Workday launches Student Recruiting, first installment of broader education push

Workday on Thursday said the first installment of its Workday Student Suite---Workday Student Recruiting---is available.

Consider Student Recruiting, part of Workday 23, as a teaser to the launch of the full Workday Student at the end of 2016. Education has been identified as a key vertical for Workday, which specializes in human capital management and financial cloud software.

The bet for Workday is that Student Recruiting, which is being rolled out at a few universities and colleges, will garner interest from other educational institutions. Campus and student management systems are largely supplied by Ellucian as well as Oracle's PeopleSoft unit and Campus Management, which has a bevy of for-profit education companies as customers.

Workday Student Recruiting will revolve around finding, understanding and reaching prospective students. Universities are increasingly battling for top students to improve rankings and appeal to the broader population that is questioning the debt load and returns on a college education.

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According to Workday, Student Recruiting was built with the help of nine college and universities that served as design partners. The educational institutions range from the University of Texas at Austin to Yale to Stevens Institute of Technology to Broward College and Tallahassee Community College.

The application is mobile first and revolves around engagement, analytics and outcomes such as completing a degree.

In the broader picture, Workday sees education as a vertical ripe for modernization as well as one to cultivate a future customers. If college students are engaged and find Workday's software appealing they'll be more likely to consider the company's HR and financial wares when the become business executives.

Liz Dietz, vice president, strategy and product management at Workday, said the goal with Student Recruiting was to capture use cases for the traditional and non-traditional student bases. "We're working with our nine design partners to peel back the onion and rethink what a modern student system needs to be," said Dietz.

Workday meets with design partners quarterly in person for two-and-a-half days to break out design and functional needs. There are also weekly or every two week meetings to talk development. As the quarterly meetings rotate to design partners' campuses, Workday also holds student powwows. One key ask: A detailed path gives students the fastest route to a degree with the least amount of debt.

Deitz said the design partners will all implement Student Recruiting and for Workday that initial feedback will be critical from first contact through the student life cycle. Broward and Talahassee Community College will be the first wave to implement Student Recruiting. Both institutions are interested in micro targeting to find students in nursing, specialized manufacturing and other key areas.

Key features of Workday Student Recruiting include:

• Recruiting goal setting using analytics to match prospective students to profiles of historically successful ones. The aim is to use analytics to find students likely to apply, enroll and complete a degree.
• Recruiter management with dashboards of recruitment activities, assignments, events and territory.
• Campaign and event management with targets and communication along with integration with Workday's HR and financial software.
• Prospect record keeping via smartphones and tools to merge and identify duplicate records.
• Success tracking on campaigns, events and other recruitment activities.