See Newton’s applicant tracking software in action in this new short video featuring people that use it every day.

How does a busy recruiter in San Francisco, a remote Hiring Manager in Austin and a performance- minded HR Director at Corporate all do their part to support the company’s recruiting program? They use Newton, easy-to-use, recruiting software designed to organize and manage internal recruiting programs at small and medium sized organizations.

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.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) August 08, 2011

Newton Software, the developers of smart, corporate applicant tracking software, just revealed another key feature aimed at helping human resources and corporate recruiting departments in the creation and improvement of their online requisition approval process. The new feature empowers organizations to better control recruiting resources with an automated, email-driven job requisition approval tool.

Read more about Newton’s job requisition approval functionality….

Job requisition management isn’t t just for large companies anymore.  Now small and medium sized businesses can leverage Newton to create user friendly, effective job requisition approval processes. Designed by recruiting industry experts (like the rest of our product), our latest feature enhancement is our answer to the rigid, nonintuitive requisition management tools prevalent in most applicant tracking systems.

Our products team has been working on this feature for over a year and they’ll be the first to tell you that Job Approval Management is a full product in itself. Those of us on the marketing side of the house are proud of our product team’s effort and congratulate them on shipping their 4th major release of the year – unheard of in the HR Technology industry.  And, they’re not done. Rumor has it (hint) they’ve started working on Newton Mobile and a host of other useful features that we know will be equally elegant and thoughtful.

Here is a preview of Newton’s Job Requisition Approval Manager.

Newton Software develops corporate applicant tracking software for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Unparalleled usability, industry leading user adoption rates and exceptional customer service set Newton apart.

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.

One of the most prevalent issues that ATS buyers face even before choosing a recruiting software vendor is deciphering what type of applicant tracking software is the best fit for their business. There are two main categories of recruitment technology, each with a distinct feature set designed to manage a specific type of recruiting.  Here’s a short video that breaks down the key differences between corporate applicant tracking software and applicant tracking software that’s designed for recruiting agencies and staffing firms.

Having run corporate recruiting programs for nearly 10 years, we began developing Newton in 2004 after becoming frustrated with existing commercial recruiting platforms. Until the advent of Newton, there wasn’t any recruiting technology that facilitated the fundamental activity key to all recruiting programs: decisions making. Sure, we wanted something that would make rolling out, ramping up, managing, and improving hiring programs easier. And we wanted something that offered a more collaborative recruiting experience. But, we needed something that would intuitively drive the decisions that both recruiters and hiring managers are asked to make every day. Essentially, we needed something that would make saying yes or no simple.

It’s undeniable, over the years; hiring processes have become more complex. But, one day, we asked ourselves why does it have to be this way? Then, the “Newton apple” fell on our heads and we realized that recruiting is just a series of sequential waterfall tasks that are defined by a series of yes / no decision events. It became clear that the hiring process doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, if we could simplify the process, we could eliminate wasted activity (or inactivity) that can slow it down, confused people, and lead to bottlenecks and failures.

Newton, our popular applicant tracking software, is designed to move applicants through each stage of the process in a systematic, orderly, and continuous manner and to eliminate periods of inactivity (waiting) between each stage. Our intuitive, patent-pending workflow is native to Newton and doesn’t require weeks of customization to leverage. On the same token, it’s also not designed to allow users to add unnecessary steps to hiring that complicate the process

We’ve built years of practical recruiting knowledge into Newton, offering our customers an easy way to drive the decisions that drive recruiting. When you choose Newton, you get a recruiting platform that’s designed around a proven, fully optimized workflow that promotes decision making, collaboration, captures critical data for compliance, and provides game-changing analytics. It’s not just a tool … it’s an infrastructure for making decisions.

Watch how Newton drives decision making.

What’s happening in your recruiting program right now?  This second?  If you’re anything like I was when I was a corporate recruiter, your answer is likely- “stuff”.  And, if you’re still using email and spreadsheets to track recruiting then it’s impossible to really know what’s happening right now.  Even if you’re using applicant tracking software, chances are that it can’t tell you what’s happening in real-time. It may pollute your inbox with a bunch of messages but, we all know that’s not a good solution.

Introducing Newton Tracking, a powerful, customizable, feed that will help you manage tasks better, respond to requests faster, and provide you with unparalleled visibility into your recruiting program.  The new Tracking utility in Newton is designed to allow corporate recruiters and HR professionals to be everywhere at once answering questions like:

Has a manager reviewed that applicant I sent her yet?

Do I need to schedule any interviews today?

Are we getting new applicants for the job we just opened?

Does the VP want me to make an offer to that candidate?

You decide what to track you’ll manage your preferences easily.

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.