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.

Newton Software’s Joel Passen is a featured presenter at HR.com’s Recruitment Process Outsourcing Virtual Workshop on July 19th at 12:30 EDT.

Register Here

Given recent unpredictable economic conditions, more and more companies have turned to recruitment outsourcing as an alternative to the fixed costs of an internal recruiting staff, software, independent contractors and the use of agencies. In the practice of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) a company will outsource either part or all of their recruitment needs to an outside company who focuses entirely on finding, certifying, and delivering candidates for the hiring company to consider.

With the growth and chatter round the RPO market, providers have been overwhelming the market with information. Many can and will suggest reasons to use their service over their competitors. But at the end of the day, it’s all about performance and reliability.

Any service provider must be held accountable with performance metrics. Recruiting analytics are an essential component to the success of any RPO program.  Vendors that bring these metrics into the equation are able to diagnose small problems before they become larger issues. This also allows for conversations that drive improvements and lead the vendors to the front of the RPO landscape.

During his presentation, Joel will present a guide to assist HR practitioners in making sense of recruiting performance metrics. He will present the best practices and recommend vital metrics that must be gathered as part of any RPO, regardless of size.

Joel Passen, a recruiting industry veteran and blogger on merging issues, innovations and trends in the recruiting industry. He started in the recruiting industry as a corporate recruiter and went on to co-found Gravity Technologies, a company that operates in the human capital management industry. Currently, he is the Head of Marketing and Co-Founder of Newton Software.

Newton Software is easy-to-use applicant tracking software which offers a variety of features including EEOC/OFCCP compliance, intuitive recruiting processes and dashboards, and real-time recruiting analytics.  Find more information at www.newtonsoftware.com.

CIO.com recently published a very informative article titled “Social Networks: A New Hotbed for Hiring Discrimination Claims.”  The article gives an in-depth perspective into the world of corporate recruiting, in particular how recruiters are using social networks more and more to evaluate potential hires.

Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter give recruiters and hiring manager the opportunity to peer into a potential candidate’s everyday life, work habits and personal information.  More and more, recruiters are using information gathered from social networks to  determine whether a candidate is a good fit for their company.  However, using this information as the basis for a hire can lead to a bevy of discrimination claims against the company.

This is a topic that Newton Software has been following very closely. Newton’s own Joel Passen, interviewed Dr. Stephanie Thomas, one of the leading experts on the analysis of equal employment opportunity issues, almost a year ago for a podcast titled, “Can Social Recruiting Lead to Discrimination and Equal Opportunity Issues “.

In this recent article, CIO.com spoke with HR consultant Jessica Miller-Merrell about some of the risks involved with using social networks to make hiring decisions.  She outlines potential legal risks including the niche demographic breakdown of specific social networks as well as the necessity for concise affirmative action reporting for government contractors.

She goes on to talk about how using someone’s personal information to determine their qualifications can be problematic: “if you make hiring decisions based on protected information that a candidate provides on the Internet—if you decide not to hire someone because you find out they’re Muslim, pregnant or their child has a health condition—these are hiring decisions that can get you in hot water.”

There’s been a growing trend of more and more claims of workplace discrimination getting submitted over the past several years, and the addition of social networking as a hiring tool is bound to only increase the rate of claims.  Every year, companies face an uphill climb to follow confusing regulations that require them to provide detailed reports to various federal agencies.

These are the very factors Newton took into account when we decided to build EEOC / OFCCP compliance features into our recruiting software.  We realized that companies already face a great risk in regards to complying with the U.S Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs for government contractors.)  Bad or ignorant hiring practices and  decisions can sink a business due to costly litigation battles over wrongful discrimination.

Newton’s EEOC /OFCCP Compliance tools make sure that all the right information gets collected, stored and tracked regardless of the source of the data. Voluntary self-identification surveys, reasons for non-selection, hire/offer logs, minimum qualification questions and flow logs (EEO1 reports) are just a few of the tools that can help recruiters and human resources professionals  keep track of all the mandatory information.   Newton makes EEOC and OFCCP compliance a seamless part of the hiring process, so that when the time comes, a company doesn’t need to scramble to deal with a problem.

While we haven’t yet seen a pervasive precedent set regarding social networks and social recruiting, experts agree that it’s just a matter of time. As more companies are learning to use social networks as recruiting tools, there will be a social media recruiting precedent before you know it.  For now, our advice is to seek guidance from counsel especially before using social media to vet applicants and to always have a consistent, compliant process in place when distributing job related information to social networks.

