Here’s an interesting fact about Newton. All of our 300+ customers use the exact same core workflow. Yeah, that’s right, Newton customers don’t customize the core recruiting process. Why? Because they don’t have to and no one ever really complains. The reason that customization doesn’t come up is because Newton works. We designed the platform to work the way recruiting works. Our customers don’t have to tell Newton how to do recruiting. In other words, there is more than just a little recruiting DNA in the product. A native understanding of corporate recruiting is a huge advantage of Newton’s and our customer’s.
A recent blog post by Steve Boese, a popular HR technology product strategist, instructor, blogger and HR community leader got us thinking about the topic of customization. In his post, Steve writes,
“While choice, options, and freedom to adapt technology are all necessary components in the modern enterprise and consumer software age, let’s not forget there is quite a lot to commend software and hardware solutions that simplywork. Turn them on, activate them, answer a few questions in configuration sure – but the sooner solutions can start solving business problems and delivering positive impact to users, without asking users to morph into armchair software developers is really the hallmark of a great solution.”
We couldn’t agree more. When applicant tracking software integrates into your day to day without massive customization only then does it really live up to its potential. And, when you deliver customers a product that’s designed to address a specific set of business functions, (in our case corporate recruiting at small and medium-sized organizations) there is immediate impact, little support required and it’s easy to teach others how to use it.
Kris Dunn, Founder of Fistful of Talent, the popular and influential blog devoted to human capital, recently sat down with Newton Software Co-Founder, Joel Passen. The interview uncovers the “HR Mafia”, Joel’s recovery and a recruiting methodology that Kris and Joel agree to agree on, “the funnel”.
I caught up with Joel this afternoon and asked him about the interview. “Kris Dunn is one of these guys in the industry that flat out knows his stuff. He’s been in the trenches. To have him say that ‘he respects our game’ is flattering and encouraging to say the least.”
Read more about the origins of “the funnel”, “the truth teller” and how Newton’s applicant tracking software is built to work the way the best internal recruiting work. Oh yeah… and about the rumor of this HR Mafia…..
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.
Automated Job Approval features aren’t a new thing. We’ve decided it’s high time to make the job approval process better. We’re excited to announce the arrival Newton’s Automated Job Approval feature, the latest addition to our popular corporate applicant tracking software.
First, we have something to admit. This was the hardest feature for us to design to date. We’ve been redesigning and enhancing this feature for nearly a year. We could have shipped our original design months ago, most vendors would have so they could add Job Approval to their feature matrix ASAP. Instead, as with all of the enhancements we make to Newton, we wanted this feature to work great.
3 reasons to love Newton’s Automated Job Approval feature.
1. Easy for Hiring Managers and Approvers
What we’ve learned is that when applicant tracking software achieves something valuable without being distracting or requiring hours of training, only then will it live up to its potential. The 80/20 rule applies here: we want to do well what 80 percent of your users do all the time and together we will create a great user experience that promotes adoption. With Newton’s Job Approval feature, managers can simply login and request to get a job approved with a few simple steps. And, job approvers will love the easy approval process: Green is go. Red is no.
2. Ultimate Flexibility
Hiring is dynamic. Your tools need to be flexible. Newton’s email driven Job Approval Process is the most flexible on the market. Some companies don’t really want to reinvent the wheel. They have a ‘requisition form’ that works well and they just need a vehicle to expedite and track the actual process. We do that. Some organizations want to start over and create an optimized automated requisition process. We do that too.
3. Ultimate Visibility
If you know anything about Newton Software, you know that we are the ones that bring transparency and visibility to corporate recruiting programs. If you don’t know us, we used to be corporate recruiters and we understand that having visibility into all aspects of the recruiting process is not only critical – it’s power. True to form, we’ve provided our users with a dashboard that allows them to see where all their approvals are in real-time. Anything less would be…..annoying.
If you’re a Newton user, please contact our support team to enable the Automated Job Approval Process starting on Monday, August 1st. Support@newtonsoftware.com
If you’re investigating Newton for your organization, please know that we may not have every feature that other ATS systems have. BUT, the features we do have, the 80% that people use all the time, are easy-to-use, intuitive and work great. Please contact us for a demo today, we’ll prove it to you. Sales@newtonsoftware.com
This past weekend, our technical team made some final adjustments and now, Newton, our popular applicant tracking software, joins services from industry leaders like Microsoft, IBM and Netflix in Amazon’s AWS cloud computing environment. Our decision to move to the cloud was as much driven by the growth and success of our business (quite profitable) as by the operational efficiencies that the Cloud offers. Amazon Web Services provides us the scalability and agility for continued fast-paced growth and the reliability to continue to exceed our customers’ expectations.
