SmartRecruiters, an SAP company, today shared its vision for the future of simplified and accelerated talent acquisition. The company showcased innovative new capabilities as well as visionary goals for 2026 and beyond. State-of-the-art innovations introduced include agentic interviewing, enhanced candidate engagement, agentic CRM, integration with the SAP SuccessFactors human capital management platform, and applicant fraud detection.
Rebecca Carr, CEO, SmartRecruiters, said: “SmartRecruiters’ mission is to make hiring easy – a simple statement with a big promise. Being part of SAP has dramatically accelerated our ability to realize this ambition. We now have visibility into some of an organizations most critical data sets from employee performance to business growth to organizational intelligence. This access, coupled with the world’s leading engineers and industry experts, have played a part in delivering the momentum and innovation we are showcasing today.”
Central to SmartRecruiters’ vision is Winston, the AI hiring companion, a human-centered recruiting agent that helps recruiters and hiring teams create campaigns to fill roles, surface and screen candidates, speed up workflows and reduce bias. Winston is evolving into a central orchestration layer, streamlining sourcing, engagement and decision-making across the hiring funnel.
Upgrades to Winston’s capabilities include:
- Accelerated time to hire with Winston Interview: An agentic interviewer, available on-demand, which provides first-round screening that produces consistent, reviewable candidate-scored answers for recruiters, at scale.
- Reduced candidate drop-off rates with Winston Chat: Recruiters can embed assessments and job-specific Q&As directly into candidates’ chats, improving completion rates and reducing drop-offs.
- Deeper insight and better planning with Winston Companion: A conversational Q&A agent for recruiters and hiring managers providing fast, contextual answers about jobs, pipelines and processes.
- Enhanced candidate analysis with Winston Match: Winston Match scores now include sub-scores for education, skills and experience to simplify and standardize candidate ranking decisions consistently.
Early reported customer wins shared include:
- 75% reduction in time-to-decision using Winston Screen.
- Winston Chat deployments have shown application completion rates of up to 66%, aided by in-chat assessments and multilingual support.
- Candidates recommended by Winston were 100% more likely to be selected for interviews.
Introducing agentic CRM:
- A foundational shift in how enterprises activate talent pools. Rather than sitting idle as a system of record, SmartRecruiters’ vision is to position the CRM to act on recruiter intent – surfacing, ranking, and re-engaging candidates already in an organization’s database, and executing tailored, compliance-aware outreach across email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
- It is being developed with partners across consulting, healthcare, pharmaceutical and technology industries with the aim of unlocking latent pipeline value while reducing repetitive recruiter work.
Seamless integration with SAP SuccessFactors:
SmartRecruiters also shared that it has developed a connector that embeds SmartRecruiters into SAP SuccessFactors with one login, integrated navigation, and data synchronization. The company previewed a range of agentic integration and migration tools which guide onboarding and adoption of SmartRecruiters, recommend field mappings, support data validation and monitor and prevent data-related failures.
Universal candidate fraud protection:
In response to the industry challenge of fraudulent applications, SmartRecruiters demonstrated a prototype fraud-risk tool that combines behavioral signals, device intelligence and network indicators to identify suspicious submissions. Fraud indicators plug into recruiter workflows, so high-risk applications can be quarantined, routed for additional verification (for example, Winston Interview) or sent to a review queue. The feature is designed to be configurable, auditable and reportable so teams can tune thresholds to their risk tolerance.
“What we’re building is a fundamentally new hiring experience – one that brings together innovations across conversational AI, automation and deep intelligence matching into a single, cohesive workflow,” says Shiran Yaroslavsky, SVP of Product at SmartRecruiters. “We are structurally reshaping SmartRecruiters to be end-to-end agentic, whilst being human-centric by design. From screening and engagement through to decision making, each capability is designed to empower recruiters so they can find the right candidates, faster.”
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