The Evolution of Newton

Snapshot

Newton is the brainchild of former recruiting professionals that began developing the product in 2004 after becoming frustrated with existing commercial recruiting technology. Having run corporate recruiting programs for over 10 years prior with paper resumes, email, spreadsheets and legacy software, the founders of Newton wanted to leverage the benefits of internet technology to help them provide a better service to their clients: they wanted something that would make rolling out, ramping up, managing, and improving hiring programs easier for them; they wanted something that offered a more collaborative recruiting experience for all users; and they wanted something that was simple and easy-to-use for all users. After demoing a lot of recruiting products and even purchasing some, they all fell short in at least one area of the founders’ needs. They soon realized that they would have to build this system if they were truly serious about providing better services.

So, Newton was designed to address two areas where they thought the existing recruiting technology in the marketplace fell short. One, it needed to help people make hires so easily that their client users would actually want to use their recruiting system. The founders of Newton wanted to give their customers a login, conduct a short walk-through and have the user start contributing to the process immediately – no hassles.

Secondly, like many other recruiting systems, Newton also needed robust reporting capabilities, but the founders wanted it to be able to surface and report information in real time, so they could help companies continuously improve their hiring efforts on the fly. The founders knew if they solved the first major problem of most recruiting systems, user adoption, they could build a real-time reporting platform at some point that would actually have useful data in it (since most users preferred Newton over traditional resources, like email). Over the years, the founders of Newton focused on refining Newton’s usability and workflow to address ease of use eventually deploying it to users in mid-2005.

By early 2006, Newton was the recruiting platform for one of the country’s largest recruiting programs with hundreds of concurrent jobs, thousands of users and tens of thousands of active applicants. Newton had quickly become mission critical to dozens of companies, which gave their product team the unique advantage of being able to test and tune their application in complex, high-volume, and demanding commercial environments. With the addition of a full-time development team and a couple of product managers, Newton evolved even faster and became even more popular.

In 2007, still coupled with services offered by their parent company’s recruitment outsourcer, the founders moved Newton to the Adobe Flex platform–making Newton the first rich internet application for recruiting. This move accelerated development cycles and improved performance and usability. By the end of the year, Newton was deployed to users at some of the largest technology companies in the world, like Dell and Microsoft, often supplementing legacy applicant tracking systems.

Formal inquiries to buy Newton as a standalone product started to trickle in by early 2008. Many companies began to feel the pinch of the retracting economy and were seeking ways to bring recruiting in-house. As the year wore on, more and more companies were asking to use Newton to run their recruiting programs. With the writing on the wall, Newton’s parent company prepared to launch Newton Software despite the already crowded applicant tracking marketplace, creating a separate company to manage the day-today business operations.

Newton Software was officially launched on January 5th, 2009. As the first product offered by this newly formed, autonomous company, Newton had the advantage of having been tested, and refined in real-world recruiting situations since late 2004. Unlike most start-ups, they had a mature product to start with, something customers could buy, and a product that was proven. The founders of Newton Software will be the first to admit that starting a company that offers hiring software during a recession was at first daunting. But Newton was greeted kindly by industry analysts and customers alike because of its innovative, process driven, easy-to-use approach to an old problem. And they have been steadily growing their customer base since their inception.