SmartSearch ATS vs. Workday Human Capital Management

If you have a recruiting organization that needs flexibility and a wide range of options to address an ever changing landscape than this is your system. It does not try to pigeon-hole recruiters into a single recruiting model. It allows you to customize how your organization does things but also allows you to control where you need to control. We have been using SmartSearch for more than 24 years. We started out on one of the first versions because we liked the company and the direction they were taking. SmartSearch has not always been the tool with the flashiest features.... but it has always had some of the best features. They have always been of the cutting edge of the next technology and have the tools and features that make SmartSearch a complete solution. We have not seen anything else out in the marketplace that has encouraged us to change.

I would say it's well suited in every environment because I think it does so much. It's like the holy grail of HRIS systems is what I like to call it because thinking about all parts of the employee lifecycle, it lives here in Workday Human Capital Management. So I love the fact that you can do the people data analytics, you can store employee records, the talent acquisition pieces there. I'm thinking I can't think of anything negative right now except for the fact that I can't drill down into the data for the people analytics side. Other than that, I think it's literally, yeah, the holy grail of HRIS systems, I love it and I would highly recommend it.

Incentivized

• Customization - the team at SmartSearch always tries to find a solution that works for our company specifically.
• Customer Care - the team actually cares and is concerned about the well-being of our business. They help us solve issues as if they worked for us and this feeling is felt at every level of the organization beginning with their President.
• Technology - I have used multiple ATSs and demoed many, many more. SmartSearch has superior technology for staffing firm; the technology that helps us recruit and fill jobs faster.
• Listening - the team at SmartSearch actually listens to us and our concerns whether it's regarding a feature for an upgrade or simply solving an issue we are facing.
• Common Sense - there have been many times in our relationship when we have asked about a feature and we hear "that makes sense, we will make that change for all of our customers"...listening is rare and they do it well.

• Since it is cloud based, it does not have version control issues (e.g. get 10 years behind on versions that are no longer supported), or the need for constant upgrades. This is completed behind the scenes.
• The flexibility of Workday HCM implementation and then taking it to day to day operations was superior. You can then blow and out and start using other system cababilities when ready.
• To enter the system, we must use multi-factor authentication for additional security of employee data. A user downloads their reports and then they are shown in their archive of work transactions and history.

Incentivized

• There's some room for improvement with candidate status. If you change a status, you have to refresh your screen for that to appear. It's a minor thing.
• It would be nice to hide certain bits of information on the web posting, but keep that information in the requisition for our records, ie, salary range, etc.

• The web interface is awful
• Terrible, terrible, UI. No modern features like auto-save. I can't count the times I have lost work.
• Their UX team (if it even exists) must be aliens, because I can't see how humans would have come up with the UI conventions they have.
• Who creates a website application where you can't open stuff in multiple browser windows and tabs easily?

Incentivized

While I do not have experience with SmartSearch's competitors, I would renew my use of SmartSearch simply based on the up-front costs of implementing the program. It would be better to continue with a program that is sufficiently meeting my needs than it would be to incur the same up-front costs to implement something else.

Incentivized

It is work to make one system the source of truth for our data, but now that it is done, there is less work involved in staying on this path. This means for us that maintaining and/or implementing new modules like performance, finance, talent, etc. is simple. It's a no-brainer

Incentivized

There are so many facets of SmartSearch, that to know everything about it is nearly impossible. While it is mainly straight forward, there is a lot. After using the program for a while, you become pretty comfortable with the basics and can start adding some of the other features.

Incentivized

Overall this is a highly useable product. It does require continual use to stay current on changes in the User Interface and functionality, but as noted earlier, this is a reasonable trade-off for the rapid rate of improvement. It is very user friendly and the templated business processes prevents the system from becoming overly complicated

My license for SmartSearch goes back to 2004. It has always been available for me - don't remember a single time it was not available in all of those years.

