WORKDAY BIG DATA ANALYTICS – MAKING A SMARTER WORLD

I am so overwhelmed by the response for the WD blog; it encourages me to come up with more topics. Thanks one and all for your comments and email communications.

A couple of days’ back, I was chatting with my friend as he wanted to shift to a new challenging role. After working for several years on SAP platform for  one of the Big five companies, he was not satisfied with the kind of work he was doing. I suggested him to go for BIG DATA. He was perplexed by my suggestion and wanted to take some time to think about it. I was taken back this time as he asked me to tell in detail about the BIG DATA. He couldn’t get the information from his peers as well as from his seniors who are having decades of technical and management experience.

I was so pumped to tell him; I love sharing knowledge THAT I KNOW.  He was happy to hear me as usual, then I thought why not I write about 'Big data' to encourage my friends who are looking for a career change and for the ones who want to adopt the latest technology that is in demand.

I hope it will help the young talent to understand the difference between Analytics and Big Data so that they can be on the right  career track. HERE YOU GO…

In Workday, BIG DATA ANALYTICS plays a major role for the companies to streamline their data.

I have come across a nice quote to start with -----------------------------------------------“In God we trust, all others must bring data” – W. Edwards Demming, Manufacturing Guru and Statistician

Analytics, to put simply, is helping businesses with data. Data can be any information about the system or surroundings.

If a person doesn’t feel well, he/ she might experience a fever or any other anomaly in the body, which indicates that there’s something wrong. Similarly...this data about the system or surroundings of a business is shouting if something is wrong. Analytics is all about identifying and capturing this shot and transforming it into a corrective action.

Let’s take an example, how can analytics help in running a factory? The main components of a factory are machinery, human capital and real estate infrastructure. It will be a great relief to the management instead of routine checks if we can predict when a machinery will develop a slag or when can we expect the workers to go on strike or leave their jobs. It’s too hard to imagine to be worked out, but there is a solution for this …

Yes, analytics can help in doing all this. Machines are made up of a number of components. When a machine is not working properly, some components may have been damaged. If we can place sensors in appropriate regions of a machine and track their output, using historical data, we can very well predict when a damage is about to happen to the machine in real time based on a live feed from these sensors. A recent study by one of the top consulting firms elaborates on how advanced analytics can improve manufacturing to reduce process flaws, save time and money. And the applicability of analytics is practically limitless. From helping run businesses better to saving lives in the field of healthcare, analytics are everywhere. If it’s not anywhere, it will be in the next few years as more and more firms and industries are understanding the importance of analytics and implementing the same.

 Analytics has always been around us. We make a lot of day-to-day decisions based on data floating around us and now this is growing as a professional field of study. Analytics will definitely stay and grow!

BIG DATA ANALYTICS

Definition: According to the information technology research and advisory firm Gartner –“Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.”

Big Data in today’s world

Software and Information Technology has made it possible to generate extremely large amount of data which is generated in real time, typically these data sets are of sizes which cannot be processed using traditional database management systems or other data processing software. In the language of big data sizes, we do not deal with gigabytes rather the data size ranges from hundreds of petabytes to Exabytes (1 million terabytes) of data. Now the biggest questions are –how can an organization make effective use of this data to predict upcoming scenarios and trends and how can it use this raw data to optimize its processes in order to increase efficiency, reduce costs and approach unexplored avenues?

Mining Terabytes or Petabytes of raw, unprocessed data is a very complex task and then drawing out meaningful, relevant insights is an even more complex task, the skills needed to mine this data is what matters in today’s fast changing world.

Big Data technologies:

Hadoop an open source framework from Apache is the leading one used globally. This framework, which is a set of tools allows processing of large sets of data by breaking into clusters. Unlike in traditional computing the processing capability using Hadoop can be scaled up from single servers to thousands of machines. The two main components of Hadoop Distributed file System (HDFS) and Hadoop MapReduce. HDFS is a distributed file system designed to run on a fault tolerant, low cost hardware known as commodity hardware. MapReduce, which is based on the Google’s search technology, distributes large data sets across multiple servers which individually do their processing of partly allocated data sets. LinkedIn is one of the companies that use Hadoop to give real time personalized recommendations.