Citations

Levinson, Meredith.  “Social Networks: A New Hotbed for Hiring Discrimination Claims.” CIO.com. April 18^th, 2011. http://www.cio.com/article/679830/Social_Networks_A_New_Hotbed_for_Hiring_Discrimination_Claims_?page=1&taxonomyId=3123

I used to dread Fridays.
While the rest of the company was hoisting their coffee cups on Friday morning in reverence to the coming weekend, I had dread. Friday was the day that I had to turn in my recruiting status report. The report would be reviewed the following Monday at 9:00am by the executive staff at their weekly meeting. Depending on how busy I was during the week, the report would take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours to complete. Instead of hitting up happy hour with the sales team on Friday afternoon, I was knee deep in a spreadsheet. And, I know that I wasn’t the only one frustrated on status report day. There are thousands of recruiters that bristle at the thought of compiling status reports and wasting time exacting data instead of actually recruiting talent.

So, why has compiling status reports been such a burden for corporate recruiters? Well, to date, the challenge with providing reports has been exacerbated by existing applicant tracking tools that fail to reflect the realities of the recruiting process. If you look at what vendors in the ATS marketplace are producing currently, it’s clear that they are still focused on what they’ve always been pushing: developing highly cumbersome data repositories with a bunch of check-box features, none of which are designed to make reporting performance metrics any easier. Let’s be real: the harden an ATS is to use, the harder it is to get any information out of it. And, if you do manage to get some workable data after hours of effort, you’ll end up with spreadsheets that look like Da Vinci’s code.

As many of you know, Newton’s core team is made up of former corporate and RPO recruiters. We understand as well as anyone that corporate recruiters are certainly not the only ones responsible for the success of recruiting programs, but they are typically left holding the bag. We also know that a lack of systemic accountability costs corporate recruiting departments money, time and resources and often leads to animosity and plenty of petty misunderstandings. Only the consistent capture and reporting of real data can back up a responsible recruiter and ultimately allow them to be more than just purely tactical or only as good as their last placement.

Good news for corporate recruiters.
There’s no need to be a victim of reporting madness on Fridays any longer. In fact, we may give you reason to throw on a cape and wow people with your reporting superpowers. Check out Newton’s custom reporting engine, a powerful tool that makes generating reports refreshingly easy. It’s not just easy to use: similar to Newton’s real-time analytics dashboard, this new tool spits out reports that are digestible, even a bit flashy. If you’re a data junky (or your manager is) the Newton custom reporting engine is like kryptonite.

Our new reporting engine empowers users to build, save and share customized reports comprised of every piece of data collected during the recruiting process. Users can generate reports on talent pipelines, user activity, requisitions, advertising performance, interview statistics, hires and more. Reports are easily built with Newton’s drag and drop interface and exported to auto-formatted spreadsheets that are production quality and ready to share with anyone. And, processing large amounts of data will not cause latency for users because the reports are generated from a reports-specific database in the Cloud. The new reporting feature even enables users to save the report structure created by an individual user so that the report can be run anytime with the click of a button. Think weekly staffing report with one click!

There’s more to come.
2011 will continue to be busy year for Newton’s product team and another great year for customers. Our custom reporting engine is just one of several important features that we’ll release this year. Our idea has always been to build the most innovative corporate applicant tracking software and we’re constantly studying the evolving recruiting marketplace so we can meet and even exceed the needs of modern recruiting programs. At the end of the day, the most rewarding part of our business is providing the tools corporate recruiters need to rise above the challenges that can plague their roles (and performance). Can we really give you superpowers? Maybe not. But we know Newton can make recruiters more effective, save them time, and elevate them into the strategic roles that can, on some days, make them heroic.

Recently, I was asked to provide my predictions of the top 3 trends in the mid-market applicant tracking software industry that all HR executives and corporate recruiting leaders should be aware of going into 2011.  My picks are based on conversations with 100′s of HR executives and corporate recruiters around the US and UK. If I had to sum up my predictions in one line it would be: People are ready for easier to use applicant tracking software that requires less customization, less time to activate and less training.

Usability is the new killer feature.

It can hardly be debated that most applicant management technology is way too complicated and for the most part, pretty thoughtless when it comes to user experience. The legacy ATS platforms that many businesses use to run their corporate recruiting programs are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code.

Up to this point, vendors have designed recruiting software almost entirely for what we might call a “Power User”, i.e. corporate recruiters that use it every day. For a business process like recruiting where 90% of the users don’t hire all of the time and therefore don’t use recruiting software day in and day out, this design focus leads to 10% user adoption. Standard users don’t have the time or usage frequencies that foster retention of complex features.

