Comeet 2018 Year in Review
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As 2018 fades into history, it’s time for our annual debrief on how we got here. We saw huge progress in multiple areas and in multiple geographies, vastly expanded our list of product features and customers, and bolstered Team Comeet with key additions. We also celebrated the weddings of teammates the births of their children, and other life milestones. Overall, it was an excellent year. Here are the highlights:
People (organization)
The org chart grew with important additions to our sales, business development, and engineering teams:
- Sales: Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) doubled in 2018, the third consecutive year that we’ve seen at least 100% annual MRR growth. #Awesome. Part of the reason was due to the expansion of our Brooklyn, NY sales team that welcomed new account executives and SDRs. We’re looking forward to another year of sales momentum in 2019.
- Customer Success: Yossi Massafi was an important hire, adding two decades of full customer and account lifecycle management experience when he joined us mid-year as our Chief Customer Officer. So happy to have his presence on our management team.
- Engineering: We added more engineering resources, while Eugene Chernyshov was promoted to be the front-end team lead.
- Product: We count ourselves very fortunate to have attracted Jacob Greenspan, a super experienced and gifted UX expert, as an advisor. In addition to teaching UX courses, Jacob earns a lot of frequent flyer miles travelling to speak at design conferences across the globe.
Patrons (customers)
When you start taking inbound orders compared to knocking on doors, you know you’ve crossed a growth milestone. 2018 was the year it happened for us. In addition to closing more “Comeet was recommended to me” kind of opportunities, we’re also closing many more “This is what we need” accounts as Directors of Recruiting and Heads of HR move to new companies. Based on their Comeet experience at their previous places, they want to implement Comeet ASAP. In particular, I want to recognize our USA sales team for their enthusiastic evangelism in both tech and non-tech sectors.
Product (platform engineering)
When we launched our revamped website in Q2, we contrasted how the rest of the recruiting tech industry delivers a similar, almost homogenous product experience while Comeet is richly different. We’re zagging while they zig. We continued this independence in 2018 because, well, our customers repeatedly emphasize ease-of-use as one of the key differentiators that they love. (And we get a ton of unsolicited love from hiring managers and individuals like interviewers and hiring agencies that refer candidates). Here are some of the key improvements we unveiled in 2018:
- GDPR: You couldn’t escape references and opt-in requests in your email in-box back in April and May when GDPR compliance was so prominent. Helping Comeet customers achieve GDPR compliance requirements for their recruiting-related data was a huge project for our product team. We made it simpler to comply with the regulations, provided more flexibility in terms of recruiting continuity, maximized outreach and conversion rates for securing candidate consent, and developed some nifty reports that retain recruiting history after removal of candidate data. From examples we’ve seen, our GDPR compliance functionality is demonstrably superior to almost everyone else in our industry.
- Reports: Comeet excels at reporting. We took a big leap forward by releasing Recruiting Insights, our new recruiting reporting platform. Currently in limited beta and unlike anything else in the industry, it will be revealed to all later this year. Our larger customers particularly love the flexibility and granularity.
- Dashboards: Enterprise customers, the kind that employ teams of recruiters, requested this functionality because it simplifies the process of creating high-level reporting summaries. We were happy to develop it for them.
- Sourcing: Comeet sourcing functionality has been a strength from the early days. We were really happy with the release of a new sourcing API that allows third-parties to integrate their sourcing apps with Comeet.
- Offer Letters: Our new offer letter functionality is packed with features to formalize and automate all the steps — including e-signing — associated with closing the deal with in-demand candidates.
- Chatbot: We released a chatbot enabled via Facebook Messenger that enables companies to communicate at scale with their candidates. It’s simple, non-intrusive and personable. While bots can be programmed for a wide variety of conversations, our first iteration automatically surveys candidates about their interviewing experience. Very cool indeed.
- UX enhancements: Lots of nifty and delightful UX improvements found their way into the Comeet customer experience. Often, UX enhancements aren’t so much recognized by the user as simply enjoyed and appreciated. Shoutout to Jacob for making an impact here for our entire customer base.
Other 2018 platform improvements included:
- Bulk operations that make it easier to select multiple candidates and complete actions with them as a group.
- Mass emailing using templates and attributes to send personalized emails to candidate pools.
- Beautiful mobile-friendly message templates to communicate with candidates.
- Zoom video integration so you can add video interviews to workflows.
- New referral-centric features that improve employee engagement and interaction, including “Thank You” notes for referrals.
- Automated templates and notifications that celebrate new hires.
Partnerships (vendor collaborations)
Sagi Katz leads our partnership development at Comeet. He definitely demonstrated his value in 2018 by managing a wide variety of partnerships and vendor relationships. We integrated well over a dozen vendors into the Comeet platform, including:
- SSO: Okta, Microsoft
- HRIS: Workday, Clickboarding and SuccessFactors
- Sourcing: LinkedIn, Indeed, Vizi Recruiter, Built-In, Flexjobs
Elastic Recruiting
A unique offering that we soft-launched in Q4 was Elastic Recruiting. This on-demand service provides customers with USA sourcing assistance for positions ranging from junior sales reps to C-Suite openings. This outsourcing has been well received and will expand to more customers in Q1 and Q2 2019.
What’s Coming in 2019
While it is thrilling and rewarding to recap what came in 2018, it’s definitely exciting to tease you with some “what’s coming” hints for 2019. To paraphrase Frank Sinatra, it will be a very good year:
- Reporting: We’re expanding and improving report functionality so that every type of customer, whether a single-person will be able to monitor and analyse the necessary, while a much larger hierarchical recruiting department will be able to manage and plan with expeditious ease and confidence.
- Sourcing: Filtered search through existing and new candidates will be easier and much more precise using categories such as skills, experience and education.
- Machine learning and AI: This is exciting stuff. We’re adding machine learning to Comeet to make it smarter, faster and 100X more valuable to customers.
- Opening approvals: Internal approval of new openings will be streamlined.
- Referrals: We’re improving how to engage employees more effectively in order to increase referral rates and quality.
Yes, it was a very big year, so big in fact that it necessitated a blog post as long as this one to provide a quick summary. Thanks for your interest in Comeet and collaborative recruiting.
Sincerely,
Omer Tadjer
CEO
