I’ve said this before, and I’ll say most likely forever: I do not hate large HCM recruiting modules (e.g., Workday, Oracle, SAP, etc.). If you run a large enterprise HR shop, you’ll probably be using one of these products. That’s reality. The best HR and TA leaders leverage the vast power of these systems and build around the gaps to make a world-class stack. So can you.
Workday has purposely been filling its gaps on the recruiting side and is becoming an all-encompassing recruiting platform that users were hoping for when it launched years ago. The average enterprise-level TA stack has between 10 and 25 pieces of add-on technology, so no one ever really should have thought they would only have one product to begin with. But that reality is getting closer every quarter.
The Big News!
This week, Workday announced it will acquire HiredScore. A best-of-breed talent orchestration system (A what?!). Basically, HiredScore fills a gap in Workday Recruiting around AI-based candidate matching, talent rediscovery, and mitigating bias in selection, and has a lot of increased data capabilities in TA. HiredScore takes your requisitions and automatically matches it across all of your talent pools, not just your ATS database, accelerating your recruiting team. It’s a huge get for Workday and Workday Recruiting clients. HiredScore was one of the top recruiting technologies in the world. This is not a big old, vanilla recruiting module type of move!
On top of that, Workday is launching Paradox/Olivia careersite widget on every single Workday Recruiting client careersite. In Workday’s 24R1 Release, they will be adding the Paradox AI Chatbot (Olivia) to the Workday external career site. This feature requires that a customer is both a Workday and Paradox customer but will allow their joint customers to use the chatbot for chat to apply and Q&A, making it easier for candidates to find and apply for job opportunities. Honestly, this is as big of a move as the HiredScore acquisition. Almost all of the top Workday Recruiting shops had both HiredScore and Paradox implemented, and now every Workday Recruiting customer will have this access.
Workday isn’t saying this, but I would not be surprised if, at some point in the near future, Paradox is the next acquisition. Paradox is a much bigger buy than HiredScore, but it aligns very well with the Workday Recruiting technology and fills a major gap around high-volume. This just seems to make sense for Workday. Paradox is growing like crazy and every single large enterprise shop that is doing high-volume is either using Paradox, looking at Paradox, or looking at one of their competitors.
While Workday Recruiting is also launching bi-directional texting this quarter, which seems to have been a long time coming, products like Paradox would elevate the SMS and messaging ability of Workday almost immediately. Workday also has launched its version of recruiting CRM, and it’s not necessarily the full-blown CRM we think of, like Beamery, Avature, etc. The Workday Recruiting CRM was purposely built to be used daily by recruiters. It’s more recruitment marketing automation than full CRM, and I honestly think that’s what most recruiters prefer.
Over the past five years, we’ve seen enterprise TA shops buy and implement CRM only to decide to change to another once their three contract was up and then just repeat the cycle. This is partly a CRM problem, and them selling a product that is complex but not setting up the buyer for success. CRMs are complex technologies that need full-time staff to run them. It’s not a product that your recruiters will probably sit and use daily. Workday’s CRM is actually something your recruiters will use daily because it’s light and intuitive enough for them to launch campaigns quickly and go on about their day.
Five years ago, I would have said Workday Recruiting is what it is. It’s a big, giant requisition system used by enterprise TA shops that won’t break but also won’t be feature-rich. It was a necessary evil of a large enterprise HCM module. Today, Workday Recruiting is making big moves to become a recruiting technology that has competitive advantages over its competition but also pushes the best-of-breed market.
Kudos to the Workday Recruiting team for keeping their heads down and delivering on the vision they had. Large enterprise software doesn’t move fast. It can’t. Their are too many variables and risks at play, but when they get it right, it’s extremely powerful.