Summer Plans Revealed: More Innovation, Less Fish

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.” Marshall McLuhan

We Wish

I  was at a barbeque in San Francisco this weekend and while everyone agreed that it’s nice that summer has finally arrived, our conversation inevitably meandered into talk of work and our summer work intentions.  Alex, a partner in a small marketing consultancy, remarked how he planned to lay low and enjoy the summer, taking some time off to relax.  “After all,” remarked Alex, “No one is doing anything this summer except waiting out this economy.”  Liz, an executive at an enterprise software company, agreed, mentioning that she’s observing “summer hours” and hoping that the fall will yield better results for her firm (I’d like to add that I hope it will yield better results for everyone).  When the conversation turned to me, I stuttered on about a fly-fishing trip and some weddings. I really didn’t want to tell the group that my summer is going to be as busy as they come and that “summer hours” are definitely not in the mix for me. I may dub this summer, “The Summer of Work”.

I see it like this. Throughout history, recessions have produced new leaders like HP, FedEx, and Microsoft. While someone was cost-cutting and retrenching, someone else was innovating. When spending is tight, companies look for new, less expensive ways to do routine things. It just so happens that hiring (my business builds recruiting software) is something that most, if not all, companies need to do at some point or another—and I can assure you that there is plenty of room for innovation in the world of recruiting software. Marshall McLuhan, a scholar of media theory, puts it best saying, “Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.” This quote is very timely. When the anxiety subsides and the economy loosens up, the way business is conducted will have changed.

So at Newton Software we are pushing development harder than ever, making things smarter, simpler, easier and faster—making tools for tomorrow, because the economy WILL get better.

First off, in just a few weeks we will be releasing the recruiting software industry’s most innovative analytics application. Our product management, design, and development teams have been working tirelessly to design and develop a product that will allow companies to examine and reposition corporate recruiting programs to be more efficient and effective. Creating the behind-the-scenes algorithms and measurements is a time consuming process, and making the module easy to use, yet powerful, is 10x as laborious. Our entire team has spent countless hours interviewing HR pros, recruiters, and contributing our own domain expertise to this product. Look for more news about Newton’s analytic functionality in early July.

Second, we are integrating a billing system into Newton®. This will make it easier for customers to sign up and manage costs. It also means that we can offer an unrivaled transparency to our clients.  The addition of the billing system reinforces a key tenet of our business plan: take the friction and hassle out of buying our software (and, even cancelling it if you want to!). Our investment in online billing software marks another innovation in the recruiting software industry and will make a dramatic improvement in the way that HR, recruiting, and finance professionals will interact with a software provider (us). We anticipate providing hassle free, completely transparent billing and invoicing by mid-August.

Our third major project this summer is already underway.  We are designing a feature that will make it easier for recruiting agencies to do business with companies that are hiring, and vice versa. Since the beginning of recruiting a certain animosity has existed between recruiting firms and the companies they assist. We want to help smooth these relationships by making it easier for companies to get great resumes while at the same time freeing agency recruiters from having to make 100 cold calls a day. The end of the cold call is near, my friends. Solving an issue that has plagued both sides of the recruiting industry for decades is, as you can image, not easy. You can bet that the phrase “summer hours” has not come up at Newton (except when remarking that it is still light out when we leave the office at 9PM).

This so called “summer of work”, what does it mean? Well, at Newton, we see it as an opportunity to turn a slow buying cycle (read financial turmoil) into a business advantage and to launch innovate products that solve real problems for our customers. While we would love to be out fly-fishing, backpacking, spending time with families or just cruising around getting tans on our bikes, we are planning to hunker into the Newton fish bowl (that is what our friend’s call our office) to get some work done.

Please pass the sun lamp.

Newton® Launches Affiliate Program

Newton Software has debuted the Newton® Affiliate Program, a third-party sales program for its smart, easy-to-use, recruiting technology, Newton®. The program allows qualified individuals to refer Newton® to friends, contacts, and companies and earn a percentage of the revenue generated from each sale. Ideal affiliate partners include agency recruiters, contract recruiters, human resources consultants, and other service providers.

Interested parties can sign up for the program on the Newton Software website. Approved affiliates will receive a unique code via email.  Approved Newton® affiliates can then distribute their code to interested parties.  When a company becomes a paying customer of Newton® the referring affiliate will earn a commission.

“There is quite a demand for this type of affiliate program in the professional recruiting communities where Newton® is quickly gaining momentum. Many contract recruiters have expressed interest in recommending Newton® to their clients and now we can easily empower them to do so,” said Steve Hazelton, Newton’s® CEO and Chief Product Officer. “With the Newton® Affiliate Program, our partners can provide more complete, effective recruiting services to their clients while generating a little additional income.”

