There are a lot of players in the recruiting tech landscape. For a buyer, it's at times dizzying. That said, there's one clear tool every company needs to have: an applicant tracking system (ATS). Beyond ensuring compliance with government hiring regulations, these tools are essential to ensuring the hiring process is logical, smooth, and trackable. That said, the majority of ATS's are suited for small-to-mid-size organizations. When you're purchasing for an enterprise-level global organization, where do you turn? Here are a few of the options. We looked at the two most-prominent (Oracle Taleo, and Workday Recruiting), as well as one of the most promising up-and-comers (Greenhouse).
Enterprise organizations often adopt Taleo or Recruitment as a default - the reasoning is that it's more cost-effective to buy an ATS from a vendor who they are also buying an HRIS from (ie, Oracle or Workday). That said: both of the aforementioned vendors have reputations for skimping on features when it comes to their solutions for recruiting - which is, frankly, a mistake on their part. The benefit is that there are cost-savings, and integration is easier - it's essentially "out of the box". On the flip side, the tools themselves can often hamper hiring, and that's a major drawback.
Greenhouse Software is based in New York City and San Francisco, providing enterprise talent acquisition software. It was founded in 2012, and its clients include Airbnb, Warby Parker, and Buzzfeed. Greenhouse helps small and large customers alike in designing and automating all aspects of hiring to compete for top talent.
Greenhouse software enables users to generate comprehensive reports on important aspects of the recruiting process. Users get insight into the interview pipeline, sourcing, time-to-hire, and other performance metrics for continuous improvement. Reports can be formatted in Excel and Google Sheets and connected to client business intelligence software.
The Greenhouse platform is easy to use with an all-inclusive license rather than having to buy individual user seats. A dedicated mobile app provides further accessibility. Ongoing support is provided through a dedicated implementation specialist. Moreover, there is customer support via live chat, email, and knowledge center, as well as webinars and training videos.
There are insights for managing candidate sourcing with sourcing dashboards, ability to source candidates on various attributes, and tracking job descriptions sent to social media and job boards. Customizable job posting capability includes social media and job boards, as well as a choice of different job board integrations such as a fully hosted job board by Greenhouse and an embedded Greenhouse job board onto the client’s website.
In addition, Greenhouse is one of the most innovative ATS systems on the market, with a focus on offering best-in-class offerings to clients. This is a key differentiator when comparing them to Taleo or Recruitment - the Greenhouse advantage is that it offers its clients an edge when it comes to recruitment.
Oracle is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company acquired Taleo 2012 in order to offer an ATS offering to its HRIS clients. Taleo was one of the first ATS's, and was based on supply-chain methodology. This tends to show in how the system treats applicants. Betterbuys.com comments that some users report dissatisfaction with Oracle’s search function and lack of single-click functionality.
While reporting with embedded and integrated analytics is meant to make data-driven information easily available, users report frustrations with accessing and utilizing the information. There is a mobile-first user interface which makes the streamlined processes somewhat more user-friendly. The feature-rich software has been described as time-consuming.
Internal and external candidate sourcing are designed to leverages data for business insights and improved hiring decisions, but basic functionalists such as search are woefully inadequate. Candidate engagement is challenging. Every applicant is required to create a profile, which has been repeatedly proven to cause applicant drop-off. This "feature" is hard-coded and companies are not given the option to disable it.
Oracle provides hiring and onboarding features, as well as features such as interview self-scheduling, automated job postings, screenings, interviews, offers, and personalization.
Guided onboarding functions help new hires and hiring managers with personalized tasks.. Pre-onboarding options are offered to draw new hires into team and company culture.
Workday is a leading software-as-a-service enterprise solutions provider based in California. It was founded in 2005 by the creator of PeopleSoft. Clients include TripAdvisor, BMO, and Centrica.
Workday talent management software provides solutions for businesses of all sizes and industries. The technology offers streamlined hiring communications with Microsoft Teams and Slack. It enables users to create requisitions on mobile, automates recruiting workflows, and provides dashboards and real-time analytics to facilitate data-driven recruiting decisions.
Workday is heavily focused on HR and finance - and it shows. While their talent management solutions are robust, similar to Oracle, they treat recruiting as a bit of an afterthought.
Reporting in Workday is done through limited dashboards. Basic levels of recruiting information is available to everyone through open requisitions by user and custom reports for openings, average days to hire, and average time to hire. A centralized recruiting hub makes is offered with the stated goal of making working with recruiting and collaboration more seamless with checklists and action items to fill positions and develop the candidate pipeline. Users report significant frustrations with this offering.
Candidate sourcing in Workday is virtually non-existent. There is no robust CRM offering, and candidate pipelining and/or marketing is not sufficient enough to warrant a mention.
Greenhouse - clearly. While it is not an out-of-the-box integration, it is far more feature-rich and geared toward enabling recruitment. Oracle Taleo and Workday Recruitment offer easier integration, but wind up being hinderances to hiring and recruitment.
In general: there are no "great" ATS offerings from HRIS vendors. The best option is to select a vendor that focuses on ATS, and has a strong integration history with the HRIS your company has in place.