See Newton’s applicant tracking software in action in this new short video featuring people that use it every day.
How does a busy recruiter in San Francisco, a remote Hiring Manager in Austin and a performance- minded HR Director at Corporate all do their part to support the company’s recruiting program? They use Newton, easy-to-use, recruiting software designed to organize and manage internal recruiting programs at small and medium sized organizations.
Newton is modern, easy-to-use applicant tracking software designed to organize and improve internal recruiting programs for small and medium sized businesses (30-3000 employees). Newton features best-of-breed dashboards that create unparalleled visibility and transparency. And, Newton is the only ATS designed to drive the decisions that drive hiring taking into account all users in the corporate recruiting workflow. Industry leading adoption rates (+90%) ensure easy collaboration and powerful performance driven metrics allow HR and Recruiting users are always in control.
Newton Software, the developers of smart, corporate applicant tracking software, just revealed another key feature aimed at helping human resources and corporate recruiting departments in the creation and improvement of their online requisition approval process. The new feature empowers organizations to better control recruiting resources with an automated, email-driven job requisition approval tool.
One of the most prevalent issues that ATS buyers face even before choosing a recruiting software vendor is deciphering what type of applicant tracking software is the best fit for their business. There are two main categories of recruitment technology, each with a distinct feature set designed to manage a specific type of recruiting. Here’s a short video that breaks down the key differences between corporate applicant tracking software and applicant tracking software that’s designed for recruiting agencies and staffing firms.
This is going to sound crazy to the old guard enterprise software enthusiasts out there. Ready? It’s not about more features anymore. The game has changed. The features arms race is dead. More features is increasingly taking a backseat to better functionality, a close relative of usability. This is where user adoption comes into play, a concept that’s become the focal point of the business software industry. The less features an application has, the less confusing it is and consequently, more people are willing to use it. There’s a concept – people other than just recruiters actually using applicant tracking software and not just finding ways to work around it.
What we’ve learned is that when recruiting software achieves something valuable without being distracting or requiring hours of training, only then will it live up to its potential (those enterprise guys call this concept “return on investment”). Let’s face it: it’s usually harder to do simple things exceedingly well, than to just pile up features. The 80/20 rule applies here too: do well what 80 percent of your users do all the time, and you’ll create a good user experience that promotes user adoption. That’s the goal isn’t it?
Here are some tips that we put together regarding promoting adoption for applicant tracking software. These concepts can be applied to just about any technology.
Say goodbye to the age of more features. Say hello to the age of the killer usability.
Here are 7 tips for promoting applicant tracking software user adoption
1. Your users don’t care about the technology. What counts is what it does for them.
2. Forget about that one killer feature. Say hello to the age of the killer user-experience.
3. No one likes software training. Any ATS that requires extensive training will only be adopted by a small number of users
4. Avoid confusion. Its a deal-breaker.
5. Remember, only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
6. The 80/20 rule applies to user adoption. Choose an ATS that does well what 80 percent of your company does all the time.
7. Shop for usability. You won’t make ATS software easier to adopt by shopping for the most features.
We’re in the cloud! Newton, our popular applicant tracking software, joins leaders like Microsoft, IBM and Netflix in Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing environment. 2010 has been a banner year for Newton. We’ve added over 100 new customers and our revenue has grown by over 1020%. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will provide us the agility and scalability for continued fast-paced growth and the reliability to continue to exceed our customers’ expectations.
This isn’t just some egregious cloud marketing sizzle. There’s steak here. Newton’s product team has been interested in cloud computing since Amazon announced its public availability. We’ve anticipated moving to the cloud for some time and our development team has meticulously designed our applicant tracking software to take full advantage of the cloud computing infrastructure. Moving to the Cloud gives us a huge advantage over our peers. We will continue to innovate and scale with better infrastructure, fewer resources and less operational overhead. Translation: we will continue to offer bombproof, easy-to-use applicant tracking software to more customers with less effort at more affordable prices. Good plan huh?
Why should Newton customers care?
Moving to Amazon’s EC2 platform makes Newton even more agile and provides existing and future customers significant advantages.
Scalability:
Amazon EC2 enables us to increase capacity within minutes, not hours or days. We can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. This allows us to automatically scale Newton up and down depending on our customers’ needs. This scalability proved critical in November as we added over 15 new businesses to the Newton platform and actually improved performance.
Reliability:
Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. If a server fails (because they just do from time to time), Newton will just bounce to a server that is working – instantly! The EC2 service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. That’s right, if you can buy a book on Amazon, you can status a candidate in Newton. The Amazon EC2 SLA commitment is 99.95% availability in any Amazon EC2 region. This means that Newton is ultra-reliable all over the world all the time.
