The future of recruitment: Q&As from Workable Next

At Workable Next on Dec. 6, 2023, CEO Nikos Moraitakis, CRO Rob Long, and CTO Spyros Magiatis unveiled groundbreaking enhancements in recruitment technology.

They discussed ATS advancements, innovative reporting tools, and HRIS features, highlighting Workable’s commitment to evolving talent acquisition and management.

Here are key insights from their FAQs.

Q. How much of your 2024 product road map will focus on the ATS?

A. The ATS remains the majority of our business, the overwhelming majority of our revenue and also the thing we are very well known for. So, the point solution for ATS is not being left behind in any way.

In fact, just to give you a sense, the ATS you see has been developed by, for most of the years, it was an engineering team of like 50, 60 people. And now it’s up to 70. And right now, already, the team is 150.

And yes, it includes maybe a third of them working on things that are not ATS including HRIS, job sites, etc.

We have a lot of other things that come together around the product, but [the ATS] is still the majority of the thrust of the R&D and, in absolute numbers year over year, bigger investment happens there.

So, today, obviously, the HRIS parts are new, and there’s a lot of new features, and there’s a lot of novelty in that direction.

But this is a bit misleading. The ATS remains like the brand of our business and the core of our business. That should give peace to people that we’re not starting to do other things.

Q. Are there any [plans] to improve the reports feature for recruiting?

A. We’re not surprised because these features that people are mentioning here are also the few very, very in-demand features.

We know that reporting is something that users always want more. I don’t know the details specifically, but I know we’re going for a very comprehensive solution that will give a lot of flexibility and essentially cover lots of different needs that different users have brought up.

And you’re going to get some really good news on that front, including the ability to receive scheduled email reports in your email.

Q. How can we get the information of our employees from our previous HRIS into Workable?

A. We’ll help you do that. Essentially, we have a customer success and professional services team that is going to sit with you, figure out your needs and how you want the work of HRIS to be set up and then they’re going to work with whatever provider or vendor you had before, how you had your data, and try to find the best way to migrate it and map it.

It’s not an easy process, but we have a team that is going to actually do that effort for you because it’s vital for your success. So you will have our assistance. We just did this for ourselves; we moved from Bamboo users before, and we moved to Workable. It’s been made so that this can be done.

If you just want to take a snapshot of the current information of your employees and import it to Workable, you can do it by a CSV import. We already have a fully customizable CSV import. You can map the columns of the CSV file to the employee record, the fields of the employee record as they have been defined by you in our own HRIS. And you just need to upload the CSV and you’re done.

But if you want to also migrate the historical information, then yes, with a professional service, we can do the more sophisticated import for you. It depends if you just have a list of employees and data that you can probably upload yourself.

But if you want to carry over your policies, documents, signatures, if you had an HRIS before, it’s best if you talk to our customer services team and we’ll do all the hard work for you.

Plus, we really want people to try it out because it’s a new thing. So, you will get a super VIP treatment from our team who wants to be super successful with their first customers. First-class service.

Q. Will we be adding a field to search by the general function since titles are so arbitrary?

A. What we are going to do in people search is replace the existing way to search with a natural language search that will be interpreted by an LLM to a query to our People Search index. So this thing will change completely and will have theoretically unlimited capabilities.

You’ll be able to tell it what you’re looking for and it will do with some LLM including some other things I saw in the chart, like a radius of a locale, you know, location with radius-based location searches and stuff like that.

Everything that can be mapped from natural language to an elastic search query – essentially being a bit technical here – will be possible.

Q. Any news on posting jobs in multiple locations?

A. Job postings in multiple locations is perhaps the most requested feature at the moment. It’s in the roadmap, The first version of multiple locations will be available in the beginning of 2024, but we will continue improving it over the first two quarters but even the first iteration will be good enough for most use cases regarding this qualification reasons.

I must admit this is something we had planned for [2023] but because it took us longer to do the required improvements in the new design of the candidate profile and candidate pipeline management. It’s definitely coming [in 2024].