But, there is good news and yes, my first prediction; the feature arms race is over. Usability is the new killer feature. Organizations are demanding better user experience and some vendors are finally responding and acknowledging that there are other critical users of recruiting software like hiring managers and even applicants.  Every company sourcing new applicant tracking software should make usability the focus of the buying process.

I would call this a return to simplicity but…

I would have called this prediction, “a return to simplicity”, but as far as I can tell, applicant tracking software has never really known simplicity. 95% of the buyers that I speak with are looking for an “easy-to-use” system that offers them the capabilities to improve process, without headaches.  At the end of the day, users don’t care about the technology. What counts is what it does for them.

What we’ve learned is that when recruiting software achieves something valuable without being distracting or requiring hours of training, only then will it live up to its potential (legacy vendors 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?

Now that you have users, metrics can be reported, not invented.

In the past, users of legacy ATS platforms have been forced to enter data manually to create reports in poorly conceived reporting features. Ask any corporate recruiter what they loathe about giving status and they’ll tell you that creating reports on a Friday afternoon for the staffing meeting on Monday is one of the worst things about their jobs. Well, 2011 will be the year that smart vendors will offer advanced recruiting metrics dashboards and slick reporting functionality to provide corporate recruiting departments the ability to drive business decisions. And, it will become a heck of a lot easier too.

This prediction dovetails into my first two. As applicant tracking systems become more intuitive and generally more ‘usable’, user adoption rates will increase enterprise wide.  With more users on the platform, corporate recruiters will automatically gather more complete data that will help to identify problems and help to drive more informed decisions. New programs will not only be easier to use (you won’t need a degree in ATS reporting), they’ll also produce production quality reports that will be ready for the conference with a click of a button.

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 other than just recruiters actually using applicant tracking software and not just finding ways to work around it.

What we’ve learned is that when recruiting 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 more features. Say hello to the age of the killer usability.

Here are  7 tips for promoting applicant tracking software user adoption

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

2. Forget about that one killer feature. Say hello to the age of the killer user-experience.

3. No one likes software training. Any ATS that requires extensive training will only be adopted by a small number of users

4. Avoid confusion. Its a deal-breaker.

5. Remember, only features that provide a good user experience will be used.

6. The 80/20 rule applies to user adoption. Choose an ATS that does well what 80 percent of your company does all the time.

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

Social media is changing the recruiting landscape. And while people are racing to figure out how to harness the power of social recruiting (and even define it), issues related to discrimination and equal opportunity employment are imminent. As you can imagine there’s information available on social networking sites that violates anti-discrimination laws. And, recruiting exclusively with social media can potentially lead to disparate impact. What does this mean? It means that it’s time to better understand the impacts of social media and the implications that it has on recruiting – and your recruiting program.

So, what is lean hiring you ask? Lean hiring is a process defined by the same core principles as lean manufacturing, the philosophy that revolutionized process management in the 1990’s. “Lean hiring is the systematic approach to recruiting that increases overall productivity by eliminating wasted steps and periods of inactivity, maximizing resources and promoting consistency.”

Newton is the brainchild of former corporate recruiters (that’s us) who began developing the product in 2004 after becoming frustrated with existing commercial recruiting platforms. Having run corporate recruiting programs for nearly 10 years with hard-copy resumes, fax, email, spreadsheets and legacy software- we wanted to leverage the benefits of internet technology to help us provide a better service to our clients. We wanted something that would make rolling out, ramping up, managing, and improving hiring programs easier. We wanted something that offered a more collaborative recruiting experience. And, we needed something that was intuitive and easy-to-use for recruiters, candidates and hiring managers. Essentially, we needed something that would make the recruiting process as simple as possible.

As former recruiters, we have managed hundreds of thousands of applicants through hundreds of recruiting processes. Over the years, our hiring process became more complex with ever increasing forms, spreadsheets, candidate sources and work-arounds.. Finally, the “Newton apple” fell on our heads and we realized that we had to eliminate all of that complexity and as they say in the world of  lean, bring the entire recruiting process in control.

The second part of our collective epiphany was that the recruiting process is a natural candidate for lean. In simple terms, recruiting is a series of sequential waterfall tasks that are defined by a series of yes / no decision events. At its root, the hiring process is not complex, but there are several magnets for wasted activity (or inactivity) that can slow it down, confuse people, and lead to breakdowns / failures. We set out to eliminate all of the steps that waste resources, cause inconsistency, and add unnecessary steps to hiring.

