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…..
UK-based Dylan, a marketing recruiting agency, collaborated with Tom Fishburne (a.k.a The Marketoonist) from San Francisco to create this comic. When we saw it, we couldn’t help but think about all the dollars that organizations poor into corporate recruiting and how few resources are actually spent cultivating a culture around retaining talent.
Apparently, Fishburne, who frequently speaks about marketing, is preparing for an event with Dylan where he’ll focus on how the best brands and businesses “market from the inside out”. His premise is that the HR Director is the new Marketing Director. Fishburne goes on to say, “recruitment is as important to how a brand is marketed as creating a marketing plan”.
Unfortunately, I don’t think our team will make it to London for the talk in September. Something tells me we’ll be in San Francisco hammering our new mobile functionality for Newton, our award winning applicant tracking software. Hopefully, the nice folks at Dylan will record the presentation.
We’ve all heard the recent hype about cloud computing. From competing Microsoft and Google commercials to Apple’s recent iCloud deployment, there certainly is a lot of buzz about ‘the cloud.’ What exactly IS the cloud though, and more specifically, what impact does cloud computing have on human resources and corporate recruiting?
The cloud essentially means taking all the IT and software infrastructure off a company’s hands and placing it in the capable hands of a cloud computing provider. Most often, a provider is a large company, like Amazon, that has the server infrastructure and technical expertise to handle the needs of millions of business customers. A company like Amazon can agilely deploy servers in order to maximize efficiency and provide customers the throughput they need for their product or service at any given time.
So why is the cloud good, specifically for human resources departments? The cloud means cost efficiency, security, and dependability. Think about utilizing cloud computing like you would think about hiring any other specialist. Let’s say you needed some carpentry done – you’d obviously hire a carpenter. If you hired a plumber to do the job, he’d likely take longer, cost more and provide an inferior service.
Using Amazon or another cloud computing provider, essentially means hiring a specialist for your company or product’s software and IT infrastructure. They can get the job done as efficiently as possible because they have the resources to do so. They’re also often a massive company (like Amazon) that places the utmost responsibility in providing their cloud customers with maximum security and dependable server uptime. After-all, it’s the cloud provider’s business to make sure your business is up and running at all hours.
Hreonline recently published an article that highlights the proliferation of cloud computing as well as Software as a Service (SaaS) in the HR industry. John Malikowski of Deloitte Consulting provided an insightful quote within the piece: “We have seen a lot of business cases and implementations where CIOs, CFOs and top HR executives all are getting involved,” he says. “The cost savings are there, and total cost of ownership is now more than ever a big part of the business case for HR. Also, usability and intuitiveness are high. SaaS and cloud computing just work.”
Essentially, companies that take advantage of cloud computing can pass that advantage onto their customers. This means passing on cost-efficiency, scalability, access and dependability. Newton Software does just that by leveraging Amazon’s AWS cloud computing environment for our SaaS application.
Newton’s customer can easily deploy the best applicant tracking solution on the market in a matter of days and hours, never weeks or months. Not only is the software deployment refreshingly uncomplicated, but the software can be accessed on-demand from any computer, anywhere, anytime and from any browser or platform. Newton provides an affordable, subscription-based pricing structure that can be scaled up and down based on customer’s size and demand, just like cloud servers can be deployed based on that same demand. Newton’s application security is backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation whose public stock depends on this very reliability.
We’ve worked hard to establish Newton as an innovator in a space that has for nearly two decades has been purely focused on what we refer to as the feature arms race. 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 human resources departments, hiring managers’ cubes and executives’ minds.
This is why Newton Software is proud to be a cloud computing pioneer for applicant tracking software. We provide businesses and human resources departments the efficiency, dependability and security that cloud computing is all about.
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.
I used to dread Fridays.
While the rest of the company was hoisting their coffee cups on Friday morning in reverence to the coming weekend, I had dread. Friday was the day that I had to turn in my recruiting status report. The report would be reviewed the following Monday at 9:00am by the executive staff at their weekly meeting. Depending on how busy I was during the week, the report would take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours to complete. Instead of hitting up happy hour with the sales team on Friday afternoon, I was knee deep in a spreadsheet. And, I know that I wasn’t the only one frustrated on status report day. There are thousands of recruiters that bristle at the thought of compiling status reports and wasting time exacting data instead of actually recruiting talent.
