Workday makes enterprise cloud applications for human resources and finance and recently announced the addition of Workday Recruiting, an end-to-end application to manage the find, engage and selection process for candidates for open positions. Built from the ground up, the application is claimed to seamlessly integrate with Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) to handle everything from sourcing of suitable candidates to successful employment of talent.
Workday claims that its solution creates a clearly defined, and manageable pipeline for hiring teams and team leaders. Aproximately 70 companies have already started working with Workday Recruiting, including Equifax, McKee Foods, and Noble Drilling Services.
“Workday Recruiting looks, feels, and functions unlike anything in the market, because it was built to benefit every person involved in the hiring process. Whether it’s an applicant on the bus, a manager at their desk, or an executive in the boardroom, the application enables candidates and hiring teams to take action no matter where they are,” said Leighanne Levensaler, vice president of human capital management products, Workday. “Workday Recruiting is woven into the fabric of Workday HCM – seamlessly a part of all people practices and analytics, including the ability to source and nurture internal and external talent, while offering full transparency into workforce planning.”
Forbes is bullish on this product:
First, many Workday customers use third party products for recruitment (many use Oracle) and often have millions of dollars invested in these platforms. While these products work well, most customers want a solution that is easier to use, more collaborative, and more unified with internal talent processes, which they can now buy from Workday. If Workday executes well, the market for non-Workday recruiting software among Workday customers will dry up.
Second, for companies considering a new HR or talent management platform, this announcement puts Workday in a more favorable competitive position. I’ve talked with many companies who chose Oracle or SuccessFactors because of their end-to-end talent applications. While Workday still does not have an LMS, the availability of recruitment makes Workday a more competitive talent management vendor.
Third, this announcement accelerates the end of the “standalone applicant tracking market” for large enterprises. Oracle (Taleo – the market leading ATS) now bundles its ATS as part of its ERP solution and IBM (Kenexa – another market leading ATS) now includes its ATS as part of its integrated Talent Suite. SuccessFactors (SAP), Infor, PeopleFluent, Sum Total, SilkRoad, CornerstoneOnDemand, Halogen, Saba, and most other talent management software providers now have integrated recruiting systems. This forces the remaining standalone ATS vendors (companies like Jobvite, SmartRecruiters) to focus on mid-market and mid-sized enterprises.
(Remember that nearly every company with more than 100 employees needs recruitment software, so the mid-market remains enormous with lots of opportunities for growth.)
Fourth, a new recruitment ecosystem will be created. There are hundreds of assessment, background checking, advertising, search, mobile recruiting, and analytics vendors in this market. As of today, these vendors will see Workday as an important new platform. They will shift resources toward Workday, driving innovation on the Workday platform.
Acquiring talent, particularly in technology areas of your business, is a highly competitive market. Furthermore, with the advent of social media and sites like LinkedIn, the process has become disjointed and frankly, a mess for all but a handful of large organizations that are geared up for aggressive recruitment.
Often, companies don’t get time to fully vet or manage the recruitment process of technology talent because they are facing a time crunch to bring on any candidate with the minimal skills required to get the job done.
That is why recruitment and staffing firms have become so prevalent, both leveraging the social web to recruit and, often, poach talent, as well as marketing themselves aggressively to potential employers. It’s been a bit of gold rush.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this particular approach ends up being perceived by other HR application vendors. The ideal solution is not one just aimed at the enterprise, but a SaaS based product that meets the needs of the SMB where the greatest recruitment costs occur as a portion of total HR spending.
