As 2024 begins, TA budgets remain tight and highly scrutinized, forcing recruiting teams to be even more efficient and effective than they’ve been in years past. While recruiting leaders may need to cut down on the number of tools in their tech stacks this year (if they haven’t done so already), it’s vital that they extract maximum value from their core platforms—like Workday. In many cases, maximizing your Workday ATS requires an integration with specialized platforms or software that augments capabilities, adds efficiency, and increases ease of use.

Hiring efficiently and equitably doesn’t always require a massive investment or rethink of processes; it just demands a focused effort to maximize the capabilities of your ATS. Your Workday ATS is, after all, the center of your tech stack. But as with every platform, it has its strengths and weaknesses. As such, there are elements of your hiring process that are more likely to benefit from a Workday integration. By understanding your efficiency and equity goals—as well as the challenges you must overcome to achieve them—you can unlock the full potential of your ATS with Workday integrations that can optimize these stages.

By strategically focusing on the stages of the hiring funnel that have the greatest impact on overall process and outcomes, and then investing in a few select platforms or tools to optimize those steps, TA leaders can minimize spend this year and still maximize the performance of their Workday ATS—and therefore, of their team. Fortunately, there are off-the-shelf solutions in Workday’s integration ecosystem to empower teams to hire fairly and inclusively across every stage of the hiring funnel.

Job post creation tools

Job post creation is an essential step of the larger kickoff and intake stage, which determines the downstream success of the hiring process. Every word and detail in your job post matters—after all, job posts are typically a candidate’s initial introduction to your organization; and if they fail to make a good first impression or are biased, the quality and diversity of your candidate pools will likely suffer as qualified candidates will simply choose to not apply.  Yet historically, recruiters have tended to bow to hiring managers’ personal (and sometimes myopic) requirements, and job posts overall haven’t been treated as the strategic marketing documents that they are.

Job posts should be optimized for inclusivity, appeal, and findability. That means calibrating titles and requirements to the role, eliminating both vague and unwittingly-biased language, offering salary ranges, incorporating benefits and diversity statements, and more. Ensuring your posts are inclusive while being role-and-market calibrated will help your organization attract even more qualified and underrepresented candidates, aid internal hiring team alignment, and ultimately yield faster hires at less cost. Some Workday integrations for this stage of the funnel include Datapeople, Mathison, Ongig, and Textio. (If you’re considering Datapeople and Textio or Datapeople and Mathison as solutions, we encourage you to read our comparisons.)

Interview scheduling and email automation

Once your compelling job posts have motivated qualified and underrepresented candidates to apply, it’s time to correspond with them—and to schedule future communications. This is no insignificant part of the hiring process: More than 40% of recruiting teams’ time is spent scheduling interviews—a task that few recruiters enjoy. Automating this not only eliminates the time-intensive back-and-forth of emails (not to mention the potential for unconscious biases or miscommunication that deteriorate candidate experience). It also gives recruiters more time to do the most important work of all: meaningfully engaging candidates and building relationships with them.

What’s more, automating interview scheduling and email communications throughout the hiring process establishes fairness, since every candidate receives the same status updates and information thanks to standardized, templated messaging. Hiring teams that take the most thoughtful approach to their interview scheduling and email automation software will further use it to level the playing field by offering interview prep to all candidates. Your Workday ATS does come with out-of-the-box scheduling and email automation, but many Workday users avoid using them due to their complexity and lackluster experience. Workday integrations to bolster this part of your process include GoodTime, Sense, and Paradox.

Candidate screening software

Manual screening processes (sifting one-by-one through resumes and cover letters, taking phone screens with ultimately unqualified candidates) waste time, invite bias, and can be an enormous bottleneck in the hiring process. Screening software enhances productivity at scale, fills vacancies more quickly, and can de-bias your process. For high-volume teams, this type of efficiency and equitable effectiveness can be transformative.

That said, it’s worth noting that many candidate screening solutions are built on AI. AI has the potential to exacerbate existing bias, so asking how a particular vendor’s algorithm protects against such bias (and its amplification) is critical. Remember, the name of the game isn’t just efficiency; it’s also equity.

Solutions like MeVitae redact candidate information (name, age, education, etc.), anonymizing the screening process so teams only make decisions based on criteria that matter. Eightfold matches candidates to the right jobs based on skills and potential rather than irrelevant criteria, all while masking personal information. Searchlight is another bias-free AI solution and Workday integration that filters qualified applicants by relevant work experiences, hard skills, and soft skills.

Video interviewing tools

In theory, the interview should be one of the most insightful stages of the recruiting process for hiring teams—yet research shows that historically, interviews have no correlation with post-hire outcomes. That’s because unstructured interviews invite every kind of personal bias, marring decision-making, and can deter qualified and underrepresented candidates from passing through to the next stage of the hiring funnel, resulting in candidate ghosting.

To mitigate bias and subjectivity, interview tools provide hiring teams with the right questions and format, along with a consistent scoring model so every candidate is measured against the same criteria. Workday integrations like BrightHire, Metaview, and Willo allow hiring teams and TA leaders to revisit conversations to ensure hiring decisions are made fairly based on candidates’ actual responses—not on interviewers’ own recollections or personal preferences. Another Workday integration, Sapia.ai, allows candidates to interview over text, offering an alternative to the traditional video or in-person interviews that may place undue hardship on some candidates.

