Workday is expanding its competitive assault against Oracle and SAP with the general availability of Workday Recruiting, an application for finding the most qualified internal and external job candidates.
Development began on Workday Recruiting 18 months ago, but customers had been asking for the application for years, said Leighanne Levensaler, vice president of HCM (human capital management) products.
Workday Recruiting represents "a significant investment" for the company and "serves the needs of the entire recruiting team," she added. "Not just the recruiter, but the hiring manager as well as interview team members."
Many companies have multiple "disjointed" systems for various aspects of the recruiting process, Levensaler said. Workday Recruiting's integration with the company's core human resources application will allow customers to "knock out many of those point solutions," she added.
Workday Recruiting provides a business-process framework that makes possible it to tweak a hiring process to suit a particular company's preferences and culture.
It also makes life easier for applicants, Levensaler said.
For example, internal candidates can apply for open positions at their company easily since their personal data is already in the Workday system. External applicants are able to apply through a careers site that supports both desktops and mobile devices. Another feature lets both types of candidates auto-populate an application with their LinkedIn profile data.
Workday's recent acquisition of Identified will also play a role in its recruiting software strategy. Identified's predictive analytics technology helps recruiters more effectively search for top candidates.
Workday is indeed following a trend of late in the HR software industry by introducing recruiting as a core feature, said analyst Paul Hamerman of Forrester Research. "For many years, it's been a best-of-breed application," he said.
The software is also addressing the way recruiting has changed of late thanks to social media and the expectation of younger users for a consumer-like application, he added.
"Many traditional recruiting products are have a lot of complex data entry," he said. "What they're trying to do is simplify the candidate experience."
Workday Recruiting comes at an additional charge to customers. Levensaler declined to provide pricing.
Some 70 Workday customers have already selected Recruiting, according to a spokesman.
Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com