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Mark: Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer.
PeopleTech is a member of Evergreen Podcasts. Check out other shows at www.evergreenpodcasts.com.
In November, ADP Workforce Now and ZipRecruiter rolled out an integration. It melds the capabilities of both systems, as integrations do. But it also complemented new capabilities driven by DataCloud, which is ADP’s people analytics platform. So, for instance, users have new, more convenient ways to score and assess candidates for a particular a job opening.
Integrations fascinate me. So, joining me today are Hanneli Hudock, vice president for product management at ADP Workforce Now. And Matt Plummer, ZIPRecruiter’s vice president of product strategy.
Well, thank you both for being here today. I appreciate it.
What's different about the latest ADP-ZipRecruiter integration? Listen to @ADP's Hanneli Hudock and @ZipRecruiter's Matt Plummer explain. #HR #HRTech Click To TweetWorkforce Now and ZipRecruiter have just announced an integration. What’s different about this integration? Why is it more noteworthy than your average integration? Matt, want to start?
Matt: Sure. On our end, I think for us, it’s really about the depth of the integration, and of course, the nature of the partnership more broadly. But from an enterprise recruitment point of view, or even a mid-market recruitment point of view, keeping recruiters in their platform of choice is really important to us and I believe that’s also going to be very true for ADP.
Mark: Hanneli?
Hanneli: Yeah, and just building on that. Exactly, staying in the platform. We’ve built Workforce Now from the ground up with a single database and it covers all of the HCM needs. And we have a recruiting module, but we knew that we needed greater intelligence to help our clients find good candidates and bring in good candidates. And we knew this was something that was kind of beyond our expertise, and we were thrilled to be able to bring in Zip to complete that. Exactly as Matt said, the complete, all-in-one experience is what’s really exciting for us and for our clients.
Mark: The idea of direct, seamless access to ZipRecruiter from Workforce now, it always struck me that this is the way integration should work, and everything’s just very neatly fit together and seamless from the user’s point of view. Can you talk about where the industry is with this approach and where you think it should be, Hanneli?
Hanneli: Sure. Yeah, there’s a big variation in where the industry is, but we’re seeing a lot of evidence of catching up. And so we see the whole gamut in different partners that we work with from file-based integration, if you could call it that, to sort of varying forms of API integration one-way, two-way. And then what we have more with ZipRecruiter is an experience-based integration. There’s the APIs that support it. But as a user, it feels all together and native.
That’s the direction that we’re trying to go to with a lot of our partners, but I’ll be honest, we can’t do that with all of our partners. Not all of our partners are ready for that journey, and so this is a really good situation for that. Now there are some other parties that we can tap that are connectors, and we have some connector capabilities at ADP as well that might sort of help to make up for some of that, but this is really the best-case scenario.
Mark: Okay. And Matt, what’s your thinking about this? How do you put this integration in the context of the industry?
Matt: Yeah, I think the context is really important and the context here is really smarter sourcing. From a recruiter’s point of view, that’s really the end user that we’re trying to optimize for. From their point of view, they have to serve their internal customer, their hiring managers. They’re really trying to get requisitions posted, get requisitions open, and deliver quality candidates or qualified candidates to the hiring managers that are their internal customers.
And so it’s not about having to log into a third-party platform like ZipRecruiter, it’s really working within Workforce Now, working within a platform that they’re used to that has all the workflow controls that they’re used to and that they’re sort of bound by, and really then relying on ZipRecruiter’s matching technology to deliver those qualified candidates.
From our point of view, the recruiter who’s working on sourcing here can stay within their platform, they can do the things that they’re used to doing, opening up requisitions, and ADP has made it really easy to manage their job sponsorship with ZipRecruiter so they can easily flag those jobs. And then our sort of magic engine takes over, our smart matching technology takes over and we deliver those qualified candidates.
It’s a really great two-way integration because it supports the job sponsorship and the candidate delivery right back. Really from a recruiter’s point of view, you can hit the buttons in Workforce Now to sponsor a job. And within probably minutes or even maybe hours, you’ve got qualified candidates showing up in your queue and you can get those delivered over to your hiring managers internally.
Hanneli: Yeah, and if I can just build on that, agree 100% with what Matt is saying, and just to add to it. The challenge of the mid-market is that they’re competing with big, brand name, major companies for the same talent and they have the same needs of talent, but they may not have the resources. They may not have the internal IT team that’s ready to help them build out integrations with lots of partners. They may not have a big procurement team to assist them in signing lots of different contracts. They may not have a very large recruiting team to go and find those candidates. Specifically for the mid-market, this is a huge win because they have the big enterprise company needs for talent, but they don’t always have the resources so this all-in-one is really critical.
