In an increasingly tight recruitment market, companies must rethink their practices and tools to attract and hire the right talent.
Kristof Vasselon, co‑founder of Rhaegal, the only SmartRecruiters‑certified integrator in France recently integrated into Arago, shares his perspective on today’s key recruitment challenges. He looks back at the changing expectations of candidates, the growing complexity of recruitment processes, and the technological stakes involved, while highlighting practical solutions that help HR teams gain efficiency, consistency and impact.
Kristof Vasselon: “We founded Rhaegal in 2017 with my business partner Raphaël Brénon. From the very beginning, we decided to become SmartRecruiters‑certified, because we wanted to offer highly specialized support in this area. Since then, we have delivered more than 150 projects and built strong expertise in implementation, adoption and migrations.
We joined Arago at the beginning of 2026 because the market and company expectations have changed. First, there was the acquisition of SmartRecruiters by SAP, with stronger convergence, particularly with SAP SuccessFactors, and more broadly the desire of organizations to have an ATS fully integrated into their information system.”
“Over the past eight years implementing SmartRecruiters, we have seen gradual evolution. But over the last six months to a year, the changes have been far more significant.
The first major shift is market consolidation. Companies clearly no longer want an ATS as a standalone tool : they want it fully integrated into their existing solutions.
The second major evolution is, of course, artificial intelligence. Six months or a year ago, we were still talking about AI as something that was coming. Today, it is already here and widely used. Recruiters rely on it to screen CVs, summarize profiles, identify relevant candidates or write job descriptions. Even without always realizing it, AI has become ubiquitous in recruitment.
Finally, there is growing pressure on time‑to‑hire. Candidates are also using AI; they are becoming ‘serial applicants’ and applying everywhere with highly targeted applications. In this increasingly competitive context, reducing time‑to‑hire has become critical in order to secure the right talent at the right time, before they are hired elsewhere.
These developments are profoundly reshaping company expectations: they want to recruit faster and better, using integrated tools capable of handling large volumes of applications and supporting all recruitment stakeholders.”
“We clearly see two models. In the first, the manager initiates the request ‘I need a resource’ and then largely steps away from the process. This reflects the recruitment model of five years ago, or even earlier.
In the second model, managers become true recruitment stakeholders. They are involved at every stage: defining the need, refining the role with recruiters, meeting candidates, and supporting them throughout the process.
Today, SmartRecruiters even sends a survey to both the candidate and the manager three months after hiring. This ability to measure the recruitment experience has become a strong differentiator in employer attractiveness.”
“Because we are no longer talking about an isolated ATS. The ATS is now part of a broader ecosystem. And above all, we are dealing with very large volumes, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of candidate records.
With GDPR and CNIL requirements, the risks are significant: up to 4% of annual revenue or fines of €10 to €15 million. That is why we place such strong emphasis on data migration and its integration into the overall information system.”
“They expect far more than a simple application tracking tool. They want strong interoperability, particularly with AI, customizable, real‑time reporting, the ability to involve all recruitment stakeholders, and full compliance with regulatory requirements.”
“For a long time, candidate files were automatically sent by email to recruiters and managers. With GDPR, however, when a candidate exercises their right to be forgotten, all their data must be deleted. With SmartRecruiters, all interactions, emails, interviews, interview notes, are centralized. When a candidate asks to be forgotten, their file is deleted and the matter is closed. By contrast, less mature solutions force IT teams to track down data scattered across emails, shared drives or individual workstations. In practice, this is almost impossible to manage properly.”
“We are bringing together two complementary strengths: Arago, with its ability to manage complex, international projects, and Rhaegal, with deep expertise in recruitment, SmartRecruiters and associated migrations. In practical terms, this means robust project governance, clear processes for scaling up, secure data migrations, and structured training programs to ensure adoption by teams.”
“We have moved from an ATS designed as a simple tool to an ATS conceived as an integrated ecosystem, powered by AI and subject to strong requirements around compliance and speed. This calls for far more structured projects in order to remain competitive in the talent market.”