What is our primary use case?
I have several main use cases for Workday Recruiting: workforce planning and requisitions, candidate sourcing applications, recruiter and hiring manager workflow, selection, offer management, candidate experience, reporting and analytics. Creating and approving the job requisitions, defining the roles, competencies and hiring requirements, managing hiring budgets and approvals, publishing jobs to career sites and job boards, capturing applications, managing the candidate profiles and talent pools, employee referrals, candidate screening and shortlisting, interview scheduling, interview feedback, evaluations, collaboration between the recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates, candidate assessments, approval workflows, generating and managing the offers for candidates, electronic signatures, onboarding, candidate experience including career site and candidate communications, application status, interview scheduling, reporting such as recruiter performance, diversity metrics, and sourcing effectiveness. Because there are multiple different levels of hiring, high volume hiring is also there. There are multiple countries and entities involved, with some complex approval processes. There are large international internal mobility programs, strong HR governance requirements as well, data integration for HR, significant reporting and compliance requirements.
What is most valuable?
The best features include end-to-end recruiting, managing the whole requisition from sourcing, screening, interviews, offer, and everything in one hiring workflow. The workflow and Workday HCM integration is valuable because the recruiting data connects directly to the employee, the organization, the comp and ben team, workforce data, and candidate relationship to build the talent pools and maintain the relationship with the candidates for upcoming and future roles. Lots of internal mobility are available, so employees can look and apply for the internal opportunities, career progression and movement, candidate or employee retention. AI powered recruiting helps recruiters identify candidates in quick time. There is also skill-based recruiting for using the skills and competencies to help a lot more matching people to jobs rather than just relying only on the traditional job titles. Interview management, offer management, employee referrals allow a lot more employees to refer candidates and support the referral tracking. Global recruiting supports large organizations, managing recruiting across multiple countries, entities, and regulatory requirements.
End-to-end recruiting, internal mobility, offer management, and global recruiting are important features as I mentioned earlier, and also mobile recruiting now allows recruiters and managers to perform a lot more recruitment activities directly from their mobile devices. The main features I would consider most strategically important is Workday HCM integration. This is the biggest advantage because recruiting is not just isolated into IATS. It sits within the broader whole Workday ecosystem and skill-based recruiting with AI increasingly towards understanding the skills, capabilities, and talent rather than just simply matching the resumes and the job descriptions. Internal mobility can connect recruiting with the organization's existing employees and workforce, making hire internally versus just hire externally only. Other important factors that large organizations standardize approvals, security, the roles, processes, and compliance can be more valuable than flashy sourcing functionality.
Market mapping and competitor intelligence is also there which is very important, and I have interestingly seen Workday managing the recruiting process also on the high-level executive searches and hard-to-find leadership talent. Workday has been very significantly helpful in this area.
Workday Recruiting has a lot more significant positive impact on my company, particularly when recruiting is currently fragmented across manual work, spreadsheets, email and job board and separate ATS HR systems, everything individually handled. In terms of Workday, I have seen faster hiring, lower recruitment cost, better quality of hire, improving a lot more candidate experience, better recruiter productivity as well, and I can measure that, improved hiring manager collaboration, very strong internal mobility and referral programs, better workforce visibility and analytics, improving on the decision making, strong compliance and governance, better scalability, and improving talent pipeline. Workday definitely helps transform the whole recruiting from an administrative function into a lot more data driven talent management process with analytics.
Before, the process was quite manual, with job requests emailing the recruiter, then managing the spreadsheets, interviews also there, offer and HR system, everything was just manual. With Workday Recruiting, the workforce need in terms of the requisition, then the sourcing, candidate assessment, the interview, offer, hire, and then going into the HCM. This created a more connected flow of the whole hiring and talent data, especially for the senior leadership. The impact was very high on productivity, speed, and quality and also improved the candidate experience, with the cost of automation being better recruiting, definitely in the strategic talent management connected to workforce planning, internal mobility, and broader employee life cycle.
What needs improvement?
