Searchlight Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2022
Searchlight's underlying philosophy is that you need to understand how talent does on the job in order to have a best in class assessment technology that gets smarter over time.
What's Inside
Searchlight is a talent assessment tool that allows PeopleOps teams to understand who to hire based on organizational psychology, AI, and actual employee performance data.
When you open a new req, you can choose from assessment templates within Searchlight, as well as customize your own. These assessments are sent out asynchronously to candidates, typically when they reach the final stages of the interview process.
Candidates answer questions about themselves, and also have three references to provide information relating to soft skills like coach-ability, work ethic, ability to learn, etc. 91% of third party references respond within 36 hours.
These data points are synthesized into a report that hiring managers use to understand who to hire. They are also sent to managers to help understand how to onboard this employee and where they may need help.
The secret sauce is that Searchlight has a 30/60/90 day review module which directly collects employee performance, and then uses this data to enhance assessments.
All this results in an average 45% decrease in employee attrition across their customer base. That is quite the ROI!
While you can upload data from other performance management systems into their software, it requires you do it via CSV (unless your performance management is built into an HRIS they integrate with). Moreover, this information doesn't map back to the way their system handles candidate data, so the signal is very low. So, in order to get the value of understanding how their assessments predict quality of hire, you really need to use their 360 review module.
You may get pushback from your team on the Quality of Hire Module as it requires some work to be used, and is a lot of the same work that your team may already be doing with your Performance Management System, or Employee Onboarding System.
In addition, this is also a newer entrant to the field. They don't have a 50 person customer success team. Of course, most companies with 50 person customer success teams also have technology that belongs in 2008.
Lastly, if you're just looking to check the box on assessments or background checks, there are cheaper options out there for you. They won't be nearly as powerful (or evolve as quickly), but if price is your only concern, this is not the tool for you.
Zapier
Udemy
Talkdesk
Doximity
Customers see an average decrease in employee attrition of 45%
91% of third party references respond within 36 hours
The core features of Searchlight include:
- Talent assessments for new hires, focusing on soft skills
- Third party references for new hires that are used to build a candidate's profile
- Onboarding advice on new hires for hiring managers
- Quality of hire data collected via 360 reviews, which funnel back to evolving their assessments
- Ability to source candidates from references (‚Öì of references express interest in working for the company their friend is joining)
While still a newer vendor, Searchlight has built out an impressive integrations roster with various ATS's (Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters, etc), as well as HRIS's, and tools like Slack.
Pricing is not disclosed as this is enterprise software. The company prices based on the number of hires you plan to make in a given year. The other major variable is the modules you plan to use.
Pricing starts around $12k/yr at the low end, and can get into the mid six figures for fast growing companies. We won't be surprised to hear of companies paying in the seven figures, especially as more enterprise grade customers come on board.
The core functionality of the platform (sending assessments to potential hires and their references) can be setup fairly quickly. This part should be up and running in a few weeks as the main work that needs to be done is setting up assessments via the pre-packaged templates, and making any necessary tweaks from there.
The Quality of Hire module takes a bit longer. The main lift is getting hiring managers to buy into another tool, and one that may have overlap with other performance and/or onboarding solutions you may already use.