Analysts believe that 90% of the total data is created in the last few years and this pace is accelerating. It will not be a surprise when companies start to deal with Yotta bytes of data in the coming years. Businesses already have realized the importance of Big Data and started investing substantial amount of their capital into it. Big Data is the future, it has been a trending technology recently and soon we may see many advocates for it in the coming years.

Major components of Big Data

According to industry experts Big data can be categorized into four main components when applying Big Data in real life business operations –, known as the “Four V’s”:

The 4 V’s of Big Data

Volume

When we talk of big data it is implied that we are dealing with enormous volumes of data, this data is typically generated by business processes, automated machines and social networks so the volume of data to be analyzed is massive in size. If we take social networking sites as an example where posts, twitter messages, photos, video clips, etc. Are being generated and shared every second, then we deal with data of the order of Zettabytes or Exabytes. In a research it has been found that all the data generated in the world between the beginning of time and 2014 is equal to the data, which is being generated in a single day after 2015

Thus, data sets are becoming more and more complex and too large to store therefore analyzing data using traditional database technology is often not possible.

Variety

Variety in Big Data jargon refers to the multiple different sources from where data is generated and types of data which can be structured or unstructured. Earlier the majority of data was structured data that stored in relational databases, e.g. Financial data, sales data.

But as technologies have evolved in recent years at a breakthrough pace, almost 80% of data is unstructured in the form of emails, photos, audios, videos, PDFs and social media updates.

With proper implementation of big data technology,we can now make efficient utilization of unstructured data and bring it together with structured data.

Velocity

Advanced technologies have increased the rate at which new data are generated, this data is not localized to any particular region rather it moves around the whole world at a tremendous speed, this flow of data is massive in volumes and continuous.

E.g. Social media post or videos on YouTube, which goes viral in seconds.

Big Data offers the capability to analyze this real time data and allows businesses and industries to make strategic decisions in real time.

Veracity

The data being generated is often raw and unstructured so Veracity refers to the trustworthiness of data, the information which is gathered from various networking sites, business processes or automated machines differs vastly in each instance it becomes difficult to control the quality and accuracy of data. So it is important to differentiate which data are to be mined to draw meaningful insights for analyzing a problem.

We are drowning in data. The volume of data being generated every second is enormous and the rate is increasing exponentially. We have come a long way into a digitized world where every human action is associated with data generation. Social media websites such as twitter and Facebook daily generate data in zeta bytes. In future, it is widely believed that biggest data is not created by humans,but by the ‘Internet of things’. Internet of things is a scenario in which objects equipped with unique identifiers and they automatically communicate by transferring data without human intervention.

How will different industries use Big Data?

Big Data is expected to bring a lot of benefits to the consumers in the form of improved services, more user-friendly systems and thereby resulting in a more transparent dealing of services.

Big Data can affect all industries starting from Banking, Healthcare, Consumer goods, Information Technology and also the Government services. Gartner predicts that BIG data development will drive up IT spending to $232 billion by the end of 2016. All this is possible only when all organizations and the governments are able to fully start using Big Data and reap its benefits.

With the rise in social networking websites, consumers have found a platform to connect with each other and this helps the organizations capture a lot of data with the help of data analysts. In a nutshell, there is data everywhere and hence it becomes highly important to make use of it for the benefit of the organization and the overall economy.

Big Data in Marketing

Big data is going to shape the products in the new age market. With the customer insight gathered and consumer behavior studied,it is much easier for marketers come up with customized products. The companies who are succeeding are not the ones having the most data, but the ones who are using the data the most.

In the future product development would be hugely backed by Big Data results and it would be surprising if this becomes an important competitive strategy for companies.

Big data in Retail

In the near future, for the conventional Brick and Mortar shops, big data can be a reviving force through video surveillance and conversational analysis

Big data is all poised to be detrimental factor in Airport, Rail, Energy and Social Services through its services.

In a nutshell, we are moving to a concept of SMART CITY and Big data with its other technologies like Cloud Computing, Multi Sensors and Intelligent are going to herald the Smart City Concept.

Big Data in Agriculture

John Deere the US agricultural, equipment manufacturing company has led the way in heralding the big data advent in agriculture.

Big data are used by farmers to figure out the choices of the crop, when and where to plough, and where will the best return come from. Sensors in Tractors, Historical data on soil conditions, weather prediction and crop features.

