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.
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.
Aside from some minor (but annoying) technical difficulties that occurred as a result of a data center migration (yes, we admit to these things and fix them right the first time), June was the best month ever at Newton Software.
Things are really coming together. Newton adoption rates are through the roof. This is a testament to Steve’s team designing the product to be easy for everyone to use. Companies that never envisioned having hiring managers use an ATS are adding dozens a month. Businesses that used to accept paper applications are using Newton to go digital with our customizable employment applications. And, we’ve partnered with a company that offers pre-employment screening tools, integrating their behavioral testing products into Newton creating a seemless experience for applicants and a clean applicant stream for businesses.
Here are some other June highlights.
We released over 50 enhancements to the product this month.
We signed up a record number of customers including some high-profile brands.
Interest in Newton has never been stronger. More people contacted us this month than ever before. And, we are receiving referrals every week. This is a great sign.
We were chosen as having the best technology, functionality, and usability in a competition that pitted us against some really established vendors in the applicant tracking space.
We established 2 new strategic partnerships that we’ll announce in a couple of weeks.
Needless to say, we have quite a bit going on. The other day, Steve and I were talking about customers and the topic of where our customers are located came up. I told him we have customers in places like North Dakota, Utah, New Mexico and up and down both coasts. I don’t think he realized how geographically dispersed our clients actually are. Wait until we hop the pond!
Steve likes maps so the marketing team built him a map of all of our applicant tracking software clients.
Seeing as I spend about 75% of my week on the phone with HR professionals, recruiters, and executives, I’m in a prime position to identify trends in the human capital industry. Naturally, through these conversations, I learn what people are interested in, what they think is important. Next to my keyboard, I have a notepad with a lucha libre on it to keep simple notes, just concepts. Earlier this week, I started going through my notes to identify patterns. I had some suspicions.
Here is what people are talking about now.
Size doesn’t matter anymore.
Not only has the labor market become increasingly dynamic, but the opening up of once closed networks via resources like LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc. has fundamentally changed recruiting. It doesn’t matter how big your network is anymore. Every headhunter has access to pretty much the same information these days. Today, recruiting is about processing large amounts of information efficiently and marketing to prospects as effectively as possible.
Employment branding gets a little steak with that sizzle.
Frequently characterized by cheesy videos and faux employee testimonials, employment branding is being reinvented and this time it’s about actually improving job application processes, targeting and engaging micro-communities and promoting communication between employers, employees, and applicants (who are often customers too) to create and reinforce brand identities. In short, employment branding is getting more substantive. Traditional employment branding agencies are facing stiff competition from boutique new media firms and technology companies that operate independently or as partners to create employment branding 2.0.
Job advertising is trying to leave Las Vegas.
I’ve always looked at buying job postings as gambling. They’re a necessary evil in the recruiting world. Throw some postings online and hope to see some return on investment. Finally there are some alternatives. Some job advertising companies are offering pay for performance job posting products and employers are taking notice.
It works like this. Employers set a budget for each job ad. Qualified views cost a few cents each. When the job is filled, employers pay only for the number of qualified views that job ad received. The industry needs more of this now. Indeed.com is a good place to start. I hope to be able to endorse some others soon.
Automation sees its shadow
Before the recession began in 2008, human capitalists were buzzing about automating HR and recruiting processes. Many argue, including me, that these are the last business processes to be truly optimized in most organizations. As history shows, when a crisis ends the larger trends in place before the crisis usually resume. Automation, or taking what were once manual (paper) processes online, is back in full swing.
“We want to get rid of paper.” These words are being spoken all over corporate American. Whether it’s accepting online employment applications, integrating payroll interfaces or just generally streamlining, employers are making a push for increased productivity by putting processes on the web. It’s about time.
RPO moves the chains.
Direct-hire, executive search and staffing services all of which are more analogous to out-tasking are facing major competition from recruitment outsources that are structured to provide more cost effective, flexible services that compliment their clients overall recruiting processes. Just 5 years ago there were only a handful of national RPO’s servicing employers most of which with on-going, seasonal and generally iterative hiring needs. Today, there are thousands of RPO’s many of which target high complexity environments ranging from healthcare to cleantech. RPO is the future of recruiting services.
Recently, I was invited to speak to a group of human resources leaders about trends in the applicant tracking software industry. I think my audience was a little shocked when my outline didn’t include Twitter or any mention of social recruiting for that matter. I’m just interested in talking about the bigger picture, the ideas that are going to connect the dots.