In 2014, Workday has changed the update process. There will be two updates a year; the updates will be delivered to customers typically in a 24 hour window during these two weekends a year. They also keep the Community up-to-date about any planned outages, etc. There is weekly scheduled downtime on Friday night.

From my perspective, the system runs like a well oiled machine and I have not had any issues with customers complaining about speed. If a report is taking long to run, the report can run in the background and you can go about your business. For larger enterprises, there is additional space and machines to process the application in what Workday refers to it as Extended Configuration Tenant

Once you get the 1 person on the phone they are very knowledgeable and tend to solve the problem. The issue is there are not enough resources to handle all the clients. Their primary clients are "recruiting firms" and I think that is where most of the their support resources go

Support is provided by OneSource, the reseller. They really have no expertise and their level of technical expertise is poor. When we went to our training, the room was filled with OneSource people going through the same training. We finished training in 1 day, they took 4 days. They are hardly experts. Workday has come out with two more releases since then and Onesource have doubled in size in the last year – so it’s hard to see how they can keep up.

There is an online community/portal that is pretty good. There is however no easy answer to “guided completion”

Some training is offered online. Cost is per-person. This also gets quite expensive. Training doesn’t follow a logical path A to B. Starts in middle. When you try to do it afterwards at your desk, difficult.
• Training scenarios are not very real

I have done for report writing and mass imports (EIBs). They give materials and you run through examples, i.e. you don’t just watch them do tasks, so that is helpful. Training is expensive – a single reporting writing class is $600 per person for virtual training

Using the basic functions of SmartSearch is an easy implementation. But consider carefully what your organization needs to really drive placements. Because we only did a basic implementation first, we were caught off guard when later trying to implement more functions and realizing that the capabilities were limited or were difficult to learn and implement and realizing that tech support was not going to be consistent.

We had a small team - 5 of us total. It would have been nice to have a little larger team, but we made it work. Definitely helped that for our first payroll our 3rd party partner OSV was onsight. This minimized issues.

Incentivized

We have looked at multiple alternatives over the years at both Gates and our collective experiences prior to joining Gates. In our opinion, SmartSearch is the right choice for our business today. We have been able to scale it globally and conduct all of our major requirements for our applicant tracking system and that works for Gates. We also feel like we are an important partner to SmartSearch and they work with us and we feel like our feedback is important to them. I have worked with a number of ATS vendors prior to SmartSearch and pre-Gates. That is not a universal approach in this space and is a unique value prop from SmartSearch.

The workday human capital management stacks up against ADP due to the overall different features that we have got in a single platform. With Workday HCM, we do not have to select multiple vendors or tools to manage employees, salary details, career progress, etc. Also, the workday human capital management is very easy to use in all the different use cases that I mentioned above.

Workday has released Financials and is continuing to develop it's Human Capital Management footprint with the addition of Workday Recruiting. I think customers will find that is easy to add on additional functionality in the system. Workday does make it easy for customers to make changes without relying on IT resources. The Business Process framework is a visual tool that allows functional resources to make changes and see the flow of the transaction

• I am not involved in the budgeting or finance for recruiting software, so cannot speak directly to any numbers for ROI. However, SmartSearch personally saves me several hours a day in organizing candidates, thus saving my company substantial amounts in productivity.
• The lacking ability to tag additional recruiters throughout the hire track process means whoever onboards the hire has to ensure that a "split" is marked when completing the NHS. Failure to do so can result in quite a lot of lost time from HR to get the mistake fixed.

Incentivized

• To get the most value out of all possible automation in Workday you really need to use a lot of their modules, otherwise you may not be able to solve for some pretty important and necessary needs.
• The system maintenance is way more than what I have seen with some other systems and therefore you need a quite large team dedicated to it.
• The ability to automate a lot of administrative tasks and the ability for employee and manager self-service definitely create a lot of opportunity for HR to spent time and effort elsewhere. A lot of the automation that can be leveraged in Workday also allows for eliminating third party vendors as well as the cost of their maintenance and integrations.

Incentivized