Here’s a tip. Forget about the feature checklists. Focus on the biggest concept, hiring manager adoption. For buyers of corporate applicant tracking software, there are very few other fundamental concepts that matter more. If your managers willingly use the platform to request and initiate approvals, you’ve zapped antiquated paper processes and created a layer of exception management that can only exist in a digital environment. Even more importantly, if hiring managers consistently help drive the yes and no decisions that drive today’s hiring programs and do so quickly and easily, it’s a huge win for you and your organization.

Here’s another reason to focuson hiring manager adoption as key concept driving your ATS shoice. If you’re like most HR and recruiting leaders, metrics have become the front and center topic. If you are going to get budget approval for a new ATS, trust me, the executives are going to want reports. In the end, if the recruiting and HR users are the only ones using the system, it’s only logical that the system will capture metrics exclusively from administrative users. This won’t yield helpful insights without significant data manipulation (you know, building spreadsheets by hand on Fridays). Only when hiring managers are consistently using an ATS will you be able to get holistic recruiting performance metrics that will help you automatically generate reports and have the knowledge to pinpoint bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

As you create your ATS shortlist, ask yourself: what system will garner the most adoption amongst all of my users? What system is the easiest to use, easiest to activate and will be the easiest to roll out to new managers and interviewers joining the organization every week? Most importantly, whether or not your hiring managers will adopt an ATS isn’t even a question anymore. Hiring manager adoption is no longer a nice benefit. It’s not a feature. Hiring manager adoption is a must.

Here are 5 tips to help you choose applicant tracking software that will promote user adoption.

1. Hiring managers don’t care about the technology. What counts is what it does for them.

2. Shop for usability. You won’t make ATS software easier to adopt by shopping for the most features.

3. Hiring managers loathe software training. Any ATS that requires extensive training will only be adopted by a small number of users.

4. Remember, only features that provide a good user experience will be used. Expecting managers to login proactively and complete a task is unrealistic.

5. The 80/20 rule applies to user adoption. Choose an ATS that does well what 80 percent of your hiring managers do all the time. Hint: think making reviewing resumes as simple as possible.

View and share the digital booklet with a friend.

Sometimes when I have a minute to sit and think about the people that I’ve met since we started Newton, I am humbled, really kind of amazed. If I were still in an HR or recruiting role, I would have any problem or question covered with a quick email or phone call.

So, today, as I was starting to put together some collateral  for our customers on resources for safe hiring, I sat back and looked at the experts that our clients have access to. It’s a safe hiring dream team.

Here is the starting forward line (it’s a hockey reference).

Starting Center

This week, Newton Software partnered with Employment Screening Resources  (ESR) to provide our customers with integrated background checks. ESR’s CEO is Les Rosen, a recognized expert in background screen. He, quite literally wrote the book on safe hiring. Les is also a frequent contributor to the ESRNEWS, the de facto news source for the background check industry

Catch Les on Newton’s upcoming webinar: Getting Started with Integrated Background Checks. Newton customers can register here.

Starting Wing

Another great partner of Newton and a wonderful resource for the HR community at large is Dr. Stephanie Thomas, is the Founder and CEO of Thomas Econometrics Inc., a firm specializing in quantitative solutions to complex, unstructured problems. She has provided economic and statistical consulting services to Fortune 500 companies, privately held businesses, and government agencies such as the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Stephanie is also the host of the popular podcast, The Proactive Employer, a resource for the latest news and commentary on workplace issues, HR best practices, employment litigation risk management and EEO and OFCCP compliance. The Proactive Employer focuses on issues of interest to HR professionals, compliance officers, corporate counsel, employment attorneys, expert consultants and others interested in workplace issues in the United States and around the world.

On a side note, The Proactive Employer will be hosting the Director of the OFCCP, Patricia Shiu on May 17th, 2012 to discuss the Department of Labor’s goal of “Good Jobs For Everyone” and how her Agency—OFCCP—is working to achieve that goal.  More to come on this.

Starting Wing

This week we’re also adding Carla Irwin to our cadre of partner experts. Carla is the founder and managing partner of Carla Irwin and Associates,  a firm that specializes in developing and implementing Affirmative Action Programs (AAP) for Federal Contractors. With clients ranging from small business to Fortune 100 corporations, Carla and her team supplement their  clients’ human resources functions with in-depth AAP knowledge and expert systems.

