Not too long ago, we published a blog post: How to Hire a Great Recruiter. It’s a topic that we’ve been thinking about on and off for nearly 16 years and it’s recently resurfaced in a big way as the economy continues to show signs of improvement. Currently, as executives at a leading corporate applicant tracking software provider, we come into contact with hundreds of organizations that are looking for internal recruiting support. Literally, a day doesn’t go by that our team doesn’t get asked to refer a good corporate recruiter.

Unfortunately, too many companies make costly mistakes by not vetting their recruiters properly. This leads to inefficiency, wasted time, wasted resources, diminished status within the corporate hierarchy, etc. It’s not surprising. In recent years, recruiting has gotten more sophisticated. Once closed networks are wide open. Today, it’s less about processing people and more about leveraging technology, relationship building and managing information. Now more than ever, it takes talented corporate recruiters to find talented employees.

So, what’s the fundamental formula for hiring a successful corporate recruiter? Here is a guide that will help distill the characteristics so your organization has the best chance at hiring successful corporate recruiters. These must-have attributes have been developed with the help of an industrial psychologist who administered a series of tests benchmarking top performing corporate recruiters over the past 4 years.  We encourage individual organizations to use this guide as a foundation. We’ve intentionally kept the rationale broad so this guide can be used by a wide variety of organizations.

Hiring a successful corporate recruiter is as important as ever. As the economy continues to gain strength, talent will increasingly become harder to attract and hire in nearly every industry.  Hiring a recruiter for their “network,” because they have been a recruiter for a decade or because they have experience at a hot company should take a backseat to looking for the person with the right traits. A successful corporate recruiter will have the focus to be successful in a dynamic environment, the confidence to become productive immediately, and the resourcefulness to get the job done.

Lately,  I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersection of human resources and marketing and how critical it is these days for HR and Recruiting professionals to think like marketers.  Admittedly, I didn’t invent this concept.  Rather, I was turned on to the idea by a London-based recruitment firm Dylan. With help from Tom Fishburne, a.k.a the Marketoonist ( by the way, a friend and former co-worker of my wife’s), the notion that HR’s role as marketers is brought alive in a speech that he gave earlier this year in London.

During his talk, Tom points out that one of the ways that we as HR and recruiting practitioners can start embracing our roles as marketers is to avoid silos. That is, we can’t operate under the pretense that marketing is not our responsibility. Marketing is everyone’s responsibility. As employees we all need have the ability to concisely communicate our corporate story. And, as HR and recruiting professionals , we of all people, need to be the ambassadors of our employment brand able to convey our organization’s unique qualities, advantages and mission expertly.  After all, our job is no longer just to ‘process’ people. Our job is to ‘influence’ people.

Read more about HR and Recruitment Marketing on Newton Software’s Applicant Tracking Software blog.

Improve your job advertisements by Newton Software

1.  HR and Recruiting professionals need to be the Chief Marketing Officers for jobs.

Write concise, narrative job descriptions that tell the story about the position. Some employers are still inclined to advertise job requisitions designed to screen candidates by listing every skill, requirement and degree imaginable. It’s time to get more scientific and strategic about job advertisements. Put emphasis on the word “advertisement” and tell your story. Avoid the obligatory laundry list and get higher click through rates. That’s right, make your job ads interesting and more people will read them.

2. Emphasize unique qualities that show you appreciate employees.

Tell applicants what makes your company a great place to work. Free flowing artisan coffee and all you can eat snacks are nice. Gaming areas and nap rooms fine too but in many circles, these “perks” aren’t really that unique and furthermore, they aren’t things professionals look for in a job. It’s time to tell applicants about the meaningful things that you do well. Maybe it’s an education stipend, some sort of special training, great benefits or simply flexible hours. The key is to share the unique and valuable qualities that let applicants know that you care about all of your employees.  Above all, job seekers want to know that they will be treated well, compensated fairly and appreciated.  Tell them.

3.  Make the transaction easier.

Creating a cumbersome application process is restrictive and ineffective. For example, requiring applicants to create a user name and password to apply for a job not only presents a barrier but it also predicates that the applicant will come back and apply for other jobs, check on the status of their application or update their profile with new skills, degrees or certifications. They won’t. Very few companies have the brand equity to command this type of interaction with top applicants. People have too many other places to update their professional profiles these days to expect them to come back to visit your careers “portal”.  And, while this may make me wildly unpopular with some of the HR crowd, when was the last time you hired someone that applied to 6 jobs at your company or came back to update their original profile, resume or application? Top applicants aren’t going to come back and “login” and they don’t knock twice.

