Category Archives: Workday

Workday Recruiting is making Big moves!

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Who is in your circle of Care?

Posted on by
1

I was on the Workday Ventures analyst call yesterday and they had one of their new venture partner companies, Wellthy, and their CEO, Lindsay Jurist-Rosner, on to discuss her company and experience, etc.

Wellthy is a fascinating company, especially when you take into context the current demographics of the U.S., and really all industrialized countries. Wellthy is a digital care concierge service. Think about taking care of aging parents and how you have to deal with the logistics and administrative burden on top of everything else. This is where Wellthy steps in and helps families with this burden.

Lindsay said something profound that stuck with me in terms of how they look at each family and their ability to care for their family: “Who is in your circle of care?” Meaning, when you need help, who are those who will take care of you. What her company finds is it’s almost always the parents. For so many people, this is problematic and that problem is growing as we live longer and a larger portion of the population ages.

It’s not just helping to take care of aging parents, although that is a giant issue, it’s also how we care for our own children, or extended family with needs, maybe even a close friend or neighbor who relies on us (their circle of care).

I’ve written before about how helpful my personal board of directors has been to me over my career with big decisions. I never thought about my circle of care!

Can you write down your circle of care network?

Immediately I have my wife. She’s the CEO of the Timmy circle of care network. I would also put in my Dad, even though he’s about to turn 80, if something happened to me, he would do whatever he could to care for me. My three sons would also be in there, but honestly, until this moment, I never even thought of them in that context. But they are adults and if something happened I know they would gladly find me a home! (just kidding – they wouldn’t be happy about the price and money being taken out of the estate!)

Beyond family, I have my co-workers that probably know more about my medical issues than most of my family. I mean we spend so much time together, so I’m guessing they would also be considered part of that circle of care. I have some neighbors and friends that would help out in a pinch from time to time, as I would do that for them as well.

As I write all of this down, god damn, I’m a pretty lucky person. I can count on a lot of people in my circle of care.

Unfortunately, most of our employees aren’t so lucky. Many have almost no one that they could count on within their circle of care. This is why Wellthy and this type of technology are growing quickly within the HR Tech landscape. We no longer live in a world where we can expect to keep their personal lives at home and not have it impact their work life. So, the best companies will find ways to support an employee’s circle of care.

It’s interesting if you think about it, at every age we need care and support. Some of us are lucky to have that robust circle of care along the way, but many will never have it, or have it and lose it, or not have it and gain it. All of our employees will be at different levels of support, no matter their age, gender, ethnicity, etc. As health care issues are taking a national stage currently, it’s important for us as leaders to rethink how we are supporting our employees and their wellbeing.

The Weekly Dose: @Workday Ups its Game in Belonging and Diversity!

Posted on by
3

Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at Workday’s recent announcement about their new product offerings around Diversity and Inclusion. If 2020 has done anything, it’s brought the conversation of diversity and inclusion to the forefront like never before in organizations. Many HR tech companies have been working on products in this space for a while, but few will have the impact of Workday’s new VIBE Central and VIBE Index.

One of the largest issues faced by organizations in moving the needle around having employees feel a sense of belonging, as well as broader D&I issues, is those front-line leaders and above never truly felt like they had the data to help them make the right decisions. So, we mostly just tried to make change by gut feel and subjective data that was constantly changing.

Workday’s VIBE (Value, Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity) Central brings all diversity- and inclusion-related data into one centralized place in Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), enabling organizations to set goals and then monitor progress against those goals. Businesses can assess, measure, benchmark, and manage diversity and inclusion by the dimensions of their choice, such as race/ethnicity and gender. For example, VIBE Central could surface that 10 percent of women in the organization have been promoted in the last three years; in addition, benchmark data could show that promotions for women are well below the median of 50th percentile, which may be 20 percent, for peer companies in the same industry.

Organizations can benefit from the ability to assess talent management, talent development, and employee experience for key factors including:

  • Hiring. Organizations can better understand if hiring practices are balanced or if one group is over- or under-represented.
  • Promotions. Business leaders can look at metrics to determine if their promotion process is inclusive and then view a succession report to gauge if they are planning in an equitable way.
  • Leadership. Companies can look at leadership/management levels and succession planning to compare planning to the actual diversity of management and to see if diversity drops off from one management level to the next—which may indicate a need for more targeted development.
  • Attrition. If hiring and promotion practices are helping to increase diversity overall but there’s a high rate of voluntary attrition for that diverse talent, HR leaders may need to focus on belonging and inclusion.

VIBE Index (being released to Workday customer in Q1 2021) empowers HR leaders to set a B&D strategy and create a tailored plan aimed at driving positive outcomes. It will measure the relative performance and outcomes of an organization’s efforts across talent acquisition, talent development, leadership development, employee experience, and workplace culture to deliver a heat map that identifies the highest opportunity for positive change, as well as a VIBE Index score for overall workplace equity.

VIBE Index will allow organizations and leaders to have real-time diversity data, to ensure that progress is being made to the plans and goals. For too long organizational leaders have been making strategic D&I decisions with dated and insufficient data, many times that wasn’t even their own. VIBE Index changes this completely. Your own plan. Your own goals. Your own data. Belonging and D&I isn’t the same for all, it’s very specific to your organization and your culture, and your strategy and data should reflect that.

Workday is drinking its own Kool-aid, as well. Workday’s Chief Diversity Officer, Carin Taylor, announced a bunch of initiatives that Workday will be taking on including:

  • Increase overall representation of Black and Latinx employees in the U.S. by 30% by 2023.
  • Double the number of Black and Latinx leaders in the U.S. by 2023.
  • Invest 25,000 hours in training over the next year to help ensure all people leaders can attract, recruit, hire, and advance employees of all backgrounds.
  • Help ensure less than a 3% difference in belonging for all Workmates across all demographics (as measured by the Great Place to Work questions that power the belonging outcome of our VIBE IndexTM).
  • Infuse VIBE into how we think about and act on our Workday core values.
  • Invest 150,000 hours in career development programs and education that increase visibility and opportunity for Black and Latinx talent over the next year.
  • Donate $10 million, as previously announced, to social justice initiatives over the next year.
  • Create opportunities for Workmates to contribute 250,000 hours toward mentoring and skills-based volunteering in communities around the globe by 2023.
  • Accelerate Opportunity Onramps hiring to fill 20% of our early to mid-career full-time roles by 2023.

No small plan! I love it when organizations put it in black and white. Yes, there is some risk you don’t meet all of your goals, but it’s how real change happens!