A new candidate management system based on Web 2.0 tools is aiming to simplify the recruitment process and promote better collaboration between recruiters and line managers.

Joel Passen, co-founder of US-based Newton, told Recruiter that it is addressing recruiting software from a different angle. “Hiring managers receive a ton of information from multiple channels,” he said. “This forces many managers to ignore recruiting because it is a drag in most cases.”

The product, also called Newton, is sold as softwareas- a-service and aims to offer managers a single channel and a single feed to communicate with recruiters.

This has been achieved by Newton’s exchange of application programming interfaces (APIs) with major job aggregators such as Simply Hired and Indeed, which Passen said will allow its clients to feed jobs into the social networking space with one click. Other handy features include being able to easily share LinkedIn profiles with managers.

The application has been in development for nearly five years and has been built using open source tools such as Adobe Flex which allows for a rich, interactive user experience without the reload or refresh times traditionally associated with this.

Passen said that Flex has allowed Newton to build in major improvements to the usability. “There’s a lot of great software out there but when organisations roll-out applicant tracking systems (ATS), they’re sometimes accompanied by an expensive change management programme,” he said. “The fact is that hiring managers are probably only going to use it a couple of times a year, so what we’ve tried to do is design easy-to-use tools so people don’t need training every time they need to use them.”

Although Newton is based in San Francisco, the software is available to UK recruiters and the company already has users in India.

Among the US recruiters using the software is Bird- Dog, a San Francisco-based recruiting firm specialising in software engineering. President Mike Sienkowski said Newton’s strength lies in its simplicity. “Managers want something simple and that gets the job done without a lot of fuss. Newton understands this,” he said.

Cade Garrett is technical recruiter at US web application development and design company Solution Stream. “Line managers want to know the status of each candidate immediately and executives want to know the overall progress of each search. Newton has allowed me to cater to both.”

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