So, why has compiling status reports been such a burden for corporate recruiters? Well, to date, the challenge with providing reports has been exacerbated by existing applicant tracking tools that fail to reflect the realities of the recruiting process. If you look at what vendors in the ATS marketplace are producing currently, it’s clear that they are still focused on what they’ve always been pushing: developing highly cumbersome data repositories with a bunch of check-box features, none of which are designed to make reporting performance metrics any easier. Let’s be real: the harden an ATS is to use, the harder it is to get any information out of it. And, if you do manage to get some workable data after hours of effort, you’ll end up with spreadsheets that look like Da Vinci’s code.
As many of you know, Newton’s core team is made up of former corporate and RPO recruiters. We understand as well as anyone that corporate recruiters are certainly not the only ones responsible for the success of recruiting programs, but they are typically left holding the bag. We also know that a lack of systemic accountability costs corporate recruiting departments money, time and resources and often leads to animosity and plenty of petty misunderstandings. Only the consistent capture and reporting of real data can back up a responsible recruiter and ultimately allow them to be more than just purely tactical or only as good as their last placement.
Good news for corporate recruiters.
There’s no need to be a victim of reporting madness on Fridays any longer. In fact, we may give you reason to throw on a cape and wow people with your reporting superpowers. Check out Newton’s custom reporting engine, a powerful tool that makes generating reports refreshingly easy. It’s not just easy to use: similar to Newton’s real-time analytics dashboard, this new tool spits out reports that are digestible, even a bit flashy. If you’re a data junky (or your manager is) the Newton custom reporting engine is like kryptonite.
Our new reporting engine empowers users to build, save and share customized reports comprised of every piece of data collected during the recruiting process. Users can generate reports on talent pipelines, user activity, requisitions, advertising performance, interview statistics, hires and more. Reports are easily built with Newton’s drag and drop interface and exported to auto-formatted spreadsheets that are production quality and ready to share with anyone. And, processing large amounts of data will not cause latency for users because the reports are generated from a reports-specific database in the Cloud. The new reporting feature even enables users to save the report structure created by an individual user so that the report can be run anytime with the click of a button. Think weekly staffing report with one click!
There’s more to come.
2011 will continue to be busy year for Newton’s product team and another great year for customers. Our custom reporting engine is just one of several important features that we’ll release this year. Our idea has always been to build the most innovative corporate applicant tracking software and we’re constantly studying the evolving recruiting marketplace so we can meet and even exceed the needs of modern recruiting programs. At the end of the day, the most rewarding part of our business is providing the tools corporate recruiters need to rise above the challenges that can plague their roles (and performance). Can we really give you superpowers? Maybe not. But we know Newton can make recruiters more effective, save them time, and elevate them into the strategic roles that can, on some days, make them heroic.
Recently, I was asked to provide my predictions of the top 3 trends in the mid-market applicant tracking software industry that all HR executives and corporate recruiting leaders should be aware of going into 2011. My picks are based on conversations with 100′s of HR executives and corporate recruiters around the US and UK. If I had to sum up my predictions in one line it would be: People are ready for easier to use applicant tracking software that requires less customization, less time to activate and less training.
Usability is the new killer feature.
It can hardly be debated that most applicant management technology is way too complicated and for the most part, pretty thoughtless when it comes to user experience. The legacy ATS platforms that many businesses use to run their corporate recruiting programs are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code.
Up to this point, vendors have designed recruiting software almost entirely for what we might call a “Power User”, i.e. corporate recruiters that use it every day. For a business process like recruiting where 90% of the users don’t hire all of the time and therefore don’t use recruiting software day in and day out, this design focus leads to 10% user adoption. Standard users don’t have the time or usage frequencies that foster retention of complex features.
But, there is good news and yes, my first prediction; the feature arms race is over. Usability is the new killer feature. Organizations are demanding better user experience and some vendors are finally responding and acknowledging that there are other critical users of recruiting software like hiring managers and even applicants. Every company sourcing new applicant tracking software should make usability the focus of the buying process.
I would call this a return to simplicity but…
I would have called this prediction, “a return to simplicity”, but as far as I can tell, applicant tracking software has never really known simplicity. 95% of the buyers that I speak with are looking for an “easy-to-use” system that offers them the capabilities to improve process, without headaches. At the end of the day, users don’t care about the technology. What counts is what it does for them.