Big Data is promising a future in Agriculture wherein lands would be highly productive and farmers well profited. Big data strives for a self-sufficient mode.

Recording of data takes place at the most of the simplest of the tasks like the purchase of groceries to the most complex form of utility( e.g. Smart phones).

This count is growing each day and every second and hence categorized as Big Data. Currently these large units of data inventory are growing beyond the ability to be managed and analyzed with traditional data processing tools. The initial idea was to control the size of this information to free up the memory of the computers for a new set of growing data. This led to the introduction of new technologies like Google’s MapReduce and open-source Yahoo’s Hadoop and more. Data collected is used by many internet companies to gain significant competitive advantage in the market. As time passes by, companies have to change their business models to survive and hence this massive change can be categorized as data-driven technological revolution of which we are all a part of.

                         WORKDAY BIG DATA ANALYTICS:

 It is very helpful to make smart decisions for manager, employees and executives with the valuable information that they get.

With workday BIG DATA ANALYTICS we can integrate, analyze and visualize data from workday and non-workday data to identify the root causes, detect patterns and trends and predict accurately and all this can be done by a single application.

WORKDAY BIG DATA ANALYTICS enables organizations’ to answer business questions such as, how we are measuring performance accurately.

Ex: We can augment workday performance data with sales data from CRM systems to determine the average sales performance rating.

To get a clear picture whether worker performance matches the rating, we can drill down to get a closer look at the matrix within the performance rating. This gives the information you need to know to make smart investments in your talent. By using existing capabilities within workday,such as custom fields. We can view worker data coming from data sources outside of workday to give an inside view of low-level details used in reports. Workday BIG DATA ANALYTICS makes it simple to match together from workday and non-workday data source with built in data connectors to common gate resources. Data analysts can easily connect to any data source of any type at any volume with easy to use interface on data analysts with tools to quickly and easily exploring combined data from multiple sources with hundreds of built in functions. Data analysts can perform simple joins and filters with more advance analysis, such as ‘ Forecasting’.

BIG DATA has built in pre-defined templates such as market compensation analysis, retention risk and impact analysis, Global payroll cost analysis and more. Workday BIG DATA analytics are unified with the rest of the workday. It requires no separate infrastructure and no separate security. The best part is reports generated by workday BIG DATA ANALYTICS are treated the same with any other reports/reporting in the workday so that we can quickly gain insight and take necessary actions.

WORKDAY AND YAHOO.....Workday Big Data Analytics is ON

As one of the world's most popular web destinations, YAHOO! is an expert in helping people to find what they want. So it's no surprise that when HR leadership went searching for a new approach to managing the company's HR organization, they found exactly what they were looking for: Workday

Human Capital Management (HCM).

Kristen Robinson, Senior Vice-President of Global HR programs, rewards and operations, led the charge. "I have to say, I didn't come into Yahoo! thinking, I need to switch out the core HCM," says Robinson, who arrived at the company in 2010. "But what I did see early on is that for my team to be

effective, we needed to do HR differently. I quickly realised that technology was absolutely critical in enabling HR to achieve its goals.

Yahoo! Business Case at a Glance Leader in Internet search and digital media14,000 employees in over 30 countries $6 billion (£4 billion) in revenues (2010)Yahoo!'s headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California. Workday SolutionsHuman Capital Management Cloud Connect for Third-Party Payroll Summary of Business Benefits Greater usability driving employee and manager engagement and adoption Single source of the truth for global workforce intelligence More strategic role for HR

Workday to the Rescue

That's exactly what Workday offers. With its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, information is available from anywhere, at any time, to managers and employees alike. The time and cost of implementation is lower since nothing needs to be deployed and managed on-premise;

instead of costly, time-consuming upgrades, Workday provides regular vendor-managed updates. As a result, the software is never out of date, one of Robinson's

chief concerns."The fact that we can have the latest and greatest in the Workday solution as it evolves over time is just really exciting. We don't have to do a new implementation that

takes 12 months and costs us another million dollars," says Robinson. "Every time you have an update — which is every four months — there's more capability available

to you. There's more functionality. That is really, really important to us."

