Episode 113: Software Solutions for Enterprise Clients with Luke Switkowski at Rooster

Luke Switkowski is the CEO at Kognitiv Inc. and Rooster. Kognitiv is a consultancy that works with enterprise clients that run the Workday HR software platform. Kognitiv helps its clients with anything they need, from a configuration or support perspective, to get the most out of their Workday integration.

As they were building that business, the team identified an opportunity to build a standalone software application that could solve a set of problems they saw their clients dealing with on a regular basis: scheduling. 

Spinning off Rooster

There was a need for Workday users to have the capability to schedule interviews more quickly and easily, and Luke and his team knew Workday inside and out, so they decided to make the software tightly integrated with the Workday platform.

Many of the users are recruiters and their work-life revolves around interviews, whether they be a single job interview, round-robin or panel discussion interviews. There wasn’t a standardized method or tool that could be used to schedule interviews and keep them organized with notifications and changes going out to everyone involved in a seamless way without going outside of Workday.

When they saw that they were onto something that could gain traction, they sped up their development to get to market as soon as possible. Eventually, they spun the new software product off to become Rooster. They were able to get the product developed in a year, and Rooster has been in production for more than three years.

They bootstrapped the development of Rooster, much like they did for Kognitiv. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying to attract external investment. Luke did contact a lot of VCs but didn’t get any responses. Now Rooster has nearly 50 enterprise clients with 5,000 to 200,000 employees.

Not a client-specific product

Many companies, especially those that spin off a SaaS offering from an existing consulting service, develop their new software to solve a problem a specific client of theirs is experiencing. This wasn’t the case for Rooster.
There was a trend that Luke and his team had identified, where many companies were actively looking for a way to seamlessly schedule and manage the job interview process. The usual tool of choice in a typical applicant tracking system was something like Calendly, which let those involved pick a date and time, but not much more.

Unfortunately for HR teams at enterprise companies, it gets much more complicated than simply picking a date and time quickly. When dealing with complex situations, like web conferencing a panel interview with several people where different invitations needed to go out to different people and resumes had to be attached, it became a pretty tedious, manual process.

There was also the issue of companies running different email platforms, usually Microsoft Office or Google Gmail, which didn’t always integrate seamlessly with each other. It was an industry-wide problem that Luke and his team set out to fix.

The Rooster pricing model

The Rooster team decided from the beginning to go with a fixed, single-price enterprise subscription model, but they did have to think about all their options. They could have gone with seat licensing with monthly billing, but it just wasn’t a fit for their customers.

Enterprise companies budget on an annual basis, and a product that has monthly billing that fluctuates every month based on usage wasn’t going to fly. Also, recruiting is an industry with a lot of turnover, and that would only add more complexity and put Rooster into the seat-management business. So they settled on a fixed, annual subscription with unlimited seats.

The importance of customer acquisition

Since Luke and his team already had dozens of enterprise clients from Kognitiv, they thought that all of them would jump at the opportunity to buy their new scheduling software as soon as they spun it off to Rooster. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened.

At enterprise-level companies, the people who make decisions about procurement and budgeting for consulting services like Kognitiv, don’t necessarily make decisions about buying software for the talent acquisition team. That is a completely different buyer.

So they have found other ways to get new customers. Many of their new clients come from inbound hits on their website, which shows that people are searching for solutions to their scheduling problems. They have also pulled in new clients from going to conferences.

Sometimes the high turnover rate in the recruiting space works in their favor through word-of-mouth. A talent acquisition leader might leave company A, which uses Rooster, and go to company B, which does not. They might then say, “I used this product at my last job, it has a great ROI, and they have great customer service, I want to use it here.”

The Rooster value proposition

Rooster gives a great ROI to its customers, based on the amount of time and money it saves companies in the talent acquisition process. It’s also known for its great customer service and deep knowledge of Workday integration.

But Luke says that’s just the baseline to get considered by an enterprise company. It’s a prerequisite for getting considered because no large company wants to spend money on something that doesn’t improve their talent acquisition ROI.

Rooster helps improve the candidate experience, but many companies place an equal value on the interviewer experience. If there is friction in the company because interview scheduling is done manually and every recruiter does it a little differently, hiring managers and interview panelists can get frustrated because there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the flow. Nobody likes that kind of chaos.

The global nature of Rooster is also a selling point outside of ROI. With many of its clients being global companies, there is a lot of value in improving the hiring experience seamlessly around the world.

Rooster runs on all continents, it’s normalized for any timezone, and it can run in any language. Not many scheduling applications are integrated with as many languages as Rooster.

It also has a patent on a system to integrate with multiple-domain companies. If a large company has multiple dot-com domains under its umbrella, Rooster is the only scheduling software that will seamlessly integrate with all of them.

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