In this post, Chief Strategy Officer Piers Lea explains LTG's plans to develop a mid-enterprise applicant tracking system by merging the UX and configurability of Breezy HR and PeopleFluent Recruitment.

When Learning Technologies Group acquired PeopleFluent last year, we hit a major milestone. With that decision, we began in earnest the work of joining our industry-leading learning technologies and services with a unique set of talent management solutions—to help organizations close the gap between current and future workforce capability. Since then, our focus has been on strengthening PeopleFluent’s best-of-breed solutions so we can extend their value to existing clients and prospects.

Our first step was to replace PeopleFluent’s learning offering, which just wasn’t up to par with its talent acquisition and talent management solutions, with NetDimensions’ award-winning learning management system (LMS).

So in October, we folded NetDimensions into PeopleFluent. And already, many PeopleFluent clients—including our largest customer—have taken advantage of our offer to switch, license for license, to get the superior LMS. From there, we turned our attention to PeopleFluent Recruitment, a best-in-class solution for enterprise organizations that hire at high volumes and whose global operations create uniquely sophisticated hiring and compliance workflows.

In their applicant tracking system (ATS) we saw industry-leading recruiting capabilities for the small businesses Breezy HR serves today. And we saw immense potential to deliver a similarly robust solution for a large section of the market served by LTG’s other companies. Specifically, mid-enterprise companies with 1,000-5,000 employees.

To engineer an all-new mid-enterprise talent acquisition offering would take years, and we wanted to deliver for these clients faster. So we scoured the market for a stellar product and a smart investment. We found just that in Breezy HR, whose acquisition we announced in April. In some ways, the strategy behind our decision was as simple as that. And now that the deal is done, we’re moving forward rapidly to bring the strategy to life.

The LTG Fit: Innovation That Delivers and Delights

Since inception, LTG has focused on smart growth fueled by a keen sense for the needs of our customers. Not just their needs today, but what they’ll need in the future to deliver for their own customers.

This forward-looking orientation is baked into our strategic mission—to help customers close the gap between current and future workforce capability—which PeopleFluent and now Breezy HR do by helping them put the right people in the right roles.

In service of this mission and outlook, we’ve developed an eye for innovative technologies that will augment and integrate well within our existing offerings. And for companies that share our drive to deliver and delight.

Who is Breezy HR?

Founded in 2014, Breezy HR serves small and medium-sized businesses that compete for talent with larger employers.

Their recruiting software is, according to Gartner, the most highly rated HR and Applicant Tracking product in Customer Satisfaction. Breezy also holds similarly high ratings with G2Crowd, Capterra, Trust Radius, and others.

We started Breezy HR to simplify the way businesses attract and hire, while making sure customers always come first,” said founder Darren Bounds. “Our customers expect a lot from their recruiting software, so we developed a feature-rich solution with an easy-to-use interface.”

To date, some 13,000 companies have used Breezy's ATS to recruit 15 million candidates in 72 countries. Their reputation for customer satisfaction bears out in strong revenue growth and client retention as well as delivering good margins and profitability. In recent years, Breezy HR doubled in size and is on track to maintain that growth pattern in 2019—clearly an attractive acquisition, even without the synergies.

What Breezy Offers and Why That Matters

Small and mid-sized businesses that use the Breezy ATS are able to create a delightful candidate experience, source proactively, nurture silver medalists and passive candidates, and otherwise empower their recruiters to attract and hire top talent.

Breezy HR has all the communication avenues needed for great candidate nurturing, along with capabilities like sourcing and interview scheduling that enable smaller companies to adopt an agile approach to recruiting.

There are many recruiting solutions that target the SMB and mid-enterprise markets,” said PeopleFluent Managing Director Stephen Bruce. ”Breezy offers unique depth of capabilities compared to other SMB talent acquisition vendors: namely, its automated workflows; interview scheduling with shared calendars, events, and panel interviews; and improved candidate communication and experience through email and text. These capabilities are more common to mid- and large enterprise ATSs.”

But what sets Breezy HR apart is that these capabilities are combined with its engaging and intuitive user experience for recruiters, managers, and candidates. This allows customers to rapidly deploy recruiting solutions that are highly effective, so they can identify, attract, and hire the right candidates and grow their businesses.

Broadening and Deepening Our Recruiting Software Offerings

To seize the full potential of Breezy HR, the PeopleFluent executive team—which now includes Breezy’s Darren Bounds—has begun working out how to optimally integrate the best of Breezy into PeopleFluent Recruitment and vice versa.

In broad strokes, the vision is to combine Breezy’s agile, modern interface and recruiting capabilities with PeopleFluent’s unparalleled configurability. To tune all the functions to the needs of the mid-enterprise company, using Breezy’s open architecture, and deploy its benefits to larger-scale customers.

At the same time, we will bring PeopleFluent’s embedded video into Breezy HR, giving their SMB clients the best video interviewing tools on the market—a capability that enhances a recruiter’s agility and can dramatically widen their candidate pool.

How important is video to HR and L&D? Read the Q&A with PeopleFluent’s Stephen Bruce.

Answering for Agility: What All Employers Need in an ATS

One thing that distinguishes recruiting from other HR functions is that recruiters compete for the same talent regardless of the size of their company and their budget for talent acquisition software.

Tech startups compete against Google for software engineers and predictive analysts. Regional retail outlets compete against The Gap for sales associates. Your local coffee shop competes against Starbucks for baristas and store managers.

Recruiters need tools that enable them to shift and act quickly, to respond immediately, and to reach out proactively. They simply cannot be blocked by deficiencies in functionality, a clunky user interface, or restrictive workflows.

Breezy gives recruiters the ability to compete against larger employers and brands in their markets. And by coupling its nimble features with PeopleFluent’s sophisticated talent acquisition solution, PeopleFluent will be able to empower enterprise clients to recruit faster and smarter—within an interface that both candidates and recruiters will love.

This is where many solutions—including well-known enterprise HCM systems—are failing companies today.

Related reading: 'Choosing Your Next Enterprise ATS: 4 Must-Have Features'

The Unique Power of Point Solutions

Across LTG’s brands, we deliver the absolute best in features, functions, experience, and service. In our experience, many client needs simply cannot be met with monolith systems. So we’ve come to believe strongly in the unique suitability of best-in-class solutions to solve acute pain points.

And we’re not alone in this thinking.

As Bersin notes in their Talent, Technology, and HR Predictions for 2019, “Cloud-based HR platforms such as Workday, Oracle HCM, and SuccessFactors have not transformed the work experience as we had hoped (Sierra Cedar research shows that user satisfaction is dropping), so we need to build a new tapestry of solutions focused on these systems of productivity.”

We see evidence of this every time PeopleFluent’s talent acquisition and talent management solutions are chosen by clients because their enterprise HCM platforms lack sufficient configurability.

And with the Breezy acquisition, we’ll be able to deliver an even better solution for those companies while simultaneously reaching a wider range of clients—giving their talent acquisition teams an advantage over the competition.

Keep reading: 'How to Implement an ATS: 13 Things You Need to Accelerate ROI'