“Do you really need to understand Workday to hire Workday specialists?”
I get asked this question a lot, particularly by HR and IT people who know hiring and know their company.
And I understand their scepticism. Because people hire for complex roles all the time across many different departments and skillsets.
So what makes Workday hiring so different?
The candidates.
Without a doubt.
Yes, there are lots of cloud ERP, HCM, planning and finance software solutions out there. And yes, there are hundreds of thousands of people with experience deploying them. But Workday truly is different. The nuts and bolts of implementation – the coding, integration, data – are all different for Workday than for other solutions.
And that means you need people with Workday-specific experience on your project. (It's why hiring people from outside the Workday ecosystem is the most common mistake companies make.)
But Workday is relatively new, which means there’s an exclusive pool of candidates to draw on.
You need a different approach to finding candidates
Workday experts – from project managers to testers – are in demand. They don’t hang around on job boards, and their LinkedIn profiles may be well out of date. They can receive 5 overtures a day because Workday is growing so fast.
This means your LinkedIn Premium subscription won’t work as effectively. It means you can’t just advertise on your usual sites. It’s why we’ve invested so much in our Workday-specific CRM over the past 3.5 years and used it to build relationships with 90% of Europe’s Workday professionals (as well as those across the US). The general market just doesn’t have an effective way of finding viable candidates in the timescales Workday projects need.
You need to be very smart in how you approach people
Workday people are a unique group. It’s like a club with its own language of acronyms and abbreviations. And if you don’t speak the language, the door shuts in your face.
I’ll give you an example.
I was talking to an integration lead the other week. He told me about an email he got from a generalist recruiter. His Workday mates were actually laughing at it.
It wasn’t something he’d take seriously, even though it was a standard email from someone who recruits IT people for a living.
And in the fast-moving Workday recruitment market, you need to be taken seriously fast (or you miss out on the best people). Not only are relationships important, but having Workday knowledge is critical, too. At this stage in Workday’s evolution, you need to understand the skills to know which unique combination will be the right fit for the role.
Save yourself the frustration and the budget
Don’t waste valuable time with a DIY approach to Workday recruitment. Ask a specialist at Focus Cloud to help. Not only will you get CVs in 2 to 4 hours (in most cases), but you’ll be in a position to interview and offer quickly.
And that’s what it’s all about – getting the right people in place so your project carries on smoothly.
Credit - Lloyd Gordon - CEO | Focus Cloud