We get nerdy about figuring out ways to make people more efficient. So, we’re excited about the September release of Newton, our popular, easy-to-use applicant tracking software.
Newton has always been designed to provide users with helpful dashboards to tell the story of exactly what’s going on in your recruiting program. Now, with suggestions from of our user community, we’ve designed some features to surface more relevant information about jobs without polluting our best in class user interface.
Watch the video to learn more. Oh, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. More to come.
We’re super excited about our upcoming release due out September 10th. Over half of the new features are customer recommendations. Last month, we did a large performance release to ensure that Newton has the capacity and speed to keep up with our growing customer base (we’re serious about performance). September is all about cool new features. Our development team is working away at building and testing 10 great new additions to Newton. We’ve figured we’d give you a quick look at what’s to come.
We’ll release more details on the “Tracking” feature in a couple of days. It will be the only feature of it’s kind in the applicant tracking software world. In the meantime, think “Twitter feed” for your recruiting program.
Here’s a discrete preview of what’s on tap for September.
Last week, we introduced a new utility that enables Newton customers to design even more elegant, powerful careers sites – better places to visit so you can attract and engage candidates and make their first impression memorable.
The first company to take advantage of our newest careers site functionality is MarkLogic, a leading provider of information infrastructure software, serving industries including media, government, financial services, and others. MarkLogic is headquartered in San Carlos, California with field offices in New York, Washington, DC, London, Boston, Austin, and Frankfurt. The company is privately held with investors Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital. As a rapidly growing business, MarkLogic understands that creating a great applicant experience is a key differentiator and sets the tone for how seriously they take attracting the best talent.
For more information about how your company can leverage cutting-edge, easy-to-use applicant tracking software to create an amazing careers site like MarkLogic’s contact us.
Often times the terms used in software marketing aren’t that sexy. Take “performance release” for example. Doesn’t sound that cool huh? I agree. But, there’s a concept behind a performance release that’s actually pretty darn important.
This week, we released Newton v3.9.2.5. Our product team is referring to this as a large performance release. We in the marketing department like to call this a tune-up. This tune-up is significant for our users whether they know it or not. For most, Newton is a utility. Our customers rely on Newton. They need their applicant tracking software to be as reliable as possible. Acutely aware of this, we’re committed to constantly making Newton faster and more reliable. So, the features that we released during this development cycle are all geared towards making Newton work better.
Here are some highlights from Newton’s recent tune-up.
Newton response times dropped 50%.
Maximum concurrent users increase 240%.
Candidate Search response times were reduced by 60%.
We issued a press release today to announce that we’ve added over 50 new enhancements to Newton this week. All the new features in the latest release are designed to bolster adoption, further automate tasks, and promote consistency and process improvement. We’re told that this marks the largest release from any mid-market applicant tracking vendor so far this year. We’re also hearing from the analyst community that we have a far more aggressive release schedule than anyone in the HR technology industry. Our product team is aiming to release new enhancements to Newton about every 5 weeks.
It’s great to have new features in Newton and so far, the feedback from some of our nearly 100 customers has been extremely positive. But, the coolest part of this release is that over 60% of the enhancements were generated by our users. That is, we listened to the people that use Newton the most and want to improve the user experience for everyone.
We’re fired up to announce that we won the most substantive segment of the first annual HRtechnology(R) Ironman Competition hosted HR systems integrator, HRchitect. Four vendors including, Newton Software faced off against one another in a competition judged by panelists that preregistered for the event in order to learn more about mid-market applicant tracking software.
The event was comprised of 4 categories during which vendors were asked to showcase their advantages over the competition. We won the coveted “biking” segment which called on the vendors to feature technology, functionality, and usability. The event was a good opportunity for prospective ATS buyers to learn more about the strengths of all the vendors. And, this was a huge morale booster for us as we edged out companies that have been in the applicant tracking industry for 10+ years.
June is going to be a historic month around here. We’re on track to sign up our 100th customer and more surprising (to some), we’re launching an online employment application feature. The online application forms are part of a solution that we’ll give you more details about when we officially launch our newest product (essentially a new recruitment software product for a special vertical). How’s that for mysterious? In the meantime, organizations that want employment applications online – we’ve got’em.
What we can tell you is that the timing of our new features couldn’t be better. It’s undisputable. America’s entire labor pool is flocking to the internet for social interaction, play and, of course, to find jobs. But what about unskilled and manual labor jobs? Well, the majority of those positions are now online too and for good reason. Internet job boards have almost completely replaced traditional print advertisements and this trend will only continue, soon eliminating print job advertisements all together.
The “digital divide” in the US is shrinking at a remarkable rate. Thanks to the accessibility of broadband internet, $400 dollar personal computers, affordable hand-held computing devices and the widespread presence of computers in public spaces like libraries and state employment offices, more and more Americans are able to and prefer to conduct their job searches online. With more applicants online, companies that require manual, hourly, seasonal and unskilled labor must take steps to move recruitment processes online too -and fast. This starts with an online application process, the first mile to automating what has typically been an inefficient manual process.
We’ll leave it at that.
Here is a preview of Newton’s new online application form.
When we design features for Newton, we think first and foremost about what’s really going to help our users be more efficient. What can we do to automate those iterative tasks that cost people valuable time?
Phone screen requests, interview confirmations, request a writing sample, request references, give directions to the office, how many times have YOU written and sent the same email? Hundreds of times? Thousands? Well no more…
New to Newton is an email assistant that’s going to save you loads of time. Simply create a template for those repetitive emails, click the email button, choose your template, add people to the email and even copy people via drag and drop. Click Send and that’s it. Done.
This is just one of many features that we’ve designed to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up recruiters to do what recruiters do best – talk to other humans.
We’re testing the Newton Email Assistant and other great features now. They’ll be live is just a few short weeks.
He was the only one that picked Duke from the start and it paid off big for “Fabulous” Steve Fine, the winner of the 2010 Newton Software BBall Pick’em. Steve pretty much had the bracket wrapped up last week and he wasn’t afraid to let us know. He sent an email to the commissioner’s office on March 30th with a screen shot of the standings. He’d pulled away from the pack.
Steve is said to be traveling this week and was unavailable for comment this morning. But, a spokesman for Mr. Fine sent us a picture of Steve celebrating this morning and enclosed the following video. Watch for Steve 30 seconds into the video and then again at 44 seconds. Steve Fine takes his sports seriously. Congratulations to Steve Fine and thanks to everyone that participated.
We’ve moved! Newton Software’s new home is a former fire station, built in 1907 with bricks from the rubble of the Great Earthquake of 1906. Once the home of the San Francisco Underwriter’s Fire Patrol, a privately financed fire battalion sponsored by insurance companies, the building was a working station until 1943. The station was also the first to receive a motorized fire patrol wagon in 1911, an American LaFrance, registry #25, Type 5 with a 4 cylinder 50 HP engine.
While we’ve only moved 7 blocks from our former HQ, we’re excited to be in a new neighborhood. Our new home is located directly behind the SFMOMA and we’re only one block from the Moscone Convention Center and Yerba Buena Gardens. Also, rumor has it that we’re only a half a block from the nearest kimchi burrito. This is important.
We issued a 
We’re fired up to announce that we won the most substantive segment of the first annual HRtechnology(R) 