4.   Less is better.

Tailor your application process to capture the information that will allow you to assess applicants. In short, an online application behind a job ad is NOT a true application for employment. Employers shouldn’t ask for date of birth, social security number and other sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).  Most applicants won’t provide that type of information. And,  more importantly, why collect risky information from every applicant you receive knowing that you won’t even speak with 90% job posting respondents?

Ask for information that will allow you to better access applicants’ skills and experience to determine if they meet the minimum qualifications necessary to be successful for the job.  And, remember, there’s still no better initial assessment tool than a resume.

Streamline you application process this year. The shorter your application process the better. Our  research shows that every step added to the online application process diminishes completion rates. Use applicant tracking software to make your online application process leaner, smarter and faster.

5. Communicate with every applicant.

Whether an applicant is a go or a no, employers are obligated to communicate with every applicant. This is especially true for consumer brands, nonprofits and any other employer whose applicants can be  their customers. The application process doesn’t end when the applicant clicks the submit button anymore. This isn’t 1990. We don’t have to send applicants a rejection letter via the USPS. A simple email goes a long way and there are applicant tracking tools available that make the entire communication process nearly effortless.

Aside from doing the right thing, employers that notify applicants about the status of their candidacy mitigate risks and protracted inefficiencies by reducing duplicate applications and follow up calls to HR and  hiring managers. And, in our age of social media and the overall democratization of public sentiment, it doesn’t hurt to treat others like you’d want to be treated.

You’ve probably never seen a corporate advertisement that reads “We don’t do anything better than before – we simply stick to the status quo.”   Innovative companies, especially in the multibillion dollar Human Resources software sector, often strive to set themselves apart from their competitors through new features, faster services, and lower prices.

However, this was not always the case for the giants in the HR Technology space.  Over the course of the past two decades,these “old-world” companies have actually embraced the software status quo. For years, ‘sticking with what works’ made sense, as these companies pulled in billions of dollars in profit every year from selling the same old ‘boxed’ software packages while charging for periodic upgrades, maintenance and deriving the bulk of their revenue and profit from services.

Today, these big software companies are really starting to  pay the price for sticking with the status quo for too long.  They are scrambling to catch up with both nimble startups and open minded corporations that have embraced new technologies and ways of doing business; most notably they’ve welcomed cloud computing from the very beginning.

Wharton recently published an article that provided some interesting cases of cloud computing chipping away at traditional software business models.  From knowledge@wharton:  “For example, Forrester calculated that Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail program will cost a company with 5,000 employees $28.22 a month for each user. By comparison, Google’s fully loaded corporate suite — including Gmail, calendar and productivity applications, along with technical support — for a company with 5,000 users will cost $8.59 a month for each user.”

The article also highlights the disruptive changes that cloud computing has brought to the various other corners of the software industry; including consumer productivity software, business services software, and video gaming software.  In each of these sectors, the traditional models of selling ‘boxed’ software and charging for upgrades has slowly been eroded by ‘Software as a Service’ models that instead focus on monthly fees void of any long term contracts.   Companies like Sonar 6  and Bamboo HR are offering customers #HRtech  products that exist entirely in the cloud – making access as simple as signing up online.

Another software sector that has been drastically shaped by cloud computing and SaaS pricing structures is recruiting software.   The days of a company needing to ‘unbox’ a recruiting software suite and install the program on every computer and server in the company are  long gone.  The days of having a company ‘tech guy’ walk downstairs and troubleshoot local server-side glitches are over.  There are very few companies, if any, that continue to push the innovation envelope in the world on on-premise software.

Businesses now are able to utilize applicant tracking software that exists entirely in the cloud – including communication tools, customer service, data analytics and instant updates.  Newton Software is proud to be the company that pioneered cloud-based applicant tracking software, having fully embraced a new age of delivering hiring technology from the very beginning.

