Applicant Tracking, or…Candidate Management?

The Market has Changed
The recruitment technology marketplace has undergone a significant revolution during the past
24-36 months. The first phase of this revolution was the automation of manually-intensive,
paper based processes through the use of document scanning and back-office, applicant tracking
databases. These systems (SkillSet, Restrac, Resumix were the primary players) were generally
enterprise-wide in nature, residing on the Corporate computing infrastructure. Efficiency gains
were great, but almost exclusively internally focused, eliminating high transaction volumes and
providing for faster decision making.

The second phase of the revolution provided for the integration of these applicant tracking
databases with the web. During this period, we witnessed the explosion of the web as the
dominant channel, source, tool, what have you, for finding a job or finding candidates. Over
40,000 sites emerged as players in the recruitment market space, with offerings ranging from
pure job posting and resume collection, to pay-for-referral sites, online headhunters, and more.
The ability to apply online to job postings became the norm, and a large number of start up firms
entered the market to help companies integrate their Corporate websites with their existing
applicant tracking systems. The traditional applicant tracking companies began changing their
business models to focus on the web as the medium for delivering what now has become a
“service”. Some companies even began offering applicant tracking as a “free” element in an
overall approach to managing sourcing and candidate flow, with a shift to offering tools and
services that allow the recruiter to source candidates effectively via the web. The web crosses
all sources, campus to headhunters, entry-level to executive. The three companies mentioned
above were all slow to respond to this dramatic shift, all being saddled with managing service
and support of legacy enterprise systems, while incurring the significant costs of developing
web-based approaches. Restrac, now called “WebHire”, appears to be the only one who will
survive, and the competitive scene now includes some 40-plus vendors with comparable systems
and services. No doubt, winners and losers will emerge.

The third phase of this dramatic change is going on today. It is the shift to overall “candidate

the web. We expect the next step will be the direct integration of these tools with the candidate
management systems to provide in-depth assessment like that provided by our OLAF.

Where are we today at P&G?
One of the most compelling pieces of data from our 2+ years of using an online application in
our process here at P&G is that only 2% (versus an average of 10-12% conversion for Hire.com
customers) of the total traffic to our recruiting site on pg.com has chosen to complete the
application. Granted, this number equates to roughly 60,000 applicants per year, but we know
nothing about the other 98% that chose not to apply. Why did they come to the site? How did
they get here? What were their intentions after they arrived? Most importantly, why did they
leave? We don’t know the answers to these questions, and don’t currently have the tools to find
them out. The new candidate management systems provide tools to answer these questions,
providing recruiters with the ability to tailor strategy.

Our recruitment technology at P&G is currently developed to a robust second phase versus
market capability, with online application integrated with back-office applicant tracking, and it
has served us well as our initial e-recruiting approach. SkillSet applicant tracking, coupled with
our highly developed internal Lotus Notes architecture allowed us to drive internal efficiency
gains about as far as they can go. The infrastructure and nightly processes required to move data
between the web and SkillSet are significant, and require intensive care to maintain reliability.
We are no longer able to drive globalization of this technology due to Notes/SkillSet
performance problems in lesser developed regions, and the suspect reliability of pg.com,
particularly as users attempt to access our application forms from outside the US. SkillSet (the
company) is no longer the viable business that we once knew, as they’ve gone out of business,
unable to make the shift to
- 3 -
web-based candidate management. The time is right for us to move to a Candidate Management
system; the question is, how much capability do we want, and are we ready for it?

What we could have….which do we want?

• Workflow and recruiting process tracking (where candidate is in the process)
• Candidate information storage
• Ability to post jobs to third party websites (Monster, CareerBuilder, Job Direct, etc.)
automatically
• Batch, automatic or personalized acknowledgement to candidates
• Keyword and structured field-level search capability
• Ability to meet government reporting requirements and support data privacy
• Ability to track/measure the effectiveness of sources
- 4 -

• Supports cycle time analysis
• Integrates with e-mail
• Reporting
• Import/Export of data

“Back end” Capability and Integration with Other Systems. Some vendors such as PeopleClick
and, to an extent, BrassRing with its SAP interfaces, tend to focus more on integrating with
internal staffing, job posting and enrollment systems more so than the candidate front-end.
However, with the emergence of web standards, it is possible to choose from a suite of products
with a variety of vendors to cover all needs. This capability can provide for the management of
internal candidate pools as well as external. It can also become the tool that drives target setting
through enrollment and requisition creation linkages. What we might do in this area can range
from what we do today (i.e., flat text delivery of new hire data to SAP, team spaces for School
Teams and Draft databases) to using common data standards driven by SAP HR for information
flow to and from our recruiting systems. Specific functionality would be designed to support
work processes driven by broader SAP processes designed to manage enrollment and staffing
processes. If we were to pursue this capability, we would need to gain alignment of IT strategy,
as well as HR leadership to drive creation of work processes that would take advantage of the
technology capability.