Last week I decided to research the applicant tracking systems (ATS) used by the Fortune 100. The analysis was prompted by a fellow recruiting startup founder who suggested that Great Hires invest in becoming a partner for a newer ATS company’s marketplace. This made me want to estimate the size of the opportunity based on the volume of candidates that pass through the ecosystem of these providers. Despite how fragmented the ATS market is, I was surprised that there are only three ATS system providers who serve more than two F100 companies.
- Taleo/Oracle and Kenexa BrassRing dominate the Fortune 100
2. The number of jobs flowing through the top systems (Taleo/Oracle, Kenexa/BrassRing and homegrown) dominate everyone else.
3. The average number of job openings of the Fortune 100 is 2,172. These firms must have very large talent acquisition organizations to keep up with their hiring needs.
4. Many companies have started using a second platform such like a recruitment marketing system (e.g. Jibe or Smashfly) or even a second ATS-oriented company (e.g. Smartrecruiters or Jobvite) to deal with CRM, Recruitment Marketing or Talent Community needs. However, these “second” platforms have less than 20% penetration in the F100.
5. Six firms built their own ATS: Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Verizon, Statefarm. What makes Statefarm unique is that they aren’t a technology company, but they seem to have unique needs with a franchise-like recruiting model.
6. Only one Fortune 100 company has adopted the Workday ATS in the two plus years since its release.
7. Amazon has 17,000 job openings and 230,000 employees. They are a much bigger organization than most people think and ranked #20 of the F500 by number of employees. For comparison, Wal-Mart is the largest employer with 2,300,000 employees.
8. Oracle has 8,000 open job reqs. I wonder how much input/feedback the Oracle recruiting function has provided the Taleo development team about their ATS?
9. Three of the top 6 companies with the most job openings are healthcare related and combine for nearly 43,000 openings
10. American Airlines gives candidates the option to apply using their Yahoo credentials. Not LinkedIn, Facebook, Google or Twitter. Are they signaling applicants who they are really looking for?
Note: Berkshire Hathaway was not included in this analysis since it is really a holding company, and was replaced by #101 DuPont.