Newton is designed to move applicants through each stage of the process in a systematic, orderly, and continuous manner and to eliminate periods of inactivity between each stage. This 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.

We’ve built years of practical recruiting knowledge into Newton, offering our customers a competitive advantage from day one. Think of Wal-Mart turning itself inside out, offering its industry-leading supply chain and logistics systems to any and all outsiders, even rival retailers. Or, imagine Amazon renting out everything it uses to run its own business, spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and the millions of lines of software code that coordinates all that (they do this). When you choose Newton, you get a recruiting 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.

Here’s how it works

Optimize your recruiting workflow and HIRE FASTER.

Translation: get rid of all the “muda” (lean lingo for waste) that slows down your hiring process

The easiest way to hire people faster is to eliminate wasted steps in your process and reduce periods of inactivity i.e. waiting. Newton standardizes the stages of your recruiting process while maintaining enough flexibility to address dynamic events. Knowing all the stops in a process makes it easier than ever to measure recruiting performance and to pinpoint and eliminate periods of inactivity which lead to inefficiency. Newton standardizes the process of hiring by removing inefficient activities (i.e., friction) in the hiring process, reducing periods of inactivity (wasted time) and promoting decision making (green is go, red is no).

We’re also looking into ways to incorporate an electroshock device that will “notify” people when they have a task to complete but, we’re not sure if it’s legal.

Use Newton real-time analytics measure stage-to-stage performance

Automate iterative tasks and MAXIMIZE YOUR RESOURCES.

Translation: automate the crap that frustrates the heck out of your recruiters

One of the pillar concepts of lean processes is “autonomation” (from Toyota), or smart automation. Newton is designed to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up recruiters to do what recruiters do best – talk to other humans. For example, with Newton’s Thank You Letter feature, never before have recruiters been able to improve the candidate experience with so little manual work. For many years, the best practice literature has said that every candidate should get a Thank You Letter, yet probably less than 1% of company recruiters actually send them out. (We imagine that a decent percentage of the companies that do send these emails are mostly Newton customers . One click and recruiters are back to work and applicants are in the know and feeling more positive about your company.

We’re trying to figure out a way to automate meetings, but that may be a ways off.

Improve the candidate experience without creating extra work for your team with Newton’s Thank You Letter Feature

Stay in compliance and improve quality of hires by PROMOTING CONSISTENCY.

Translation: collect the right information all the time so nothing goes down on your watch

In a complex system, consistency is only achieved through discipline and a whole lot of practice. Newton fast-forwards user training because the decision process is as simple as “yes” or “no. Newton allows you to operate and manage a streamlined recruiting process that promotes consistency across all departments. Ultimately, consistency drives more than just efficiency or cost reductions, it’s also critical for promoting compliance. No matter what size recruiting program you’re running, recruiting is subject to government regulation and only Newton will help you capture all the essentials automatically.

Newton is like insurance for your recruiting program.

Stay in compliance by promoting consistency.  Newton is insurance for your recruiting program.

“Please contact support.” Makes you cringe, doesn’t it? At Newton we encourage people to contact support—by email or phone. No, I’m not kidding.

We call it “Support Driven Design”.  I’ll explain this concept in just a bit, but first I’d like to give you some background on how we came to believe that free technical support results in better recruiting software: it makes it easier to use, faster to deploy, and paradoxically, makes supporting your customers cost less (which in our case means we can sell our hiring software for less money).

In the beginning providing free technical support, like we do at Newton, appeared to be purely a business decision: giving away support makes the buying decision easier for people. We also didn’t have the time to build a big FAQ on our site, so we were pretty much required to do this personally anyway. On top of this, we also don’t like paying for support, or reading online help, and felt that we shouldn’t make our clients do something we don’t like to do. Today we think it was a good business decision, and an even better product one.

Of course we were warned.  The “old-school” software folks, whose advice we openly take and whose success we jealously admire, told us that providing free technical support was a bad idea. “You’re going to have to charge for it sooner or later because it will eat your margins,” “support is a profit center,” they’d say. We’ve always had a problem with authority…

Design the Question Out of the System

One of the first things we tell any customer at Newton is, “If you don’t understand something, no matter how small, it’s our fault, not yours. Let us know.” We ENCOURAGE technical support emails and phone calls. Again yes, I am being serious.

As a result, and contrary to what you might think, we are hardly ever asked to provide support. The net result of Support Driven Design has been that today we get less than 1 support question per year per customer, or about .01 questions for each user per year, a group of business users can be trained in 5 minutes, and a recruiter in a mind-numbing 30.

