We’ve all heard the recent hype about cloud computing. From competing Microsoft and Google commercials to Apple’s recent iCloud deployment, there certainly is a lot of buzz about ‘the cloud.’ What exactly IS the cloud though, and more specifically, what impact does cloud computing have on human resources and corporate recruiting?
The cloud essentially means taking all the IT and software infrastructure off a company’s hands and placing it in the capable hands of a cloud computing provider. Most often, a provider is a large company, like Amazon, that has the server infrastructure and technical expertise to handle the needs of millions of business customers. A company like Amazon can agilely deploy servers in order to maximize efficiency and provide customers the throughput they need for their product or service at any given time.
So why is the cloud good, specifically for human resources departments? The cloud means cost efficiency, security, and dependability. Think about utilizing cloud computing like you would think about hiring any other specialist. Let’s say you needed some carpentry done – you’d obviously hire a carpenter. If you hired a plumber to do the job, he’d likely take longer, cost more and provide an inferior service.
Using Amazon or another cloud computing provider, essentially means hiring a specialist for your company or product’s software and IT infrastructure. They can get the job done as efficiently as possible because they have the resources to do so. They’re also often a massive company (like Amazon) that places the utmost responsibility in providing their cloud customers with maximum security and dependable server uptime. After-all, it’s the cloud provider’s business to make sure your business is up and running at all hours.
Hreonline recently published an article that highlights the proliferation of cloud computing as well as Software as a Service (SaaS) in the HR industry. John Malikowski of Deloitte Consulting provided an insightful quote within the piece: “We have seen a lot of business cases and implementations where CIOs, CFOs and top HR executives all are getting involved,” he says. “The cost savings are there, and total cost of ownership is now more than ever a big part of the business case for HR. Also, usability and intuitiveness are high. SaaS and cloud computing just work.”
Essentially, companies that take advantage of cloud computing can pass that advantage onto their customers. This means passing on cost-efficiency, scalability, access and dependability. Newton Software does just that by leveraging Amazon’s AWS cloud computing environment for our SaaS application.
Newton’s customer can easily deploy the best applicant tracking solution on the market in a matter of days and hours, never weeks or months. Not only is the software deployment refreshingly uncomplicated, but the software can be accessed on-demand from any computer, anywhere, anytime and from any browser or platform. Newton provides an affordable, subscription-based pricing structure that can be scaled up and down based on customer’s size and demand, just like cloud servers can be deployed based on that same demand. Newton’s application security is backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation whose public stock depends on this very reliability.
We’ve worked hard to establish Newton as an innovator in a space that has for nearly two decades has been purely focused on what we refer to as the feature arms race. 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 human resources departments, hiring managers’ cubes and executives’ minds.
This is why Newton Software is proud to be a cloud computing pioneer for applicant tracking software. We provide businesses and human resources departments the efficiency, dependability and security that cloud computing is all about.
In today’s always-online world, consumers utilize reviews for almost everything. Whether it’s locating the best pizza spot in Boulder, CO or finding a recommended place to stay on TripAdvisor people like to know what their peers have to say about a product or service before they jump into it.
The same goes for business software. Any human resources leader, corporate recruiting manger or company executive knows that an important purchasing decision needs to be properly vetted through research. Part of this research naturally must involve investigating what other similar business leaders are saying about a product or service.
This is especially true when moving forward with an applicant tracking software platform. At Newton we know that any potential customer wants to know “why Newton?” In other words: what makes Newton’s applicant tracking solution the best choice, and what do our customers have to say about the product and our team’s ability to deploy Newton quickly to any sized organization? It only makes sense to have these questions answered before moving forward with an applicant tracking solution.
For that reason, we’ve asked a couple of our customers to review their experience with Newton. Although these applicant tracking reviews are fully downloadable as PDFs on our Why Newton page, we’d like to highlight a few of them over the next couple of months through the Newton blog.
For this entry of Newton’s applicant tracking software reviews, we’ll concentrate on what customers had to say about getting started and setup with Newton Software:
Hannah Adams, a human resources manager, let us know how easy it was to get Newton setup in the first place: “I was definitely pleasantly surprised about how easy Newton was to get started with and how well integrated it is into our own website.”
Other customers like Brandon Thurman, a technical recruiter, spoke of Newton’s implementation simplicity: “Newton’s implementation process was very simple. Since it is operated as a software as a service, it is as easy as logging on to the site. Newton’s implementation team was helpful in establishing a foundation for us to work off of; including loading our jobs, current candidates, etc.”
Ro Carbone, a VP of Human Resources, put an exclamation point on the applicant tracking reviews with her experience in getting started with Newton: “Never has so little expended effort brought so much benefit!”
It’s not surprising that Newton’s customers are extremely satisfied with Newton’s activation methodology. After all, unlike our peers’ software, the Newton recruiting platform is designed around its deployment model. We make every effort to build Newton to be easy-to-use and intuitive and therefore easy to deploy to customers of all sizes.
We believe that a customer’s experience getting started with a product is reflective of the product as a whole. We’re glad our efforts to achieve this are apparent through what our customers are saying about the setup process.
Our next applicant tracking review entry will focus on what people are saying about Newton’s customer service – stay tuned!
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.
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.”
We’ve all heard the recent hype about cloud computing. From competing Microsoft and Google commercials to Apple’s recent iCloud deployment, there certainly is a lot of buzz about ‘the cloud.’ What exactly IS the cloud though, and more specifically, what impact does cloud computing have on human resources and corporate recruiting?
