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.”
Translation: Simplify.
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 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.”
“You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin’”
Bob Dylan
The Fishbowl
A couple of weeks ago I learned that my co-workers call the office that I share with our CEO, “The Fishbowl”. The Fishbowl is the nerve center of Newton Software. Given our small footprint, the Fishbowl acts as the design studio, front office, communications center and test lab. Sometimes our co-workers might say it more resembles an ultimate fighting iron cage, or a badger den, but for now we’ll leave it at The Fishbowl.
A while back, I started keeping a tally on my whiteboard in The Fishbowl. Often, during phone calls, I will get up and place a mark or two under some jibber that I had previously written. Over the last 2 quarters, my scrawl has roughly tripled in size, now infecting a second large grease-board. It now is directly juxtaposed with a neatly-written product roadmap owned by my office mate. Admittedly, the walls in our office now have a pop culture “Odd Couple” look to it.
As the VP of Marketing and Sales and general front-man for Newton Software, I spend a great majority of my time speaking with HR and corporate staffing professionals about recruiting and hiring. I also have the pleasure of spitballing with notable recruiting bloggers, industry analysts and other technology vendors in the recruiting-sphere.
Undeniably, the recent economic train wreck has brought a new sobriety to town and with it some pervasive emerging themes. And while I don’t profess to be a recruiting software industry Nostradamus, I can share with you some recent observations from my varied conversations over the past 2 quarters. Clearly, there is shift occurring and believe it or not, this shift means good things are ahead for people that buy (recruiting) software.
Here are the trends that I believe are here to stay even when, once again, the economy improves and hiring becomes a front-burner issue.
My 3 Emerging Trends:
1. Easy Does It.
I would have called this trend, “a return to simplicity”, but as far as I can tell, recruiting software has never really known simplicity. 90% of the people that I speak with are looking for a “simple and easy” system that offers them the capabilities to improve the process of recruiting, without headaches.
I believe that this quest for easy and simple is a reaction to stress created by people being asked to do more with less. No one that I speak with has time for complexity right now. They don’t have time to learn, tweak and teach others another new system. They’ve got a lot of other things on their plate, and they can’t relearn a software application when hiring is turning on and off every few months (or weeks).
For example, I spoke with an HR manager named Patty the other day who is basically doing 3 jobs. “I am the office manager, HR manager, and recruiting coordinator. Right now I am getting hundreds of resumes a week that I need to open, make sure they are not duplicates and then forward to the managers. All I need to know is if your system can help me get some control and save me time somewhere?” I hear things like this all of the time, and everyone asks for the same thing, “Will I be able to use it, tomorrow?”
Obviously the movement away from complexity and toward simplicity has been going on for some time, well before the recession. But the recession has really made us all focus on what makes us, and our businesses, more efficient. It’s kind of like stubbing your toe. The first time you stub your toe, it hurts. The second time it hurts 10 times more. The economic meltdown was the first stub, and anything that makes us inefficient or slows us down from here is likely to bring us to our knees. In these tough times software vendors should be listening to their customers and innovating. In the end, this will be good for the software industry as a whole.
2. I Need this to Work, Now.
In 2007, when we started offering beta versions of Newton®, “deep customization” was high on our customers’ lists of requirements. In the past year, this request has become nearly non-existent.
Now this is entirely contrary to a recent poll on ATS (applicant tracking systems) I read, so I should explain. I would like to call it a little bit of the “tail wagging the dog”. If you sell software without a good recruiting process built in, then you MUST make it deeply customizable. If you’re a software company without HR people and recruiters guiding your product design, then it MUST be customizable, because you don’t know the challenges faced by your audience (your customers).
Most buyers that I speak with are being asked to spend less on sourcing, recruiting agencies and to cut advertising budgets, while still providing service to multiple teams that demand fast service. Clearly, the “here’s a tool, now build your own” approach won’t work for them. I believe that this trend is characterized by buyers seeking software that helps them do their job better, instead of software tools that they must “teach” how to solve their problems. “We need to fill these before we lose budget,” is a common refrain. These buyers I talk to don’t have time to wait for long customization process: they have a couple of openings, and they need them filled fast. Instead of a hammer, they need a house.
I get this a lot; “Let me be honest, we don’t have much of a recruiting process.” In some companies, the people that used to own and drive recruiting aren’t there anymore (often due to budget cuts). And, truth be told, there are many companies that have never had much of a recruiting process to speak of. People from these camps are looking for best-of-breed software that already has a powerful process built-in. “Our core competency is making renewable energy accessible, not recruiting. I just need something that works,” remarked an operations manager during a recent meeting. Custom software for these companies is like a birthday present without the batteries.
I would like to add that I don’t just see this shift in recruiting software, either. Just the other day one of our customers asked if we could recommend “Newton-like” performance review software. She wanted something that “would just solve the problem so that I don’t have to build this process myself.” More and more, software vendors are building innovative “point solutions” to optimize business processes providing more options and ultimately better software for consumers. It’s about time.
3. Come On! Make it cost less and take the handcuffs off. I am a customer.
Captain Obvious at your service: The recent financial meltdown has put an emphasis on thriftiness. All enterprises, even oil companies, are looking for ways to shave costs. Buyers that I speak with have no choice; they are short-staffed, under-budgeted and forced to do more with less in the most uncertain conditions of their lives.
So what’s the trend? Economizing? That’s part of it and very well could be the biggest driving force. But, what I find really interesting is that some software companies are structuring their businesses to entice cost-conscious buyers. And, potentially even more interesting is how this trend may turn the business of enterprise software on its ear.
Many progressive software companies, across all industries, are offering “Friction-Free” buying programs to attract and retain customers. These programs are highlighted by simple tiered-pricing models, free trial periods, pay-as-you-go-contracts and non-punitive cancelation policies. The reduced risks help buyers get purchases approved easily.
(As a side note, this new model for software pricing forces vendors to build better software because they don’t force people into long term contracts: if the software isn’t good, you cancel.)
Convoluted pricing hides the elephant in the closet behind long-term contracts. “With our current software every time I want to do something, like add a user, or increase our job limit I’m forced to call someone and pay a fee.” Or, “We tried to lower our user limit because we aren’t hiring as much, but they wouldn’t let us. When our term expires we’re going to cancel.” I hear these complaints almost every day, and the recession will be the end of this: the elephant has charged and is bowling over these anti-customer business models. Fair pricing is coming, for some buyers it has arrived, and it will benefit all consumers long after the recession is over.
Walk the Walk
As you can imagine, most trends are interconnected. Fatigued by complicated products, failed implementations and archaic pricing methods, buyers of recruiting software are seeking innovative products delivered with dynamic terms of service. I speak with at least 10 companies a week that are looking to move away from their legacy recruiting software and I can only guess that this will accelerate as the economy improves. With better access to information and the creation of easy-to-use products offered with friction-free buying programs, consumers are more empowered than ever to shift allegiances from one vendor to another. And with modern systems, companies can easily move information from one system to another without incurring significant IT headaches and extended service outages.
Undoubtedly, the way business software is designed and delivered is changing and it must continue to change to satisfy the evolving demands of buyers. Recruiting software vendors will need to examine how they develop and deliver their wares. And this brings me to why the recession will end up being good for you, the buyers of software. When it comes time to start buying again, you’ll for the first time have better choices: ease of use, built in intelligence, and fair pricing.
“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.