In the beginning, and still today, our product managers, i.e. the people responsible for designing Newton’s applicant tracking software, did all the walkthroughs, customer training, and provided all support. Without knowing it, we had started a “Support Driven” design shop. When we’d get a question from someone, we didn’t add it to the user manual, we’d think about how we could redesign Newton in such a way so that we didn’t have to answer the question again.

I think this has been more than a modest breakthrough for us. Instead of teaching people how to conform to our recruiting software, instead of an online hiring FAQ, we take each question and “design the question out of the system”.

For example, early on we had this bad “More Info” button that people overlooked. Since all support email came through my desk, as it does today, I answered the same question three times in one week, “Where do I find this <something>?” One of our customers actually apologized for asking me a “silly question”! Have we come this far? Do software users really think that it’s their fault for not understanding something? Clearly, it didn’t look like a button, and clearly it was our fault.  That week spelled the end of that button. Support questions: 0. Easier to use: 1.

The Tail Wags the Dog

Since we’ve never charged for support we’ve learned to appreciate that if we design a confusing feature we’re going to pay for it later. Since we don’t force people to an FAQ page, we know immediately when something isn’t working. The tail of support wags the dog of design: if you can’t charge for it, you better make it work right out of the box.

As a result, we often design a feature and say to ourselves, “we can’t do this, it will create support tickets.” This approach is not for everyone (especially for companies that get paid for making confusing software). It puts tremendous strain on our design process, and is the single greatest reason why it takes us 4 times longer to design (i.e. mockup, whiteboard, wireframe, etc.) a new feature than it does for our development team to build it.

The output of this also means that we can provide free training. We don’t like losing money any more than anyone else and if it took us 4 hours to train our customers, or 40 emails to answer their questions, we’d never be profitable. Free support: design the question out of the system + design rigor = easy training.

Maybe paid support is why one of the more common questions asked in an RFP is if we have an online FAQ. Think about that. Buyers are actually asking if you have a way NOT to help them. Our answer is simple, “just call us.” You might counter with, “well, I would like to just figure it out myself, without contacting support.” Tail wags the dog: you need an FAQ because the software is confusing, it is confusing because instead of designing your question out of the software, it was built into a support guide.

I think it is worth noting that people aren’t accustomed to this business model.  People actually apologize for “bothering me”.  One of the things we try hard for at Newton is to change this behavior, to “re-train” people (in 5 minutes or less, 30 minutes for recruiters <wink>) into believing that we aren’t doing them a favor for answering their questions, they’re doing us a favor by asking one. I think it speaks to just how far software has moved away from the user, and how far it has yet to go towards providing real productivity.

So the net result is that free support has led to less support. Like I mentioned before, we get about 1 support email per year, per client. I can’t imagine that Newton will ever have a technical support department that’s not run by our design team. Unfortunately, it’s gotten rather lonely over here in the support department. Can someone please contact support? Have I mentioned it’s free?

"We were not able to identify your contact e-mail address. Your login e-mail address will be used as your contact e-mail address instead. Please be aware that this contact e-mail address will be used to contact you."

The message above was sent to a prospective candidate from an applicant tracking system -not ours. This system is managing a fortune 500 company’s careers site.  Yikes! It can hardly be debated that enterprise software is way too complicated and for the most part, pretty thoughtless when it comes to user experience. The message above is a perfect example.  The expensive applications that businesses use to run their human resources are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a company that uses buinsess software or you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like apply to a job — or, heck, even look at a job on a corporate careers site — then you’ve probably encountered some really annoying user experiences.

How did we get here? Part of the problem may be that the people using enterprise software just don’t demand anything better. They think all business software has to be complicated – it’s all they’ve ever known. People have just been dealing with poorly-designed technology for so long that they internalize the flaws.  Maybe it’s that a lot of these systems, applicant tracking software particularly, are built for “power” users so thoughtful, consumer-like, usability concerns are sacrificed for massive amounts of options that ultimately “sell” the technology.  In the end, buyers do compare features and typically the software with the most features wins.  But, the question that constantly nags us is – Does the user win?  We think not.

Clearly, the real topic here, the usability of enterprise software, is a huge can of worms and I’m only scratching the surface of an increasingly incendiary topic.  I can tell you this though; the “error” message above actually encourages us. It’s evident that a majority of our peers that develop recruiting software ignore design / usability. We don’t. It’s also clear that buyers of software are increasingly eager to find well designed software that improves usability and ultimately makes their lives easier. We like this trend, it plays to our strengths.

Finally, we want to make a public promise.  We will NEVER send another human a message that doesn’t make any sense.  It’s the least we can do.