Performance:
This is where our development team gets really geeked up. By switching to the Cloud, Newton has become even faster. And, it allows our team to do some really innovative things. For example, we’re adding a very slick, powerful custom reporting engine to Newton. Most applicant tracking software bogs down when running complex reports. Not Newton! We’re leveraging EC2’s extra computing power and read-only database technology to enable users to run complex customized reports instantly. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Security:
We’re completely confident in Amazon’s ability to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of our customers’ data. They’ve got some of the world’s most trusted brands on the EC2 platform and Amazon takes security very seriously. So do we. See for yourself. Amazon Web Services’ security controls are evaluated every six months by an independent auditor in accordance with Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70 (SAS70) Type II audit procedures.
Newton Software continues to innovate.
Once again, Newton Software is innovating. Others may try to follow though; they’ll have some huge challenges. Most applicant tracking software is 10 year old legacy enterprise software that relies on legacy networks (not the Cloud) for operating power. ‘Switching’ to the Cloud won’t be a viable option for most. Alternatively, Newton was born on the web and now we’re going to leverage the world’s most cutting edge web-based infrastructure to help completely ‘disrupt’ the applicant tracking world in 2011 (and years to come). Good for Newton customers and partners. Bad for lumbering, legacy applicant tracking systems. Long live the cloud.
Having run corporate recruiting programs for nearly 10 years, we began developing Newton in 2004 after becoming frustrated with existing commercial recruiting platforms. Until the advent of Newton, there wasn’t any recruiting technology that facilitated the fundamental activity key to all recruiting programs: decisions making. Sure, we wanted something that would make rolling out, ramping up, managing, and improving hiring programs easier. And we wanted something that offered a more collaborative recruiting experience. But, we needed something that would intuitively drive the decisions that both recruiters and hiring managers are asked to make every day. Essentially, we needed something that would make saying yes or no simple.
It’s undeniable, over the years; hiring processes have become more complex. But, one day, we asked ourselves why does it have to be this way? Then, the “Newton apple” fell on our heads and we realized that recruiting is just a series of sequential waterfall tasks that are defined by a series of yes / no decision events. It became clear that the hiring process doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, if we could simplify the process, we could eliminate wasted activity (or inactivity) that can slow it down, confused people, and lead to bottlenecks and failures.
Newton, our popular applicant tracking software, is designed to move applicants through each stage of the process in a systematic, orderly, and continuous manner and to eliminate periods of inactivity (waiting) between each stage. Our intuitive, patent-pending workflow is native to Newton and doesn’t require weeks of customization to leverage. On the same token, it’s also not designed to allow users to add unnecessary steps to hiring that complicate the process
We’ve built years of practical recruiting knowledge into Newton, offering our customers an easy way to drive the decisions that drive recruiting. When you choose Newton, you get a recruiting platform that’s designed around a proven, fully optimized workflow that promotes decision making, collaboration, captures critical data for compliance, and provides game-changing analytics. It’s not just a tool … it’s an infrastructure for making decisions.
Effective user adoption is the absolute best predictor of a successful applicant tracking software purchase. You can have the most expensive software in the world, with the biggest name and the most features – but if people don’t use it, it isn’t going to add value. Today, the recruiting software industry is rife with vendors that continue to add frivolous features to their platforms to keep up with the Jones’ and to woo unsuspecting customers into impulsive buying decisions (this in turn makes their software more clunky and complicated so I’m glad they do it personally).
We’re marching to a different drummer at Newton. Adoption is everything. When users like hiring managers effectively adopt a corporate recruiting tool, productivity, collaboration, and efficiency skyrocket. Isn’t this the goal? We think so and we’re not alone. The Sandhill Group, a strategic management, investment and marketing group specializing in the SaaS industry, conducted a study and found that the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.
No software platform is magic. Some users will love it. Some users won’t. We design Newton to increase your chances of getting more users which ultimately leads to a more productive recruiting program and a significant return on investment. There are other benefits as well. The more users you get, the better off you’ll be as you’ll capture critical information that you’ll use to diagnose and solve problems (it’s nice to be a little proactive once in a while). You’ll also capture critical compliance information easier. When you have high adoption rates your recruiting platform will become the hardest working part of your solution.
Presently, the adoption rate for Newton is above 90%. We put together a short video to explain how we make this possible.
EEO and OFCCP regulations are confusing enough. Choosing applicant tracking software to automate your recruiting program and ensure EEO and OFCCP compliance can be a daunting process. This is a guide designed to help you ask the right questions when choosing applicant tracking software. And, remember take the time to see the features in action, live, so you really know how everything works. This is important stuff; don’t just take the salesperson’s word for it.
Also, we decided to share some secrets that most applicant tracking software vendors won’t. It might not make us very popular with them but, they’re not buying our software.
Poor candidate experience remains one of the biggest missed opportunities in corporate recruiting. Companies don’t intentionally treat applicants poorly. Many organizations just don’t have the resources to create a positive experience for job seekers. So, how can companies improve how they treat job applicants and, at the same time, convey a positive brand image despite limited resources?
We’ve got a couple of ideas. Here are 3 tips to help you improve how you treat applicants. And, we’ve included a short video detailing our Thank You Letter feature now available in Newton, our popular applicant tracking software.
Newton Software, the developers of smart, 