The team at Newton Software is obsessed with improving the areas of hiring that have been the hardest for employers to optimize. And, like fixing the problems that always seem to be overlooked or just accepted, we’re also always promoting the concepts of safe hiring. That is, we’re always looking for ways that our popular applicant tracking software can create and reinforce processes to help reduce the risks faced by our HR constituents.

Here’s how it works:

Organizations that choose Newton get more than an easy-to-use applicant tracking system. They get a platform that’s designed around a proven, fully optimized workflow that promotes collaboration, captures critical data for compliance, and provides game-changing analytics. It’s not just a tool … it’s an infrastructure for recruiting.

We’ve received lots of requests for more information about the concept of lean hiring.  Here is a quick guide that you can use to start thinking about leaning your recruiting process.

If you are investigating applicant tracking software and are looking for a platform that will help you optimize your recruiting process, we suggest you investigate Newton, the only ATS designed to improve the corporate recruiting process.

It’s undeniable, over the years; hiring processes have become more complex. In many ways, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the work that most of us do has become more sophisticated.  But, does complexity really lead to better, faster hires? Of course not. In fact, many smart organizations have started a trend, a return to simplicity, that allows them to compete for talent more efficiently. This trend is called lean hiring.

Lean hiring is a process defined by the same core principles as lean manufacturing, the philosophy that revolutionized process management and supply chains decades ago. We defined lean hiring a couple of year ago as the systematic approach to recruiting that increases overall productivity by eliminating wasted steps and periods of inactivity, maximizing resources and promoting consistency by optimizing processes and tools. The hiring process is a natural candidate for lean because, at its purest form, hiring is simply a series of sequential events that are driven by yes and no decisions.

Organizations that adopt lean hiring not only hire faster, safe time, money and resources and create a stronger “hiring culture”, they also enjoy a variety of benefits such as:

• Consistent collection of EEO and OFCCP compliance information

• The ability to collect and better analyze recruiting performance metrics

• Increased collaboration and user adoption rates amongst hiring managers

• Higher offer to hire close ratios

So how can you get lean? Well, keep reading. We’ve put together a short guide to get you thinking “lean”.

You are not making sausage, you are hiring people.

Are you just putting more candidates into the meat grinder or are you trying to hire better people faster? Smart organizations place more emphasis on simplifying their process, driving decisions, being consistent and treating applicants like people, not parts.

Quick Tip: Don’t confuse getting more applicants with process improvement. Many organizations focus exclusively on attracting more applicants rather than thoughtfully “processing” the people that appear interesting.

Simplify

The easiest way to hire better people faster is to simplify your recruiting process by eliminating wasted steps, paper forms, burning hoops and anything else that creates unnecessary friction in your process. Dissect your entire recruiting process from job approval to requesting a background check and making an offers. Remove anything that can create inefficiency. Next, standardize the stages of your recruiting process across your company while maintaining enough flexibility to address dynamic events.

Quick Tip: Avoid over customization, extra steps, paper forms, excessive consensus building and anything else that creates unnecessary complexity.

Drive Decisions

The hiring process is comprised of  discrete, sequential events that are driven by a series of yes and no decisions that act as stage-gates. This makes the hiring process  a natural candidate for “lean”. By sharing decision making responsibility amongst recruiters, HR and hiring managers in a streamlined, consistent manner you will drive the events that drive hiring and eliminate periods of inactivity (waiting).  Waiting kills a hiring process.

Quick Tip: Choose applicant tracking software that is designed to drive the decisions that drive hiring and one that’s easy enough for everyone on your team to use with little or no training.

Be Consistent

As with any process, consistency is only achieved through discipline and a whole lot of practice. Ultimately, consistency drives more than just efficiency or cost reductions, it’s also critical for promoting compliance and producing measurable analytics. Only with a lean recruiting process with well defined stages, will you capture all the required compliance output, pinpoint bottlenecks and continuously find areas for improvement.

Quick Tip: Standardize recruiting processes across your company. Once you thoughtfully set your course, stay on it and make minor adjustments along the way.  Among other things, this will make measuring results and reporting key data manageable.

We like pictures. They tell a story. Our story is unique. Newton is designed by recruiting industry veterans to solve the problems that haven’t yet been adequately addressed by other vendors.  In short, we were  frustrated with existing corporate applicant tracking software so we decided to do something about it. Instead of trying to compete in the “feature arms race”, we focused on usability and simplicity not fads, not gimmicks. Today, our mission remains the same as the day we decided to build this company,  to help internal recruiting departments become more efficient, more effective, more strategic – leaner!

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.

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.

Create / refine your corporate recruiting story

Select and educate your ambassadors

Create a customer experience.

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.