The sheer usability of Workday was another aspect that appealed to Robinson and her team. "If our managers, employees, and HR teams don't want to access our system, it means someone else has to do those things for them. And that's not the best use of our investment in HR," she observes. Workday will free up HR resources for other, more strategic tasks Workday also offers the global capabilities Yahoo! needs for its widespread workforce, including support for multiple languages and currencies and country-specific security and regulatory support. Finally, with Workday, Yahoo! will have a "single version of the truth"-visibility into the entire workforce, the critical element for making strategic decisions. As Robinson says, "The data and the analytics will help us provide decision support to our executives. Not just on an employee-by-employee basis, but at the aggregate level.

The present market is into Big data analytics which Workday has adopted to suit the customer needs.

In this highly scattered data world, there is a demand for refined data to be presented at the tick of fingertips, big data analytics is the right choice for the Workday HCM customers for their streamlined data to be presented in an effective way.  What is the importance of big data in IT WORLD?

Workday big data analytics can help decision makers to leverage their companies' data in proper format. It enables organizations to consolidate structured and unstructured data and combines them with workday data to gain new business insight. It gathers the raw data and segregates to identify the data which is required for analysis rather than going through large quantities of data, we can add or modify the data to do analysis. It has nearly 220 pre-built applications to do analysis quickly where we can modify each template to meet customer needs.

Few of the pre-built analytic templates for HR and finance business scenarios are as follows:

• Market Compensation Comparison ( It is used to analyse  organization's compensation by job profile to determine whether customer is providing competitive compensation to catch the best talent pool from the market where workforce planning as well to influence budget to retain the top pool of talented resources)

•Global Payroll Cost Analysis

 Headcount Analysis

•Retention Risk and Impact Analysis

•Sales Performance

•Revenue Pulse

•Customer Profitability 360

•Supplier Sentiment Analysis

When it comes to the security, all data is encrypted at rest and security features between workday and big data is much secured and it has a single sign-on feature between workday and big data.

LINKEDIN ROLE IN WORKDAY:Rolling out ESS and MSS...

How ‘LINKEDIN’ plays its role in Workday HCM: Rolling out ESS (employee Self service) and MSS (Manager Self service)

Let us discuss about ‘ Self Service’ in Workday and how Linkedin plays a part in Workday.

By giving access to your employees,workers in Workday and to the tasks and information. Access for their work and personal life, the Human resources, payroll and other groups are given the time they need to be a strategic influence.

Managers have the flexibility to run Analytics report, view dashboard and METRIC REPORTS on the Workday landing page and have data about their own direct and indirect reports at their fingerprints.

Rolling out ESS (employees Self service) and MSS (Manager Self service) can increase adoption of Workday throughout your organization.

PROFESSIONAL PROFILE: Workday delivers a professional profile that provides a user-friendly way to track key talent information about our self and others like Job history, education and feedback information from Workday’s talent management functionality.

We can configure a professional profile using the configure profile and configure profile group tasks.  It is better to add a professional profile as the first item in the overview or job profile group so that it displays first when viewing workers profile.

Ex: If anytime feedback is enabled, a worker can see his own feedback and co-worker can give feedback.

Workers can add, edit and remove their own experience, skills and education directly on their professional profile. We can use ‘ Import feature from LINKEDIN’ if we enable the task to import.

During the import process, Workday eliminates duplicate entries by matching existing entries, with new entries from`Linkedin; changes are not synchronized between Workday and LinkedIn, but you can rerun Linkedin to get the exact data.

 Our membership in a security group, or groups, will control how much personal information you will be able to send and if the there will be any actions you can perform.The personal information, you can access will be very different when you are looking at your own data compared to at a fellow workers’ data, if you are the manager or if you are the HR Partner.

In order to access the Workday system you need to set up a Workday Account for each employee after hire. This creates a user identification and password.

STEPS:  Related Employee- Action steps--- Security Profile- Workday Account

Note: Many organizations will not use Workday account creation for security, but will use an ACTIVE DIRECTORY approach, single sign on or delegated authentication. This will remove the need for creating workday account step as part of the hiring process.

