If I were an actual journalist, I would have just reported that Google announced last month that Google Hire is now available to enterprise employers, added a few quotes from the product manager I interviewed (it was good background, for sure), and appended some language pulled straight from their press release.
The headline would be something exceedingly boring, like “Google Hire Moves Up Market,” but if this were a news post, it would have been published as soon as Google lifted their embargo.
If that’s all you care about, you can stop reading now, or at least, read the blog post by the Hire product manager instead – it provides a much better product overview than this column will. If you’re interested in the features, functionalities or the perfunctory success stories, complete with gushing customer quotes and impressive outcome data to support their business case, you don’t need me – click here for the primary source, instead.
Or, you know, Google it.
Building A Castle in the Cloud.
If you’re still reading, you already know that the news that Google Hire is moving into the enterprise market is, paradoxically, not news at all. It’s been an inevitability – and pretty obvious outcome – ever since they first launched Hire back in 2017.
At the time, their messaging was pretty simple. They saw how their SMB customers were already using native G Suite functionality for hiring, and followed suit by consolidating and optimizing their existing productivity tools like Calendar and Gmail into an ATS.
They were not building a tool designed to displace existing ATS vendors, but instead, to offer a recruiting product to a SMB customer base that largely functioned without a dedicated talent acquisition solution.
As a part of Google Cloud, it would only be available to G Suite customers, designed for the kind of mom and pop shops without a sophisticated talent function or, in many cases, a dedicated HR department to begin with.
They had no plans on building an enterprise ATS or HCM offering anytime soon, the story went – there was a big enough market of companies largely ignored or underserved by traditional HR Tech to render any plans to move upmarket more or less moot. This was the story they repeatedly told reporters, analysts and customers on the record.
For the foreseeable future, according to the company, Google Hire was strictly a SMB play – much to the disappointment of enterprise TA leaders, who were immediately intrigued when Hire initially launched.
I’ve never seen so many recruiting buyers express so much interest in a new product, but the response to the plethora of public posts and product inquires was a consistent reminder that access to Hire was limited to small employers already running on G Suite and Google Cloud.
…because Watson doesn’t work for hiring.
The focus for enterprise employers was Google for Jobs, whose integrations with many leading job boards and ATS providers served as further proof that Google wasn’t a competitive threat to the traditional HR Technology ecosystem, but rather, as a trusted partner whose entry into the industry floated all ships.
This may be true, but the news the company was launching an enterprise offering seems to be more proof of what many of us have suspected all along, despite Google’s adamant, unambiguous denials: forget floating all ships in HR Tech. Google is, for better or worse, emerging as a significant competitive threat for the very companies with whom it purports to partner.
The Mountain View based behemoth will likely sink many of the more established players in the space, and those that survive may well find themselves left behind in its wake.
This is not an intentional attack on the systems status quo; Google isn’t gunning for the ATS or HCM markets as an end, but instead, as a means of capturing the real market they’re after.
The Host With the Most?
In the world of the cloud, Google wants to be the rainmaker. They have quite a long way to go in a market that’s long been dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Microsoft Azure quickly emerging as a legitimate challenger that’s an increasingly critical component of Microsoft’s revenue growth and product strategy.
With only about 9% market share in the cloud computing market – or about half that of Microsoft, and far behind the 35% enjoyed by AWS, Google finds itself in the unfamiliar position of being a laggard, rather than a leader. ‘
And while the company did a far better job than their counterparts and rivals in Redmond of getting ahead of and capitalizing on the move to mobile in terms of both software and hardware, they’re far behind Clippy and Co. when it comes to technology’s next big revenue revolution.
The real money, increasingly, is no longer in being a single source to access the world’s information, but rather, in being the company that hosts that information. Google might have won the search and browser wars on the way to becoming one of the world’s most valuable companies, but when it comes to the cloud, they’re basically Bing.
Selling cloud storage to individual users of Google Drive, Android or other consumer products is a solid source of recurring revenue, but one that’s incremental when compared to B2B, where the big money (and big data) is truly at.
For businesses, the very concept of productivity suites and Microsoft are practically synonymous – almost every office runs off of Office, with Powerpoint, Word and Excel, in particular, having achieved ubiquity in the world of business, no matter where in the world your company happens to do business in.
To consider how hard it will be to displace Microsoft and its inherent competitive advantage, consider how much of the business applications market the world’s other top tech company – Apple – was able to capture from Microsoft with Pages (its Word Processor), Numbers (Excel) and Keynote (Powerpoint) in its big corporate productivity play, known, predictably (if at all), as iWork. Spoiler alert: most of the time, it doesn’t – at least for enterprise businesses.
To win in Cloud, Google must essentially do the same with Google Docs, Sheets and Forms, not to mention convincing major employers to ditch Outlook, with its heavily utilized enterprise calendaring and contact management capabilities. This is a tall order; or a “neat trick,” as my boss Craig Fisher would say.
Of course, that’s only half of the battle. The real war for the world of work – and dominance of what’s most commonly referred to as the “Hybrid Cloud,” meaning offering infrastructure as a service, which sits behind the layers of PaaS and SaaS that, to date, has functionally been what we think of when we think of ATS and HCM providers.
The existence of SAP HANA and Oracle Cloud, however, not to mention Workday Cloud (a huge competitive differentiator from other ERPs and a big reason for WDAY’s growth) means that the three biggest enterprise ATS providers have already established Cloud Services offerings – meaning that any global employer or multinational company must not only migrate their talent data to adopt Hire at their organizations, but also (in most cases) completely switch cloud providers.
Google Cloud Next or Never?
If you think implementing Oracle, SAP or Workday is hard, you should try migrating to another system instead – it’s damned near impossible, as anyone who’s ever tried to sunset a legacy ATS knows.
But when that ATS is part of an ERP instance that’s built on a hybrid cloud hosted both on premise and on public rack space run by the same provider as said ATS, then making a move becomes infinitely more complicated, resource intensive and more expensive than simply switching systems.
Companies too often renew their ATS or HCM provider because doing nothing is both a safe choice, and a convenient one, given the pains associated with system selection and implementation.
That Oracle still – still – provides the dominant applicant tracking system amongst enterprise employers on the market, despite a decade of end user antipathy and stagnant product development – speaks to the truth that this is a hard market to knock off the incumbent.
Even Oracle can’t figure out how to sunset Taleo Enterprise – it’s been trying to do so for years – and force the migration of its customer base and user data to the Oracle Cloud and its core Oracle HCM offering. It wasn’t hard to do with Business Edition – its SMB offering – which it killed years ago. Enterprise, as Google will soon find out, is a completely different game altogether.
Of course, the new CEO of Google Cloud is none other than Thomas Kurian, the very man responsible for building Oracle’s cloud strategy. And if you’ve ever used Taleo, or happen to be a legacy JD Edwards user (and yeah, there are still a few), you know how well that turned out for the world of recruiting and job search once the company made the strategic decision to move up market.
Here’s hoping you’re feeling lucky.
