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.
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.
We get a lot of requests from people that want us to send them more information about Newton, our applicant tracking software. We’re not complaining! This is a good sign. The word is getting out. While we realize that fact sheets and feature matrices are ok for comparison’s sake, we believe videos are better at conveying how technology really works. So, we started to put together a series of videos that we can forward to people.
Joel Passen, interviewed by Bill Vick, one of the recruiting industry’s top influencers, talks about Newton Software and emerging trends like social recruiting and mobile. Joel also discusses the trend towards enhanced usability and some of the issues that are catching his attention in the applicant tracking software space.
We just made it faster and easier to analyze your recruiting program using Newton. Now you’ll see a tab on your home page called “Analytics” replacing the “Overview” tab. Click the Analytics tab to open a an interactive dashboard that will help you slice and dice you recruiting program. You can analyze your recruiting data based on a selected period of time or by job, or both.
This release, v3.6, is the first of several planned releases to tackle analytics. With a focus on measuring stage-to-stage metrics, we wanted to help our customers answer fundamental questions.
Where do I have bottlenecks?
Where can I get involved to make an immediate impact?
Is everyone in the process doing their part?
Am I spending money on the right resources?
Most importantly, we want to give our customers the power to know when something is going wrong before anyone else notices -to be proactive. After all, as John, our product manager, says, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
I was recently asked to speak to a group of Human Resources professionals about emerging trends in recruiting and Human Resources technology. The moderator of the group asked if I could send some preview collateral, a PowerPoint or PDF, that he could distribute to the group prior to the meeting. Having created, reviewed, deleted, ignored, and edited thousands of PowerPoint’s and PDF’s in my career, I decided that I was going to do something different. Knowing that most audiences have a very short attention span, I produced a short video instead.
People seemed to like the “new media” approach to business collateral. So, we’ll be posting more of these from time to time.
You can check out the short video here (it may take more than few seconds to load on slower connections).