posture. While an in-house solution worked initially, it quickly became difficult to maintain and scale as their security program matured. 

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The solution

Automating questionnaires and proactively showcasing security with Trust Center

With Vanta’s Questionnaire Automation solution, SmartRecruiters was able to create an aggregated knowledge base, informed by their security documentation as well as answers from previous questionnaires they’ve completed. Now, the security team can easily pull from this knowledge base to respond to incoming questionnaires, both directly in Vanta’s platform, as well as on third-party portals with a Chrome extension. 

In addition to streamlining how they handle inbound security reviews, SmartRecruiters also took a proactive approach to building trust by launching a public-facing Trust Center that centralizes critical information about their compliance, security, privacy, subprocessors, and more. Prospects and customers can review everything in one place without requiring a touchpoint from the SmartRecruiters team to walk through the company’s security posture or chase down documents. Existing customers can also subscribe to receive updates, as resources are updates on the Trust Center. 

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SmartRecruiters has also integrated their Trust Center with Salesforce, so the team can know when a prospect requests security documents. This helps sellers get ahead of their customer meetings and come prepared to speak to the topics that matter most to their prospects. 

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The impact

Saving time and accelerating deals

Since implementing Questionnaire Automation and Trust Center, SmartRecruiters has seen large gains in time savings. They estimate their Trust Center has saved their team over 20 hours per week. 

Additionally, prospects are moving through the sales process much faster. In one particular deal, SmartRecruiters was able to eliminate multiple steps in the sales cycle. When the security team from a prospective account reached out to schedule a meeting, SmartRecruiters included a link to their Trust Center in the calendar invite.

After reviewing SmartRecruiters’ Trust Center, the prospect decided a call wasn’t necessary after all and was ready to sign. “This fast tracked the deal for us and saved us time as we didn’t have to have a conversation with them about security,” says SmartRecruiters. All told, their Trust Center was able to accelerate over $500,000 worth of deals in the first year.