PERSONAL DATA:

An employee viewing another employee data is very minimal. By default, an employee can only view other employee’s basic data (Job, the management chain and the organization such as department, cost center etc. That the employee is a part of)

Our role and security group will control how much personal information will be available to see and if any actions we can perform. When hiring employees, the hire BP will trigger and the employee is added to’ All employees' security group’. When workday account is created, employee adds to ‘All users security group’ and employee as SELF so that that self-service can be enabled. By this feature employee can view benefits, pay history and personal data where as Manager as no ability to see the information of their direct reports.  In factory defaults for security policies, a manager cannot view an employee’s birth date or social security number. A manager also cannot view an employee’s emergency contact information.  For the activation of the above points, we can use Domain Security policy, where we can add and view the related information.

ESS: Worker can manage his own data through ‘ All about me ‘ landing page. Some approvals are required for some data changes that can be configured through the business process. Whether approval is required or not will be based on the policies and BP configuration. Policies process is generally in place for legal information that must be verified like marital status, emergency contacts and last name.

MSS:  This service puts the information managers need at their fingertips. This helps them to monitor their team for proper planning and to achieve strategic goals to the organization by taking quick decisions with the data available through ‘ MY TEAM’ worklet. This feature has the access to the data and tasks related to their responsibilities. Here BP and policies play an important role; based on them we can involve managers at different levels. They may initiate a business process such as a job change or approve it or simply get notification that it has been completed.

It is designed for ‘ Managers’.

TAX WITHHOLDING AND DIRECT DEPOSIT:  Without using ‘ PICOF ’ we have a certain payroll related functionality, which we can use in the pay worklet. Click withholding elections action to enter either U.S. W-4 or Canada TD1 information. This is a BP, we have to include payroll payee tax data event in approval step. Employees can set up direct deposit and be divided between those accounts. In the pay worklet on the all about me landing page is the ‘ Payment Elections’ hyperlink task that employees can select to set up their accounts. Once data is given, it is included in the workday payroll interface extract for use by third parties. Like the self-service, tax data functionality, this employee self service feature can be turned off by restricting who can access the BP (Payment Election Enrollment Event)

Direct deposit can be used with or without Workday Payroll, but along with a basic setup you will need to set up integration with the finance units.

WORKDAY VS. TRADITIONAL ERP SYSTEMS

	WORKDAY	TRADITIONAL ERP
SIMPLICITY	·     Shorter implementation cycles ·     No customizations ·     Application and infrastructure supported by vendor	·     Longer implementation cycles ·     Customization to support ·     Customer responsible for application and infrastructure support
FLEXIBILITY	·    Highly configurable ·    New updates must be accepted, all clients on newest version	·    Customizable ·    Control of upgrade timing and cycles
CONTROL	·    Less control over software ·    Can be difficult to fit business needs if functionality is not available	·    More control over software ·    Unique Business needs can be met through customizations (effort required)
ACCESSIBILITY	·    Accessibility from the ‘cloud’ ·    Available any time and any place with internet connection ·    Dependant on internet connectivity	·    Accessible from computers with access to company networks
COST	·     Lowerimplementation costs ·    Lower long term Total cost   of ownership	·    Higher implementation costs ·    Higher long term Total cost of ownership
UPDATES	·    Quick to benefit from new functionality ·    3 upgrades per year included in subscription fee	·    Upgrades are every few years ·    Costly and high level of effort to upgrade

WORKDAY RECRUITING: Will It Disrupt The Talent Acquisition Software Market?

Workday introduced Workday Recruiting, a long-awaited new module in the company's growing suite of cloud-based HR and Financial Management applications.

In many ways this product has the potential to disrupt the landscape for corporate recruiting software. Rather than being designed as a tool for recruiters which integrates with other HR systems, Workday started from scratch and developed a totally unified solution: one which manages all elements of the recruitment process, focused on the needs of applicants, managers, recruiters, as well as HR.

The Corporate Recruiting Software Market

The market for corporate recruiting software, now over $1.5 billion in size, is red hot.

These tools started more than 20 years ago with the advent of resume scanning systems that took paper based resumes and parsed them into a relational database. The systems were later named "applicant tracking systems" (ATS for short), and companies like Taleo (now owned by Oracle) and BrassRing (now owned by IBM) exploded with growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then dozens of companies have built applicant tracking systems and nearly every HR software company sells one.

Why are these systems so important?  The entire job application process has gone digital. Thanks to the internet and companies like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Facebook, Indeed.com, and others, companies can now post jobs all over the internet and receive hundreds of applicants in minutes ("resume overload" is now one of the biggest challenges recruiters face).