Jeff Winter, General Manager of GravityPeople, Silicon Valley’s most established technology recruiting firm became the first affiliate partner 4 months ago during a beta test of the program.  “The Newton® Affiliate Program has given our team the ability to recommend easy-to-use, affordable software to our clients. Having been in technology recruiting for nearly 12 years, we have seen plenty of ATS software applications and nothing compares to Newton’s intuitiveness.  Newton keeps our clients organized and generally improves the recruiting process allowing my team to focus on identifying and managing talent, not chasing hiring mangers around.”

Jonathan Chenard, Practice Manager at Union Hill, a recruiting consultancy, said, “The Newton Affiliate Program has been a great opportunity for my firm to extend the services we provide to our clients. As a recruitment consulting firm, we have been actively providing both support and training for Newton software. Now, through our affiliate code, we offer our clients a convenient and efficient way to purchase Newton. ”

“We want to apply Newton’s key values of innovation, collaboration and ease-of-use to the entire business ecosystem. We have an innovative business model that enables us to create unique programs that provide value to our partners and customers,”  said Joel Passen, Newton Software’s Co-Founder. “Our best advocates are those that have used Newton on a daily basis. Referring Newton is the ultimate compliment and we want to provide as much incentive our community as much as possible.”

Companies and individuals that would like to participate in the Newton® Affiliate Program can simply visit the affiliate website (http://www.newtonsoftware.com/affiliate-program.php) and fill out a short application.  Approved affiliates will receive a unique affiliate code typically within 24 hours.

About Newton®
Newton® is web-based recruiting software that uses smart technology to simplify hiring. Newton® offers the quickest and easiest way for small and medium sized businesses to organize and manage recruiting. Newton® is a native SaaS application that leverages Web 2.0 technology to empower companies of any size to create an efficient and effective recruiting process, which boosts productivity and lowers costs associated with hiring.

About Newton Software
Newton Software develops and markets smart, easy-to-use, web-based technology for small and medium sized businesses.  By offering, free trials, pay-as-you-go contracts, and all inclusive purchase plans Newton software is breaking new ground in the way business technology is designed and delivered.

The Paradox of Hiding Your Price – Your Software is More Expensive

We recently made some modifications to our website.  Not only had we outgrown our first website but we also landed the domain name that we wanted when we started the company—Newton Software.

A light bulb went off during this process—whenever we go to a website, whether we are buying a bike tire or software, we all always want to know how much things cost. We’re pretty sure that you agree with the statement, “Just show us the price!” We hate it when people don’t tell us the price. Why were we doing the same?

The Art of Pricing: According to Dilbert

So to avoid the all too common example told by this Dilbert cartoon, we have published pricing on our website for anyone to see (http://www.newtonsoftware.com/pricing.html).

Obviously, publishing pricing information is considered anathema to conventional business software companies.

The paradox of hiding your price is that it actually makes your software more expensive: hiding your price means you must employ salespeople to sell your software. Therefore, you must charge more for your product to pay their salaries and to provide them the opportunity to earn commissions. This is turn causes the loathsome cat and mouse game that most us have experienced when investigating software; ask for a little information, get stalked by a salesperson. For the record, we don’t have any sales people at Newton Software.  We keep our footprint small and our overhead low so we can focus on developing smart technology.

There is, of course, some downside to publishing price on our site. We can’t do all of those annoying things that other software companies can do, like charging one customer more than another, tricking people into long-term contracts and charging for everything under the sun(like adding users, adding forms, implementation and activation).

The other day, I was speaking with a customer of a well known payroll company that happens to sell recruiting software. This person recently hired a recruiter to replace someone that was unfortunately laid-off late last year. She needed to get her new hire “on the system”. So, she called her support number and was transferred to the sales department.  The sales department promptly explained that there is a charge for changing users. So, how did she react? Well, there was not much she could do. Buried in her 21 page contract, in section Y, article (ii) there states a clause that “adding and/ or changing a user will incur an activation cost outlined in addendum B of said contract”. She had to pay the $550 dollars for someone to flip a switch and type 10 characters on a keyboard.   We think this is crazy.

So what is our thinking on publishing our price on our website?  Well, as I mentioned earlier; if we were visiting our own website, we would want to know how much Newton costs and how the pricing works. We want you to get as much information as possible from our website about both the product and whether or not it fits into your budget.  And, we want you to be able to do this on your terms without pushy, commission-driven sales people hounding you incessantly because they have a quota to meet.

We believe that part of the reason that people put-off buying technology that could make their lives easier is because the purchasing process is so mind-numbingly painful—rife with complicated pricing formulas, too many options, long commitments, long implementations cycles ( we’ll address that is a future post), and pushy sales reps.

We design smart, easy-to-use software that takes the friction out of hiring. We want the way that we price our product to take the friction out of buying it. Tell people what they get, don’t charge for things that should be included like activation and implementation and provide plans that appeal to a broad spectrum of companies—no brainer. We think of this stuff so you don’t have to.