Candidate relationship management (CRM) software

While your Workday ATS organizes candidate information (talent that’s currently in process with your organization), a CRM organizes prospective candidate information (outreach and data on talent who hasn’t yet shown interest in your role). CRMs are where you nurture passive talent to fill positions faster down the road. Alongside email automation and talent pool management features, CRMs may also include scheduling tools, recruitment marketing tools like career site builders, and more.

By integrating your Workday ATS with a CRM, you’ll get a full view of the candidate journey—from initial cold outreach all the way through hire. Workday integrates with candidate relationship management platforms such as Beamery, Phenom, and Gem. Whatever CRM you choose, make sure the solution includes diversity analytics among its data offerings. You’ll want to know what diversity and equity look like at every stage of the funnel—including the very top.

Candidate feedback tools

One of the most powerful ways to analyze and optimize your hiring process is by getting feedback directly from the source (your candidates). Improving your process based on the actual candidate experience, alongside your own analytics and insights, will mean faster, more qualified hires down the road.

In your surveys, make sure you uncover candidate sentiment concerning company culture. How comfortable were candidates discussing things like their social and cultural background (if they did)? What did they gather about leadership’s—and the company’s—values during the hiring process? Did they experience a sense of inclusion and belonging with the hiring team?

Workday integrations like Candidate.fyi and Starred will help you more easily obtain candidate experience insights that uncover gaps, positioning you to make data-driven improvements to your process.

Recruitment analytics

“Recruitment analytics” isn’t necessarily a category of software—but it is a required capability of high-performing talent acquisition teams. Every tool you use should be gathering data and serving up insights and proactive actions you can take to improve your hiring process and outcomes. That said, it’s critical to have a single, source-of-truth view into all the data you’re collecting from every platform during the hiring process. Doing so will make it clear where bias or other frictions enter your hiring process and help you zero in on actions that power continuous improvement in your hiring process.

To get you started, Datapeople has summarized a list of the metrics that matter most in 2024:

  • Offer acceptance rate
  • Time to hire
  • Passthrough rates
  • Passthrough rate by demographic (to zero in on potential biases in your process)
  • Job non-compliance rate (to ensure jobs are compliant with local and company regulations)


When considering platforms and tools to integrate with your Workday ATS, ensure that data is at the core of what they do. A CRM like GEM makes data more easily accessible for candidate lifecycle reporting. And a comprehensive hiring workflow platform  like Datapeople inherently recognizes the importance of data and ensure it’s both accessible and actionable—not only to hiring teams, but also to leadership. After all, recruiting data not only optimizes your talent acquisition function, it also satisfies your C-suite’s interest concerning TA performance—and may possibly secure more budget and resources down the road.

Which Workday integrations does your recruiting team need?

It’s tough to find a solution if you don’t (yet) have clarity on the problem. Recruiting teams are forced to do more with less these days, so your hiring strategy—and its accompanying software—should be customized to your organization’s goals and needs to attain them.

Consider which of your goals are most important, and which improvements will be most immediately felt by leadership and your hiring teams. Then map out your recruitment process from kickoff to hire. What tasks does your team perform at each stage of the process? How could those tasks be optimized, automated, or better informed by data? Are there stages of your process that currently need more attention than others?

Consider, too, your organization’s particular pain points and challenges. Are you hiring at high volume and concerned that good candidates may be falling through the cracks? Are you not attracting the right applicants for your open roles to begin with? The answers to questions like these will help you determine which platforms and tools you need to pair with your Workday ATS to see the greatest impact on your hiring process and outcomes.

And if you’d like help from an outside expert to more swiftly arrive at process optimization opportunities, Datapeople offers a free process audit.

The necessity of a two-way integrated recruiting tech stack

Your Workday ATS is the foundation of your recruiting tech stack. While Workday can support full-cycle hiring, most recruiting teams integrate their Workday ATS instance with specific software to do their most optimal work. “Integration” has been the key word here: Ensuring all your tools talk to each other is essential. After all, if data doesn’t flow seamlessly from one tool to the next, your team won’t have a full view of either the hiring process or the candidate experience you are offering. And you won’t be able to accurately and comprehensively support strategic decisions—like where to most impactfully invest.

The integrations you choose should also effectively engage hiring managers and other stakeholders on your hiring teams. As a category, the ATS simply wasn’t designed for non-TA end users, so recruiting leaders should thoughtfully add tools and build workflows that encourage hiring manager involvement without overwhelming them or removing the guardrails that ensure standardization and consistency.

Datapeople: a trusted Workday partner

Datapeople empowers and engages Talent Acquisition and hiring managers to reduce time spent while maximizing the potential of some of the most important elements of their process, including writing job posts, measuring and identifying process breakdowns, and collaborating with hiring managers.

As a trusted Workday partner with an out-of-the-box bi-directional ATS integration that allows your team to work the way they want–directly in Workday or in Datapeople–while ensuring your data is always in sync. Datapeople’s recruiting intelligence and control platform helps organizations maximize their efficiency and equity goals; and our partnership with Workday propels mutual customers to win the talent war by executing hiring processes that are fair, efficient, and ultimately rewarding. Remitly, a Workday ATS customer, has embraced the combination of Datapeople + Workday to take a more data-driven approach to achieving their DEI and efficiency goals. Conagra, has also embraced the combination to deploy standards globally shortening time to fill, improving their talent brand consistency, and add qualified and diverse candidates to their talent population.

If you want to know more about how Datapeople can support your recruiting equity and efficiency efforts, we’d love to show you how.