This isn’t another one of those ‘all hat no cowboy’ marketing stunts. Newton’s product team has been testing and preparing for our Cloud activation since Amazon announced its public availability in 2009. We’ve anticipated moving to the cloud for since the beginning and our development team has meticulously architected 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 cutting-edge, easy-to-use applicant tracking software to more customers with less effort at more affordable prices.
Why should Newton customers care?
Scalability:
Amazon AWS 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 critical as Newton Software averages nearly 20 new customers a month and is by all accounts the fastest growing ATS in the marketplace.
Reliability:
Amazon AWS offers a highly reliable environment where database instances can be quickly 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 without a noticeable service interruption. Amazon AWS service runs within Amazon’s proven, SAS 70 datacenters. That’s right, if you can buy a book on Amazon, you can status a candidate in Newton. The Amazon AWS SLA commitment is 99.95% availability in any Amazon AWS region. This means that Newton is ultra-reliable all over the world all the time.
Speed:
This is where our product 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 too. Most recruiting software bogs down when running complex reports. Not Newton! We leveraging extra computing power and read-only database technology to enable users to run complex customized reports instantly.
Security:
Amazon AWS has some of the world’s most trusted brands on the platform and Amazon takes security very seriously. 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 has only begun.
We’ve worked hard to establish Newton Software as an innovator in a space that has for two decades purely focused on processing and storing resumes. Today, we stand, for the most part alone, as the only modern, pure-play ATS on the market. As our peers continue to drift (rather aimlessly) into talent management and human capital management, they now purely just maintain their applicant tracking modules, all but abandoning new development. Not us. We just invested in the infrastructure necessary to help us more effectively solve the problems that still linger in corporate talent acquisition departments, hiring managers’ cubes and executives minds. We’ve just begun.
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.
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.
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 actually using a business application and not just finding ways to work around it.
What we’ve learned is that when 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 killer features. Say hello to the age of the killer usability.
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.
Our daily lives on the web have become more complex. People are looking for ways to incorporate simplicity into their jobs. But finding simplicity in the workplace is becoming increasingly harder every day. To make matters worse, many people still shy away from simple because they associate simple with a lack of power. Most software vendors still play to this fear. Their guiding principal is “features are power, add as many as possible”. This is especially true amongst applicant tracking software vendors.
There’s a misunderstanding of what it means to be simple. Many professionals associate simplicity with weakness or that which ignores complexities. At Newton, we look at simplicity as being synonymous with intuitiveness, clarity, and essentialness. Sure, we design features to add power but not if they risk simplicity. Features, first and foremost, must simplify tasks.
Our focus on simplicity from day one is our competitive advantage. We are ruthless in our efforts to simplify – not dumb down – applicant tracking software. We don’t just focus on design for aesthetic impact (it helps). We’re interested in the simplification of process. Others may add some window dressing from time to time but their beauty is only skin deep – slick. If you don’t start with simple it’s impossible to end up with simple. That’s the goal isn’t it?
Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.
-Albert Einstein
Here’s an interesting fact about Newton. All of our 300+ customers use the exact same core workflow. Yeah, that’s right, Newton customers don’t customize the core recruiting process. Why? Because they don’t have to and no one ever really complains. The reason that customization doesn’t come up is because Newton works. We designed the platform to work the way recruiting works. Our customers don’t have to tell Newton how to do recruiting. In other words, there is more than just a little recruiting DNA in the product. A native understanding of corporate recruiting is a huge advantage of Newton’s and our customer’s.
Newton Software, the developers of smart, 
Our daily lives on the web have become more complex. People are looking for ways to incorporate simplicity into their jobs. But finding simplicity in the workplace is becoming increasingly harder every day. To make matters worse, many people still shy away from simple because they associate simple with a lack of power. Most software vendors still play to this fear. Their guiding principal is “features are power, add as many as possible”. This is especially true amongst applicant tracking software vendors.