Why Workday Recruiting Puts Mobile First

Working with our design-partner customers to build Workday Recruiting from scratch provides us the unique ability to develop an application that’s designed for the way people work today, with the flexibility to adapt to how they’ll work in the future. As I wrote in my previous blog post “Recruiting is a Team Sport,” traditional applicant tracking systems were developed for compliance, not for helping hiring managers and recruiters collaborate quickly and effectively to hire the best people they can. Now I’ll share a critical design philosophy guiding the development of this upcoming addition to the Workday Human Capital Management suite that sets it apart from other recruiting applications: a mobile-first approach.

The reason for our mobile-first approach is simple—the hiring process does not take place at a desk. The most fundamental aspects of recruiting, including sourcing candidates, sharing those prospects with hiring teams, nurturing top candidates, and even making the offer, take place between meetings or while people are “on the go.” Throughout this process, speed is of the essence. That’s why everything managers and recruiters require to expedite the hiring process should be at their fingertips, on one device and in one quick, easy-to-use app.

We’re adding to that mobility some powerful capabilities, including access to the entire talent pool (both internal and external candidates) as part of the unified Workday HCM suite, the ability to onboard new hires, and the ability to drill down into actionable workforce planning analytics, providing our customers with an incredibly powerful cloud-based application that’s accessible from wherever they happen to be.

What does it mean to develop for mobile first? Here’s a look at some of the things we’ve been focused on in Workday Recruiting:

• Simplicity and delight. Workday Recruiting will include the most essential information, in the simplest way, with the opportunity to delight. It’s not about words on a screen; it’s about enjoying the recruiting experience. Since the smartphone is the smallest form factor among mobile devices, we’ve avoided what might be the traditional approach, which is to start with the desktop interface and figure out what to take away. Rather, our approach is to start with the smartphone interface and determine what essential information the user must have on it without losing simplicity. Then, is that information enough to make decisions and be productive? If not, what else can be added without getting away from simplicity and delight? It’s a fine and careful balance we’ve been working hard to achieve. Most importantly, we are not shoehorning a traditional desktop experience into a mobile UI.
• A great candidate experience. The people you want to attract are likely looking at job opportunities and communicating with potential employers on their mobile devices. That engagement should be positive, consistent, and rich with capabilities and information. Workday Recruiting will serve up our customers’ career sites utilizing our responsive design, supporting strong engagement with candidates and enhancing their recruiting experiences regardless of the devices they use.
• Mobile analytics. Hiring managers and recruiters require headcount planning, job requisition, and pipeline management analytics for complete insight into internal and external hiring pools from wherever they are and wherever they go. They should not have to pull up spreadsheets on a desktop to gain this information (and as we’ve all experienced, spreadsheets often contain outdated information). The ability to unify information among our cloud applications and deliver actionable insights and analytics on mobile devices using real-time data is unique to Workday, and made possible by the way we’ve made the object model core to our system architecture. Our object model is a tremendous benefit in our development of Workday Recruiting, as its flexibility allows us to think about relations among data and different ways we can serve up unified Workday HCM and Recruiting data on mobile devices to deliver the insights people are most interested in having.

Our customers have been very enthusiastic with their views about what would make Workday Recruiting great, and the need to make mobile a top priority has come through loud and clear. We can’t wait to put our solution in their hands to help them find the very best talent for their organizations.