While Workday Recruiting provides a strong enterprise recruiting platform, I would still see there are several areas where it could be improved to make recruitment a bit more faster, more intelligent decision-making, very candidate-centric and more effective for recruiters and hiring managers. Improvements have already been made on a few aspects like improving the AI powered candidate matching, but it could make AI matching more sophisticated by going beyond the resume keywords and just the job title. For example, potential improvements could include matching the candidates based on transferable skills, career trajectory, and potential, identifying hidden talent who do not have the exact job title but still possess the right capabilities and skills and experience, and explaining why a candidate is recommended with at least some summary providing confidence scores and eliminating the potential bias.
There are a few other aspects to strengthen the passive candidate sourcing as well. This could be their biggest opportunity. Many of the best candidates, particularly senior executives and specialist talent, do not actively apply for jobs. Improvements could include external talent discovery, passive candidate identification, talent market mapping, competitor talent mapping as well, executive talent intelligence, and making the candidate experience more personalized where they can receive more personalized career recommendation, job suggestions, and real-time application updates. Recruiters still can benefit from more reduction of the recruiter administrative task because recruiters still spend a significant time on operational tasks in terms of screening, coordination for interviews, follow-ups, status updates and reminders, recruiting reports, and so recruiters should spend more time talking to candidates rather than managing the system alone. In terms of the analytics, better recruiting analysis and predictive intelligence, moving from just descriptive analytics to predictive recruiting intelligence, is where Workday could add a lot more value. Instead of just simply reporting time to fill is, let's say, 70 days, Workday could still say that position is likely to take maybe 80 days, 75 days to fill because the available talent pool is limited and consider expanding the geography or adjustment in the compensation or expand the search reach, whatever. Those kinds of analytics would be helpful.
Improvements could go higher, but some improvement areas need Workday to make a few improvements to make skill-based recruiting even more powerful. It could develop a more dynamic enterprise skills graph as well. For example, current employee skills or adjacent skills, potential career paths, future roles, or reskilling opportunities could be included. This would connect the whole recruiting team with internal mobility, workforce planning, learning, reskilling, succession planning, and retention of the existing employees. Improving the diversity bias and monitoring is important. If Workday can do this, AI recruiting creates an additional responsibility around the fairness and companies and everybody have the responsibility to be fair. Workday could provide a stronger real-time monitoring of candidate sourcing diversity, funneling the conversion by demographic groups, potential algorithmic bias, interview score patterns, and selection rate differences. Those are a few things Workday can improve on and can achieve a higher score.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Workday Recruiting for over 10 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not experienced any downtime or technical issues. Overall, Workday has been very stable and reliable. I have seen occasional short periods of degraded performance, but these have generally been isolated incidents. They have not significantly disrupted any recruiting operations. It is a cloud-based SaaS platform, so availability in infrastructure management is handled directly by Workday, which reduces the operational burden on our internal IT team. Workday has generally provided reliable availability and day-to-day recruiting functionality. There are no issues on stability and reliability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability and high-volume hiring has never been a problem for Workday Recruiting. It handles high-volume and seasonal recruiting very well because it is a cloud-based SaaS platform. The organization does not need to provision additional recruiting infrastructure when hiring volume increases. It can support large numbers of requisitions, candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers across business units and geographies and multiple regions involved. Standardized workflows, automation, candidate management, and reporting also helps us manage the recruitment spikes efficiently. The main challenge during the very large hiring campaigns are more related to the process design, the recruiting or recruiter capacity, integrations, and user adoption than to underlying the platform's scalability, and Workday performs very well in this area.
Workday Recruiting is highly scalable and can accommodate significant growth and organizational change. It is a cloud-based architecture, supporting an increasing number of candidates, requisitions, recruiters, and hiring managers without requiring any additional infrastructure. It also scales well across geographies, business units, and different recruiting processes. Any change in the organization structure, workflows, approval process, and hiring volumes can generally be managed through the configuration rather than any major system changes.
How are customer service and support?