I am interested in technologies that will integrate each phase of the hiring process (acquisition, assessment, interviewing, screening, etc.) so they are coordinated, connected, organized and online. And, I am interested in how new design concepts and business models will reduce the buying risks for HR people.
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.
Think back to your last staffing meeting or the last time that you were asked for recruiting status. Where did you get the information? Spreadsheets? Better yet, how long did it take you to compile all the information? If you just sighed, you’re not alone.
Do you loathe those Fridays when you have to “update” your ATS or staffing spreadsheets? We did. So we built recruiting software that works the way recruiting works. Now capturing all of your recruiting information is simple. And, because Newton is easy for everyone to use, even your hiring managers will add data to the system allowing you to collaborate and store critical information.
Newton is designed to be like air traffic control for your entire recruiting program. See all the information that’s important to you at a glance, right from your home page. Now you’ll drill into detailed analytics anytime from your analytics dashboard to access real-time information like: candidate pipelines, conversion rates, average time it takes to move candidates from stage-to-stage, best sources of applicants, missed opportunities and more.
Give your hiring managers and executives logins. It’s free! Get ready to show all of your hard work, to point out bottlenecks and to make better decisions about your recruiting resources. With Newton you’ll be the envy of your company, running the most informative meetings with the best information at your fingertips.
“You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin’”
Bob Dylan
The Fishbowl
A couple of weeks ago I learned that my co-workers call the office that I share with our CEO, “The Fishbowl”. The Fishbowl is the nerve center of Newton Software. Given our small footprint, the Fishbowl acts as the design studio, front office, communications center and test lab. Sometimes our co-workers might say it more resembles an ultimate fighting iron cage, or a badger den, but for now we’ll leave it at The Fishbowl.
A while back, I started keeping a tally on my whiteboard in The Fishbowl. Often, during phone calls, I will get up and place a mark or two under some jibber that I had previously written. Over the last 2 quarters, my scrawl has roughly tripled in size, now infecting a second large grease-board. It now is directly juxtaposed with a neatly-written product roadmap owned by my office mate. Admittedly, the walls in our office now have a pop culture “Odd Couple” look to it.
As the VP of Marketing and Sales and general front-man for Newton Software, I spend a great majority of my time speaking with HR and corporate staffing professionals about recruiting and hiring. I also have the pleasure of spitballing with notable recruiting bloggers, industry analysts and other technology vendors in the recruiting-sphere.
Undeniably, the recent economic train wreck has brought a new sobriety to town and with it some pervasive emerging themes. And while I don’t profess to be a recruiting software industry Nostradamus, I can share with you some recent observations from my varied conversations over the past 2 quarters. Clearly, there is shift occurring and believe it or not, this shift means good things are ahead for people that buy (recruiting) software.
Here are the trends that I believe are here to stay even when, once again, the economy improves and hiring becomes a front-burner issue.
My 3 Emerging Trends:
1. Easy Does It.
I would have called this trend, “a return to simplicity”, but as far as I can tell, recruiting software has never really known simplicity. 90% of the people that I speak with are looking for a “simple and easy” system that offers them the capabilities to improve the process of recruiting, without headaches.
I believe that this quest for easy and simple is a reaction to stress created by people being asked to do more with less. No one that I speak with has time for complexity right now. They don’t have time to learn, tweak and teach others another new system. They’ve got a lot of other things on their plate, and they can’t relearn a software application when hiring is turning on and off every few months (or weeks).
For example, I spoke with an HR manager named Patty the other day who is basically doing 3 jobs. “I am the office manager, HR manager, and recruiting coordinator. Right now I am getting hundreds of resumes a week that I need to open, make sure they are not duplicates and then forward to the managers. All I need to know is if your system can help me get some control and save me time somewhere?” I hear things like this all of the time, and everyone asks for the same thing, “Will I be able to use it, tomorrow?”
Obviously the movement away from complexity and toward simplicity has been going on for some time, well before the recession. But the recession has really made us all focus on what makes us, and our businesses, more efficient. It’s kind of like stubbing your toe. The first time you stub your toe, it hurts. The second time it hurts 10 times more. The economic meltdown was the first stub, and anything that makes us inefficient or slows us down from here is likely to bring us to our knees. In these tough times software vendors should be listening to their customers and innovating. In the end, this will be good for the software industry as a whole.
2. I Need this to Work, Now.
In 2007, when we started offering beta versions of Newton®, “deep customization” was high on our customers’ lists of requirements. In the past year, this request has become nearly non-existent.