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 (legacy vendors 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?
Now that you have users, metrics can be reported, not invented.
In the past, users of legacy ATS platforms have been forced to enter data manually to create reports in poorly conceived reporting features. Ask any corporate recruiter what they loathe about giving status and they’ll tell you that creating reports on a Friday afternoon for the staffing meeting on Monday is one of the worst things about their jobs. Well, 2011 will be the year that smart vendors will offer advanced recruiting metrics dashboards and slick reporting functionality to provide corporate recruiting departments the ability to drive business decisions. And, it will become a heck of a lot easier too.
This prediction dovetails into my first two. As applicant tracking systems become more intuitive and generally more ‘usable’, user adoption rates will increase enterprise wide. With more users on the platform, corporate recruiters will automatically gather more complete data that will help to identify problems and help to drive more informed decisions. New programs will not only be easier to use (you won’t need a degree in ATS reporting), they’ll also produce production quality reports that will be ready for the conference with a click of a button.
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.
I would guess that, like a lot of people, 98% of my snail mail goes straight into the recycle bin. I’ve tried GreenDimes and 41pounds.org but it seems that marketers continue to find a ways to kill trees and burn oil in order to send me information about stuff I don’t want.
As far as I can tell, I get two important pieces of snail mail: save the date notices and stuff from the IRS. In the last 90 days, I’ve received one non-spam piece of snail mail. Snail mail is the de facto the vehicle by which people I don’t know and don’t trust attempt to communicate with me. Snail mail is a muddy communication mechanism.
Sadly, email isn’t much different anymore. Yet amazingly nearly every business application on the planet goes to great lengths to integrate with email (or tries). In fact, the single greatest technical ulcer-causer of any software web-based application is Outlook integration.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that email integration isn’t necessary. I’m just wondering if email’s dual-dominance of both the trusted and muddy communication channels is anachronistic. Why are messages from people and applications I know and trust being dumped into an unorganized file with untrusted messages? Why are critical alerts comingling with people trying to sell me email lists or consultants from overseas?
If you’re like me, your inbox is more like a “what do I do first?” box. I have documentation from my product team, invoices from vendors, people trying to sell me things, messages from dad, and most importantly, messages from my our applicant tracking software customers (which always get answered immediately I might add).
Many of these messages are coming from systems that are trying to boost my productivity: manage finances, complete projects, follow up with people and track progress. In essence, my productivity applications are taking their trusted communications (messages I definitely want to read) and dumping them into a message mud bog, then trying to clean them up after I deal with them.
Email needs a redo. How did I come to this conclusion?
Well, from a disclosure standpoint I have to admit that integrating with Outlook is really hard and pretty darn scary, and even though at Newton we’re probably going capitulate in some areas, we really don’t want to. Developers of software can control the reliability of their own environment, but once you start relying on someone else’s system you start touching all sorts of things you can’t control. That’s why every time someone says “integrates with outlook” they never use the words “easily” or “never breaks” or “no plug-in required” in the same sentence. Here’s a simple guide to probably the most integrated outlook application on the planet: http://tinyurl.com/cf6dae. This is the apparently shorter, “cheatsheet version”.
But, more important to me than the technical hurdles is this nagging belief that email might be the problem, not the solution.
Actually, I’m not even sure it’s the problem. I’m just starting to think that there’s a better path to productivity than dumping important messages into an uncontrolled, unorganized inbox and then forwarding them around like crazy, all the while trying to clean, reabsorb and reorganize them back into the system that created them.
Why doesn’t Twitter need email integration? Is it only because it’s a consumer application? Or is it because they are communicating with you by way of channels you already trust? I think it’s the latter.
It’s time to rethink how our business applications communicate with the people they serve. The mail paradigm is not just old, it is centuries old. I can think of some software companies already leveraging “clean” communication channels. Newton Software just became another.
In a few short weeks, we’re going to release a utility in Newton simply called “Tracking”. We’ll release more details on “Tracking” as we get closer to the release date. In the meantime, think “Twitter feed” for your recruiting program. This isn’t just any “Twitter feed”. This is a personalized source of the information that you want to see and need to see. It will be the only feature of its kind in the applicant tracking software world.
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.