All these job applications have to be stored, ranked, and routed to managers for review. Candidates have to be interviewed and screened, then offers have to be written and people need to be on boarded. The process is complex, high volume, and filled with opportunities to create a positive or potentially negative experience for candidates.

Tools to recruit have become very sophisticated. In fact, the whole discipline of talent acquisition looks much more like marketing and much less like staffing every day.

• Today employers can source candidates through LinkedIn, Entelo, Gild, TalentBin, and dozens of other "smart search" tools which index people the way Google indexes pages.
• They can purchase and post targeted advertisements all over the internet to find engineers, scientists, nurses, and other workers in highly targeted locations.
• They can use "candidate relationship management" systems to build talent networks and interest groups, communicate with passive candidates (called "farming"), and manage the flow of candidates from "vaguely interested" to "ready to apply for a job";
• And they can build custom websites, videos, and other digital assets to attract people.

In addition, talent acquisition is one of the biggest markets for Big Data and groundbreaking assessment science. Dozens of vendors now offer analytics tools which analyze hundreds of facts about candidates and help you predict who is likely to succeed. (Evolv, IBM, PeopleAnswers, and many others). Pre-hire assessments (which are used by fewer than 40% of all companies) can significantly improve the quality of hire - and today these assessments feel more like games than tests.

Most of these science and assessment tools come from smaller vendors, making it even more important for companies to have a scalable recruitment platform to integrate everything into an easy to use, manageable environment.

For corporate HR leaders, this whole marketplace is dauntingly complex. Not only do companies have to post jobs, manage advertisements, create an extended employment brand, and manage candidate networks, but companies must open up this whole network to internal candidates and manage employee referral programs as well. Most recruiters tell us that internal candidates and referrals are the strongest tool they have.

Need for Integrated Recruitment Software

Companies need a software platform that manages this entire process. Not only must HR managers integrate third party tools, build a workflow to source and assess candidates easily, and manage internal referrals and talent mobility, they need analytics and data management to help monitor, improve, and optimize all this effort. Talent acquisition is the most important part of HR and makes up a $120+ billion worldwide market  – anything companies can do to make the process more effective or efficient pays for itself many times over.

Until the last few years, software to support this market was developed by innovative and specialized talent acquisition software companies. Today most of these companies have been acquired and these tools are integrated into nearly every vendors' talent management system. (Oracle, SAP-SuccessFactors,  IBM, CornerstoneOnDemand, Saba, PeopleFluent, SilkRoad, Halogen, Infor, and nearly every other talent management software company now has a recruiting module.) The only major ERP vendor that did not have such a system was Workday.

Enter Workday

Workday's entire product strategy is based on developing a unified system which manages all areas of financial and human capital management. To date the company has been highly successful with its core HR application and partnered with other vendors in the area of recruiting and learning management (the two "book-ends" of talent management software). This has presented a challenge for Workday customers, most of which selected the product because they want a single integrated solution to replace their existing tapestry (read "mess") of various HR products.

Understanding this market and the requirements, nearly two years ago Workday's product team started interviewing customers and designing a totally unified solution. The design point focused on building a new type of system: one which addresses the needs of candidates, managers, recruiters, and HR – all unified into Workday’s platform.

Because Workday has a unique architecture made up of an object-oriented database and an extensible and configurable workflow engine, the company could  "rethink" what a corporate recruiting application would look like - free from the legacy of the "applicant tracking system" design. They also chose to take a mobile-first approach, designing a mobile interface for candidates and managers from the beginning.

While the company started its efforts more than two years ago, Workday waited to release this product until it was competitive in the market. Six design partners were part of the development and most of them plan on using Workday to replace their existing ATS. So Workday’s strategy is not just to deliver a more unified product with features only available through ERP integration, but also to take the existing incumbents (who have years of R&D behind their systems) head on.

The result is a unified system which addresses the needs of all participants in the recruiting process: hiring managers, interview team members, recruiters, and of course candidates. By looking at talent acquisition as a process which is both an external and internal one (internal talent mobility is a critical part of recruiting), Workday has built a platform that addresses the entire talent lifecycle, integrated with Workday’s core HR application to provide a rich set of functionality for all stakeholders in the process.

