Over the past weeks, I’ve gotten a chance to see the latest and greatest inside of Workday Recruiting. There have been some amazing transformations happening over the past 18 months or so with the product. The obvious acquisition of HiredScore and the launch of their own CRM product, Candidate Engagement. These two alone make the product look and feel drastically different, in an excellent way.
Big HCM recruiting modules get a bad rap for being slow to adapt to new technology. What’s usually not said with that is there are very good reasons for this. You’re talking about a client base that is the most prominent brands and employers across the planet. They tend to only work with proven commodities in everything they do. These products tend to hold a lot of weight from the sheer market size they’ve captured. They have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of users globally. For so many, this is the only window in talent acquisition technology they’ll ever have.
What’s new and what did I like?
- When you combine Workday Recruiting, Candidate Engagement (their internal CRM product), and HiredScore (a recent acquisition with deep integrations), the technology you see feels and acts very Best-of-Breed-like.
- Candidate Engagement is much more candidate marketing automation than a full-blown CRM. This is a very good thing. It’s a product that recruiters can easily use in their daily work. There is no need for a full recruitment marketing team to run a CRM.
- The HiredScore piece will make Workday Recruiting stand alone amongst their large enterprise recruiting tech competitors. They now have full match capabilities within the internal database with “Fetch”, and clients using it are seeing almost unbelievable hiring increases from it. Like 75% of hires come from their own active past candidates. Time to fill dropping by half. Improved source accuracy near 100%. All these metrics immediately speak to a speedy ROI on the tech being used.
- The Workday Screen of Death (Create a profile screen) will soon be going away! Workday is launching social sign-on later this year across all of their clients. Again, haters will ask why this took so long. The reality is, with almost 5,000 clients globally, any seemingly small change has major ripples.
- Like any big recruiting product, each client has to build it out as will work best for them. What I saw with the combination of products is a recruiting platform that a recruiter would live and work in on a daily basis, without the need to have to log into other technology to be effective and efficient.
- As you can imagine, the Workday Recruiting roadmap is loaded with AI and Agentic AI. They are adding a Conversational AI Assistant, which leads me to believe they want to capture some of that high-volume hiring that many of their clients have layered in Paradox for. They have an Agentic Recruiting Coach in the works that will do much of the Agent recruiting automation we are seeing from many best-of-breed players. And many more types of recruiting specific use agents in development. Workday is extremely conscious about AI ethics and governance. You can assume they’ll take a little more time to ensure their clients are 100% confident using the AI that is being launched and developed in-house.
The big HCM recruiting modules continue to grab more market share. The use of these technologies is almost inevitable if you work in large enterprise organizations, and we are increasingly seeing mid-enterprise organizations also make the moves towards this big tech.
I rarely see Workday make fast decisions or make wrong decisions. They know who they are, and they know their clients’ needs. It was nice to see the movement that has been made on the recruiting product side and the very detailed roadmap they have in front of them. I think the talent acquisition users of Workday have a bright future ahead.
(For the folks who believe I’m saying all this because Workday is paying me, sorry, that isn’t the case. I’m just a recruiting tech nerd who likes seeing progress, and I think the Workday Recruiting product team genuinely cares about delivering good stuff.)
The problem isn’t their technology, it’s their partnership. I’ve worked with so many different TA products over decades, and they are by far the single worst partner for a TA shop. It’s a shame and an embarrassment for them. All the great tech in the world will not improve performance without a true partnership model with their customers, but that’s not their model.
It’s interesting. I think people tend to look at the big HCMs and just one connected company, but these are giant platforms with so many products. In Workday’s case, their recruitment product has had giant growth, so it’s hard to onboard and take care of that many clients, really well, when you’re growing so fast. We see it all the time with point solutions that take off. Honestly, WD recruiting isn’t that different from that aspect. You expect those growing pains.