Workday Recruiting in terms of the customer support has generally been very good with some variation depending upon the support tier and implementation partner, if there are any. Overall, support resources are generally knowledgeable, and issues are handled through structured support processes. Response times are good for standard issues. If there are more complex and technical issues or integration or configuration issues, they can take a bit longer to resolve, but the documentation, community resources, and knowledge base are also useful for troubleshooting and a lot more self-service.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before Workday Recruiting, I have used a combination of legacy applicant tracking systems and manual processes such as spreadsheets, email, separate HR systems. We then moved to Workday Recruiting primarily to consolidate all the recruiting activities into a single platform and improve the integration with the broader HR environment. The key drivers were better workflow automation, improved reporting and analytics, stronger collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers, better candidate data management, and reducing the manual administration, which was not earlier possible. We were using Oracle Taleo before, and it did not perform well. Once we got Workday Recruiting, then we completely changed the whole recruiting process and design.
How was the initial setup?
It was relatively easy, but not completely plug and play. Workday Recruiting integrates well with the other HR and enterprise systems, particularly within the own Workday ecosystem. Standard integrations and APIs make it relatively straightforward to connect payroll, HR, background check, job boards, and identity applications. The other complex legacy systems, however, custom workflows, data mapping, and security requirements can require significant configuration, implementation, and technical support.
What was our ROI?
The strongest ROI is coming from time savings, recruiter productivity, process efficiency, and reducing the administrative effort rather than simply eliminating the recruiting headcount. I have seen a lot more positive ROI. The biggest benefit comes from reducing manual recruiting and administration, improving productivity, speeding up the hiring workflows, and providing better visibility into the recruiting pipeline. I have not viewed Workday Recruiting primarily as a headcount reduction tool. Instead, it allows the existing recruiting team to handle a larger volume of hiring with less administrative effort. For example, the administrative time has been reduced for the recruiters almost by 20 to 30 percent reduction. Time spent on coordinating interviews has been reduced by 25 to 40 percent. Time to fill rates has significantly improved, at least 20 percent improvement. Recruiter capacity has increased to handle more requisitions per recruiter. Candidate status communication workloads have been reduced by 20 to 30 percent. Manual reporting effort has been reduced by 30 percent. After implementing Workday Recruiting, I was able to automate a significant portion of the requisition approval process, candidate communication, interview coordination, and reporting. This definitely has reduced a lot more effort for recruiters and hiring managers and allowed the recruiting team to manage more higher volume and increase the capacity of requisitions without increasing the headcount and hiring more recruiters. Approximately 20 to 30 percent savings on the recruiter administrative time has been achieved with additional benefits from faster hiring and improved visibility into the future pipeline building.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Workday Recruiting's pricing experience is reasonable for a large enterprise company, but a bit more complex and potentially expensive for SMEs and smaller organizations because it is an enterprise-level recruiting platform. Our overall experience with Workday Recruiting pricing and licensing was positive, although the pricing structure is more enterprise-oriented than straightforward. Workday is generally priced through a subscription model with costs depending on factors such as the size of the organization, the modules purchased, employee size or population, and the contract terms. The initial implementation and configuration costs can be significant because of the complexity of integrating Workday with the existing HR systems and tailoring workflows. For large organizations, the overall value can be justified by the breadth of the functionality and integration, but the total cost of ownership needs to be evaluated very carefully.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before selecting Workday Recruiting, we definitely evaluated quite a few other options as well, including iCIMS, Greenhouse, SAP SuccessFactors, and Oracle Recruiting Cloud. Quite a few comparisons and RFPs and thorough evaluations were conducted before choosing Workday Recruiting.
What other advice do I have?
Workday Recruiting should be recommended to organizations looking for an enterprise-level scalable recruiting platform, particularly those already using Workday HCM, because that is the biggest advantage that the integration between the recruiting and the broader HR ecosystem provides a single source of talent data and enables consistent workflows and reporting. Before selecting Workday Recruiting, organizations should clearly define their recruiting processes, integration requirements, reporting needs and future growth plans. They should also invest sufficient time in implementation and configure it very clearly, user training, and change management. Workday is powerful and highly configurable, but it can be complex for organizations so they should avoid any unnecessary customization and keep processes as standardized and as simple as possible. Overall, Workday Recruiting is a strong choice for organizations prioritizing scalability, automation, compliance, and analytics, integration with their broader HR technology environment and managing the whole recruiting for hiring managers, candidate experience, especially for larger and growing organizations. Workday brings order, hiring flows, data connects, growth, ease, and insight bloom. I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
