Recruiting is a Team Sport

After we announced our plans to add Workday Recruiting to our Human Capital Management suite in November, I received dozens of emails from excited customers asking how they could help as we proceeded with development. We were very encouraged by the reaction to our plans, yet not necessarily surprised by it.

It was our customers, after all, who told us their current recruiting systems are not meeting their needs. Traditional recruiting applications—or applicant tracking systems (ATS)—are isolated and disconnected from all other HR functions. Designed for compliance, those systems don’t support managers’ ability to easily share referrals or to find and learn about internal candidates, and are disconnected from the new hire onboarding process. They’re also complex and hard to use, which is why information about candidates and the overall talent pipeline is more likely to be found in spreadsheets and email on managers’ laptops than in the ATS. It’s ironic that what was intended to be a repository of information for recruiting has become a system best avoided.

Customers told us the antidote would be an application that is simple, accessible, and unified with their core human capital management processes. This made a lot of sense to us, and is consistent with Workday’s approach to provide customers with one global, unified system for all data and business processes related to HR and finance.

Equally important to our customers is the need for a system that supports their view of the recruiting function itself as one that includes not just recruiters, but also hiring managers and employees. Full participation and collaboration across the process is essential for filling all roles with the best talent possible. And while recruiting has essentially become a team sport at these organizations, current systems don’t support that view, leaving many team members isolated and lacking the insight they crave.

One area that demands greater insight is the availability of potential internal candidates for open positions. By having world-class recruiting functionality as part of Workday HCM, hiring teams will have direct visibility into internal talent’s skills, interests, aspirations, and even more nuanced information, such as willingness to travel or relocate to a new region. They’ll be able to find, share, follow, and provide feedback on both internal and external candidates.

This approach supports a fluid, perpetual cycle that begins with workforce planning, moves on to sourcing, and ultimately hiring and onboarding of new hires.

We are thrilled with how our customers have partnered with us on Workday Recruiting to date. Together, as a team, we hope to set a new standard for recruiting applications.