Now this is entirely contrary to a recent poll on ATS (applicant tracking systems) I read, so I should explain. I would like to call it a little bit of the “tail wagging the dog”. If you sell software without a good recruiting process built in, then you MUST make it deeply customizable. If you’re a software company without HR people and recruiters guiding your product design, then it MUST be customizable, because you don’t know the challenges faced by your audience (your customers).
Most buyers that I speak with are being asked to spend less on sourcing, recruiting agencies and to cut advertising budgets, while still providing service to multiple teams that demand fast service. Clearly, the “here’s a tool, now build your own” approach won’t work for them. I believe that this trend is characterized by buyers seeking software that helps them do their job better, instead of software tools that they must “teach” how to solve their problems. “We need to fill these before we lose budget,” is a common refrain. These buyers I talk to don’t have time to wait for long customization process: they have a couple of openings, and they need them filled fast. Instead of a hammer, they need a house.
I get this a lot; “Let me be honest, we don’t have much of a recruiting process.” In some companies, the people that used to own and drive recruiting aren’t there anymore (often due to budget cuts). And, truth be told, there are many companies that have never had much of a recruiting process to speak of. People from these camps are looking for best-of-breed software that already has a powerful process built-in. “Our core competency is making renewable energy accessible, not recruiting. I just need something that works,” remarked an operations manager during a recent meeting. Custom software for these companies is like a birthday present without the batteries.
I would like to add that I don’t just see this shift in recruiting software, either. Just the other day one of our customers asked if we could recommend “Newton-like” performance review software. She wanted something that “would just solve the problem so that I don’t have to build this process myself.” More and more, software vendors are building innovative “point solutions” to optimize business processes providing more options and ultimately better software for consumers. It’s about time.
3. Come On! Make it cost less and take the handcuffs off. I am a customer.
Captain Obvious at your service: The recent financial meltdown has put an emphasis on thriftiness. All enterprises, even oil companies, are looking for ways to shave costs. Buyers that I speak with have no choice; they are short-staffed, under-budgeted and forced to do more with less in the most uncertain conditions of their lives.
So what’s the trend? Economizing? That’s part of it and very well could be the biggest driving force. But, what I find really interesting is that some software companies are structuring their businesses to entice cost-conscious buyers. And, potentially even more interesting is how this trend may turn the business of enterprise software on its ear.
Many progressive software companies, across all industries, are offering “Friction-Free” buying programs to attract and retain customers. These programs are highlighted by simple tiered-pricing models, free trial periods, pay-as-you-go-contracts and non-punitive cancelation policies. The reduced risks help buyers get purchases approved easily.
(As a side note, this new model for software pricing forces vendors to build better software because they don’t force people into long term contracts: if the software isn’t good, you cancel.)
Convoluted pricing hides the elephant in the closet behind long-term contracts. “With our current software every time I want to do something, like add a user, or increase our job limit I’m forced to call someone and pay a fee.” Or, “We tried to lower our user limit because we aren’t hiring as much, but they wouldn’t let us. When our term expires we’re going to cancel.” I hear these complaints almost every day, and the recession will be the end of this: the elephant has charged and is bowling over these anti-customer business models. Fair pricing is coming, for some buyers it has arrived, and it will benefit all consumers long after the recession is over.
Walk the Walk
As you can imagine, most trends are interconnected. Fatigued by complicated products, failed implementations and archaic pricing methods, buyers of recruiting software are seeking innovative products delivered with dynamic terms of service. I speak with at least 10 companies a week that are looking to move away from their legacy recruiting software and I can only guess that this will accelerate as the economy improves. With better access to information and the creation of easy-to-use products offered with friction-free buying programs, consumers are more empowered than ever to shift allegiances from one vendor to another. And with modern systems, companies can easily move information from one system to another without incurring significant IT headaches and extended service outages.
Undoubtedly, the way business software is designed and delivered is changing and it must continue to change to satisfy the evolving demands of buyers. Recruiting software vendors will need to examine how they develop and deliver their wares. And this brings me to why the recession will end up being good for you, the buyers of software. When it comes time to start buying again, you’ll for the first time have better choices: ease of use, built in intelligence, and fair pricing.
Seeing as I spend about 75% of my week on the phone with HR professionals, recruiters, and executives, I’m in a prime position to identify trends in the human capital industry. Naturally, through these conversations, I learn what people are interested in, what they think is important. Next to my keyboard, I have a notepad with a lucha libre on it to keep simple notes, just concepts. Earlier this week, I started going through my notes to identify patterns. I had some suspicions.