Only recently have the corporations of old realized the importance of cloud computing – they’ve started rapidly buying up smaller companies and establishing their own cloud based applications.  However, they may be too slow to catch up.  Today’s world of software, one where online applications are easily accessed by anyone, is no longer about over-inundating a market and establishing a customer ‘choke hold.’ It’s about adapting to customer and providing the best possible solution for a specific niche.

The annual HR Technology Conference and Expo is a lot what the “Speech From the Throne” must have been like during the middle ages when the reigning monarch would lay out the condition of the nation and decree the agenda going forward. Read into this opening however you choose. All politics aside, this is an important event and really does serve to illuminate the trends and trendsetters in the HR Technology industry.

This year I attended the event specifically to connect with partners, to strengthen alliances, and to meet new people.  And, while I didn’t have a lot of free time, I did get a chance to wander the expo floor, mingle in the press room for a bit, and towards the end of the show, just sit in the hall, observe and listen.

What happens in Vegas never really stays in Vegas.  Here are some of my takeaways from this year’s conference.

On the lighter side

1. Viva Las Vegas. Ok, I personally both fear and loath “The Vegas”. It’s not a place for those of us with little self control. But, it is the perfect venue for an industry conference. It’s designed to get in and out of easily. It’s relatively inexpensive and there are plenty of places to meet, greet, eat and be entertained.  The accessibility of the venue allowed me to cram in more meetings than I thought possible. Step into a lounge or a semi-quiet corner (there is no silence in Vegas) and you could get a private 30 minutes with that important someone.

2. Free Wi-Fi or rather Wi-Fi free. This is one of my only logistical gripes about the event. The availability of public Wi-Fi was a joke. I couldn’t get an email in or out over the free Wi-Fi brought to us by ADP (clearly not ADP’s fault) let alone try to demo Newton ( our applicant tracking software).  If I were ADP I would have been steaming mad that I sponsored free internet access and it ended up being a huge failure.  Given that just about every product at this year’s show is delivered over the internet, the organizers should have ensured that there was a big honkin’ pipe running to the conference.

3. You are What You Schwag.  I am still sort of amazed by conference schwag. I guess I don’t really believe that vendors are going to lure, or even start a conversation with their next customer by offering free Smarties and flashing key chains. If you do feel schwag is still necessary, why not raffle off an iPad or Kindle Fire? Give away something that won’t end up as a chew toy or as instant landfill. For more on the state of schwag, read William Tincup’s most recent contribution to Fist Full of Talent.

The meat.

4.Get Ready for the Suite wars. I read one analyst’s review of the conference this week in which he predicts that suite adoption is in the “very early innings”. I agree. However, this space is definitely going to get more interesting over the coming months and years.

I detected a sense of urgency amongst the traditional suite vendors as many are gearing up for a multi-front war.  The talent management vendors have gone on the offensive and are quickly encroaching on the more traditional HRIS vendors’ turf. Where they were once  partners, now many camps are leery and concerned that they may be sleeping with their enemies.  I predict competition for the same seats is going to get really heated as more vendors start extending their functionality in order to address the middle of the talent chain.

5. On Consolidation: the Writing is in the Cloud. There was quite a bit of talk and speculation last week about M&A activities in the HR Tech industry.  I believe this will continue to be driven by the aforementioned suite vendors and their fight to compete across the talent chain. It’s clear that several vendors have realized that they only have a few core modules that are in their suites that are complete features. And, they’ve realized that in their race to claim “we have that too” (I saw one group wearing shirts that said this) they’ve shipped some pretty “thin” modules.

More specifically, I predict that there will be strategic acquisitions made in the talent management space as most of the major suite vendors are pretty lean on both the very front (talent acquisition/recruiting) and late stages of the talent chains (secession planning).  Given the target customer size of many of the suites( mid to upper-mid market), I am guessing that the most demand will be for talent management (performance, review, retention) applications that come later in the talent chain. Plus, as companies like Successfactors close in on the middle of the talent chain and gear up for a full confrontation with the HRIS establishment, the suites will continue to look for opportunities at the beginning and end of the talent chain (ATS and Performance respectively).

Finally, I want to give a special shout out to our partner OneSource VHR, the exclusive reseller of Workday for the mid-market.  Thanks for letting me hang around your booth.  You make the Newton team feel like part of your team. We are grateful.

PS: OneSource VHR is hiring. Click here for a list of their openings.

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.

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.

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.

This is a glimpse of the future.

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