Mark: Yeah, one of the things that strikes me is that both of your companies, ADP and ZipRecruiter, are both always working on new technology, new products. It would seem to me in some ways building an integration like this is almost a moving target, not just technically speaking but in terms of product concept and in product design.
How aware of, say, ADP’s capabilities with data or other areas was ZipRecruiter as the integration took shape? I’m specifically thinking about data cloud, but your two companies have had a relationship before this. How is it that you all worked and made sure that when the integration came out it was as good as it could be?
Matt: Yeah, I think from ZipRecruiter’s perspective, we’ve had a relationship with ADP for a couple of years and we had some good experience on the ADP RUN side of the business or the very small business segment. We had a pretty good sense for the development life cycle, the style and methodology. With Workforce Now, it was kind of a no brainer. We already knew a good partner. We already kind of had that cadence down, had that momentum.
And for ZipRecruiter being a relatively young company, I just hit my seven year anniversary, which for me is a lifetime, but I’m one of the most tenured people at the company, so we are a fairly young company compared to ADP. It’s important to us to be agile, to be able to have a roadmap that’s very sort of ambitious, and ADP fits along pretty well with us. They have an ambitious product roadmap. They’re constantly developing. I think that alignment, we knew that alignment was already there with the ADP RUN relationship. So moving into Workforce Now, again, was pretty easy for us conceptually.
Hanneli: Yeah, so I think one of the things that’s really exciting about this is, is to your point about some of our data capabilities and analytics, is in terms of how we’re facing to the market and to our clients with this offering is there’s ZipRecruiter and all the intelligence there, and we’re complimenting it with some of our own intelligence. We have a candidate relevancy capability for candidates and how they match job descriptions, that kind of thing.
But I think what’s really unique here is the compensation benchmarks. And that’s something that ADP can bring to the table that’s really new, and it’s one of the advantages of having the pay system and the HR system, and that I feel is very complimentary. I’m not sure if Zip has other partners or has even sort of forayed into this space, but at least for us, I think it brings one of the most exciting, relevant benchmarks that ADP has to bear with the intelligence of the right candidates.
Mark: The relationship between ZipRecruiter and ADP, where’s it going? Do you plan more integrations? Are you looking for more joint opportunities? What’s your perspectives on that?
Hanneli: Yeah, so speaking for me, I think already we’ve started to expand, pulling in other parts of ADP to take advantage of the work that’s going on. And then I think the other thing, and we’re already hearing this from clients, is we do have promotional in terms of job slots, which is very exciting.
Because again, back to the point about huge company needs but smaller company resources, a lot of our clients are pretty excited to be able to get just enough of Zip that they need, but many of them are saying we want even more. One of the things that we want to build on is the ability for them to buy up. Because as they’re having a good experience with it and as they’d like to pull in more of those sort of finely-tuned, intelligently-matched candidates, they’re looking to do more. I think that’s probably one of the more exciting things that we want to take forward.
Mark: And Matt, what’s your view?
Matt: Yeah, I think we should consider this V1 for the Workforce Now-ZipRecruiter integration. And so as we work together and learn more about the different buying personas within Workforce Now, we’ll likely expand the relationship to make sure that we’re covering more of those needs.
And then if you really kind of break the sourcing challenge down into two parts, maybe to simplify, we’ll say there’s the decision making as to which jobs should be sponsored, because there’s either a capacity constraint or maybe a cost constraint there especially in the mid market, as Hanneli was saying earlier. There’s smarter decision making about which jobs to sponsor, and ZipRecruiter and ADP, I think, together can help inform customers of that over time, which jobs they should be putting money behind.
And then second, there’s smarter matching. We pride ourselves on our AI-based matching. That’s kind of our bread and butter that makes us really stand out in the market. And the signals that happen post-apply are really valuable for us to train our machine learning on. And so as we get deeper into the relationship and get some of those post-apply signals, so the candidate disposition signals, the hiring signals, it benefits the recruiters because those signals make us a bit smarter on their roles and that we can deliver even more qualified candidates to their current and future roles.
Mark: Matt, Hanneli, thank you very much. I appreciate your time today.
Hanneli: All right. Thank you, Mark.
Mark: My guests today have been Hanneli Hudock, vice president for product management at ADP Workforce Now, And Matt Plummer, ZIPRecruiter’s vice president of product strategy. We’ve been talking about integrations.
And we’ve been talking on PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. A member of Evergreen Podcasts. Check out other shows at www.evergreenpodcasts.com.
And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www-dot-hcm-technology-report-dot-com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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