The system is built around a set of features that include workforce planning (creating pools of needed people and looking at both internal and external candidates), sourcing (importing data from LinkedIn and other systems), interviewing and hiring candidates, and onboarding – with analytics embedded throughout.

In the area of sourcing, one of the most fast-changing part of recruiting, Workday’s recent acquisition of Identifie gives the company some powerful technology to better search and source candidates from external networks (Facebook, Yahoo, Google, as well as LinkedIn), giving the company the opportunity to deliver a disruptive tool for sourcing.

Workday Recruiting is also totally enabled for mobile devices. The company developed the entire product on the mobile platform first, enabling them to make the mobile version feature-equivalent with the web version.

For example, managers who are in the middle of an interview can quickly see comments and feedback from other interviewees on their phone, available as comments or in an activity stream from other interviewers. Recruiters have full access to the various stages candidates are going through and can monitor interviews in real time through their mobile device.  Candidates can find jobs, browse job descriptions, apply, and monitor their application through mobile. And a special feature which Workday built with LinkedIn lets candidates immediately see who else they know at the company they’re applying for in real time while they browse job openings!

In the area of analytics, Workday’s embedded technology makes this product “analytics-ready” out of the gate. The demo shows a variety of standard reports: sourcing effectiveness, open positions, candidates by stage, etc.

Some of the more unique analytics include “headcount plan to pipeline”which essentially shows in real time how well your staffing process is filling in your workforce plan. This one feature demonstrates the power of an integrated recruiting solution: now managers and executives have a real time view of their candidate pipeline mapped against open headcount and workforce plan by role or other dimensions. You can immediately and easily see “are we ahead, behind, or on plan” for recruiting at any level of detail.

A number of complementary partnerships are in place, including providers of background checking, video interviewing (Workday integrates HireVue), and job boards, demonstrating the completeness of Workday’s approach. The company is not planning on working with every third party recruiting tool and vendor in the market, but we believe the ecosystem will grow rapidly.

Remember that the applicant tracking market is very mature, so the incumbent vendors have hundreds of advanced features, analytics tools, and interfaces with third parties. While Workday Recruiting is new and this level of maturity and broad market adoption will take time, the product is well designed, filled with features, deeply integrated with Workday HCM, and leverages the user interface, embedded analytics, object orientation, and end-to-end process management of the Workday platform.

Impact of this Announcement on the Marketplace

This announcement changes the recruitment software marketplace in several ways.

First, many Workday customers use third party products for recruitment (many use Oracle) and often have millions of dollars invested in these platforms. While these products work well, most customers want a solution that is easier to use, more collaborative, and more unified with internal talent processes, which they can now buy from Workday. If Workday executes well, the market for non-Workday recruiting software among Workday customers will dry up.

Second, for companies considering a new HR or talent management platform, this announcement puts Workday in a more favorable competitive position. I’ve talked with many companies who chose Oracle or SuccessFactors because of their end-to-end talent applications. While Workday still does not have an LMS, the availability of recruitment makes Workday a more competitive talent management vendor.

Third, this announcement accelerates the end of the “standalone applicant tracking market” for large enterprises. Oracle (Taleo – the market leading ATS) now bundles its ATS as part of its ERP solution and IBM (Kenexa – another market leading ATS) now includes its ATS as part of its integrated Talent Suite.  SuccessFactors (SAP), Infor, PeopleFluent, Sum Total, SilkRoad, CornerstoneOnDemand, Halogen, Saba, and most other talent management software providers now have integrated recruiting systems. This forces the remaining standalone ATS vendors (companies like Jobvite, SmartRecruiters) to focus on mid-market and mid-sized enterprises.

(Remember that nearly every company with more than 100 employees needs recruitment software, so the mid-market remains enormous with lots of opportunities for growth.) Fourth, a new recruitment ecosystem will be created. There are hundreds of assessment, background checking, advertising, search, mobile recruiting, and analytics vendors in this market. As of today, these vendors will see Workday as an important new platform. They will shift resources toward Workday, driving innovation on the Workday platform.

While the product is brand new and has only been tested by early adopters so far, Workday’s product is a serious first release with many unique features. We believe the company will continue to invest aggressively in this space (it’s one of the fastest growing segments in HR software) and this product is likely to become a major part of Workday’s business in the years to come.

courtesy:@josh_bersin

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