Intro:
Every day we get messages from HR Tech vendors that would love to be listed on our HR Software Buyer Guides. If you don’t know, we’ve been writing these guides since 2018 as a way to help overworked HR professionals figure out what software is actually worth looking at, from ATS’s to HRISs, and basically everything in between.
As you can imagine, as our brand has grown, we get a tremendous amount of interest to be on these pages. We show up in many relevant searches and are constantly shared on social media, which results in over 100,000 monthly visitors using our reviews to figure out what solutions they should be shortlisting.
With great power comes great responsibility, and we take it very seriously, figuring out who should be featured on these pages. While we've actually never thought about the overall acceptance rate, we had an epiphany as we were updating our criteria the other day. It was more of a curiosity, and it led us to look at our acceptance rate throughout the years.
SSR’s acceptance rate is under 10%
When we look at the data, our acceptance rate every single year since inception has been less than 8 to 9%. To us, this makes a lot of sense. There are so many vendors out there, and in fact, that's the problem that our audience had in the first place. If you're looking for a solution and there are 500 vendors, you have way too much work to do.
To me personally, it was interesting because I knew that the acceptance rate at Harvard Business School was 10%, give or take each year. I thought, "Huh, getting on our website is actually harder than getting into the world-renowned Harvard Business School." Isn't that cool?
Why we say no
A business school turns away thousands of excellent applicants because it runs out of seats. Harvard says as much: nine in ten strong candidates get a rejection letter no matter how good they are, because the class only holds so many people. Selectivity, at that school, is a function of scarcity.
We technically have no seats to run out of. A guide can hold as many vendors as deserve to be on it. We aren't assembling a diverse class, and we aren't rationing space. We say no because our question is narrower: is this the best software in its category, for a HR buyer, today? Most tools are not, or not yet. The rate is simply what falls out of that standard.
The 90% we turn away
The companies we pass on cluster into three groups.
Most are too early. Solid-looking, cohesive products, often only a few months or years old without the requisite traction/infrastructure to support many customers. A large share of these are new AI recruiting, sourcing, and interviewing tools. The AI hiring boom is producing more vendors than any category can absorb, and the majority haven't found their place yet. They have a handful of clients, and little to show in the way of ARR or NPS metrics. We tell them we’ll keep an eye on them and they are welcome to reach out again in 6-12 months, and we mean it.
A second group builds good software but it’s simply not relevant for the bulk of our audience. For example, strong payroll and HR tools made for India, APAC, the UK, or the EU, but our guides are read mostly by US buyers. If there’s no evidence of expansion towards the US, however small, it’s not going to resonate. Especially if we already cover a good option for those markets, as we do have readers from all over the world, and are ourselves an international team. That said, for this reason, we have started doing country-specific guides for EOR and Payroll.
The third group are software vendors who sit in a category we don't cover, or on the wrong side of the hiring desk entirely. An e-signature product. A team-building app. A candidate-facing tool pitched to a guide built for employers, or simply someone that didn’t bother to browse our site to verify whether we cover what they do.
A brief note on volume
The requests never stop, but between April and August this year, we’ve definitely seen an uptick, likely caused by two things:
For one thing, AI is making it easier than ever to start a SaaS company. Many of the requests we’ve gotten the past few months are from solo founders or very small teams running some form of agentic recruiting or sourcing tool.
The other is that, with LLMs taking over regular web search, companies care more than ever about what is said about them online. This, in part, is great for us. There’s a bigger incentive for software vendors to give us demos, share what they’re working on, and keep us posted on the new features they roll out. On the other hand, this does mean we have to be very careful about what we describe as ‘the best’ in a given category, hence our acceptance rate.
What the number is, and isn't
None of this is a quota we aim for. The 10% is just what remains after "best in its category, for our reader" has done its filtering. We explain our criteria on every guide, and our broader editorial guidelines are always available to the public. The value of a spot on an SSR guide is, as a featured vendor recently put it, that we take the time to look at the tool, understand it, and feature what we consider relevant for each reader that lands on our site. In his words, “Unlike most review sites, their team actually goes deep - demoing the product, understanding what makes it different, and evaluating whether it's genuinely worth recognizing.”
So, earning a place on one of our guides is a little harder than getting into HBS, not because we would ever ‘run out of room’, we are just careful about what "best" means.
To all the vendors out there who have made the cut, congratulations! It's been so interesting to learn about your solutions, and we're so happy to evangelize them to our audience. For everybody else, we hope that we've been able to give you some solid tips on how to crack into our buyer guides.
The HR tech landscape is so dynamic, and that gives us the energy every single day to get up, keep learning, and keep adding to our list. If you think we've missed somebody, please submit them here. Thanks, everybody, for supporting us on this amazing journey!
