iCIMS Hire Expectations™

Lately I’ve been speaking with a lot of industry experts, partners and clients regarding integrated recruitment and performance management; specifically on which data points are most beneficial to bring together to get the most value out of the combined areas of talent management.

Because of these recent conversations, I was interested to read Jayson Saba from Aberdeen’s latest research: Talent Management in Healthcare. While talent management means many different things to different people, much of this report touched upon bringing together recruitment, onboarding, succession, performance and competency management.

Aberdeen highlighted how top performing organizations execute talent management strategies to improve employee engagement. The criteria Aberdeen used to determine best in class vs industry average vs laggard organizations include:

·          Hiring the top choice candidate – as a result of engaging talent during sourcing & clearly communicating the brand of the organization

·          Time to fill: linking hiring manager satisfaction and recruitment efficiency

·          Employee performance: how well the organization links individual performance to organizational objectives

I was interested to see how much emphasis was placed on recruitment in this study. I think part of this is due to setting appropriate expectations during the recruiting process, as well as the tools an integrated talent management platform offers to bring a lot of these metrics together. Outside of the technology there are of course other ways that organizations can consistently engage candidates, new hires and employees about their expected results and how those contributions roll up to higher level organizational objectives. One of our clients has even suggested using a performance evaluation as the primary guide during the selection process; essentially providing a crystal clear look at what an employee will be measured upon as opposed to simply reading a job description and a few bullet points.

I won’t spoil the results for you, but do encourage you to take a look at the research and share your thoughts on this blog. You can access a complimentary copy of the report here.

Why is there a picture of Play-Doh on this post?? Follow iCIMS client John Leech on Twitter and ask him!

“Great meeting with iCIMS Customer Advisory Council. Love seeing vendors paying attention to their customers. It shows!!” – Jason Averbook, Twitter: September 22, 2009

Well, we literally just wrapped up iCIMS’ annual Customer Advisory Council (CAC) and the notes I didn’t get to write down are still swirling around my head at about a mile a minute. I wanted to share some of my observations from this year’s CAC (held at iCIMS’ corporate headquarters in NJ, with entertainment in NYC) while the feedback is fresh in my mind.

First – a quick rundown of iCIMS’ CAC. Each year, about 25 of our customers across different verticals get together for roundtable discussions, iCIMS presentations (on our customer service strategy, our technology and product roadmap, and overall corporate vision) and client success stories presented by the customers themselves. We often bring in industry experts as well; this year Jason Averbook from Knowledge Infusion presented his views on HR Technology (more on that later).

We usually have a theme for the annual event and this year’s was Beyond the ATS, which covered using iCIMS’ technology as more than an applicant tracking system as well as on taking the platform’s capabilities beyond domestic recruitment and deploying the system internationally.  (Last year’s theme: recruiting a new generation and adopting Web 2.0 in talent acquisition.)

One of my favorite parts about this year’s CAC was the global representation. Our attendees and client companies have the map covered, with visitors flying in from the Netherlands, China,  Mexico, & Canada and client companies supporting recruitment anywhere from India to Luxumborg; Romania to Costa Rica. (Many of our international visitors had never been to New York City and literally ran to do some shopping in Times Square after dinner!)
The international representation was truly perfect for a lot of our discussions this week, which ranged from learning more about data privacy laws outside of the US, to translating career portals and employment forms into different languages for a positive candidate experience, to ensuring clients have access to talk to other customers who have “been there, done that” when it comes to international iCIMS deployments. Almost all clients agreed on a few best practices for these types of global roll-outs:

1. Whenever possible, go for a phased approach. Learn from your roadblocks and apply those findings towards your next phase. Each country obviously has differences that need to be considered, but even more specifically – your own organization’s global divisions have differences that need to be embraced during these rollouts. Going one-by-one helps ensure each of those areas get the dedicated resources necessary to get the job done well.
2. Give yourself plenty of time to deploy internationally. Then add extra time onto that for padding. Almost all of our customers who were given internal direction to get a full global implementation finished very aggressively said they wished they’d had more time to breathe, digest what they were doing & analyze their progress so they could fix issues along the way.
3. Training, training, training. iCIMS has always been a huge supporter of end-user training (we give 5 free training sessions every week!), but customers hammered at this point and how important it was to visit international locations to train end users and the local system admin. Many clients noticed that locations that received on-site training and education about iCIMS’ platform and the company’s overall recruiting process fared much better than those who opted for basic web training.

There were tons of other lessons learned at this year’s CAC, but I’ll save those for another post. (Specifically: holistic HR strategies…outside the marketing speak.) Additional CAC posts will be coming soon from some iCIMS clients so stay tuned.

Special thanks to all iCIMS CAC attendees, to our hostess with the mostess Katie Walsh, as well as to all of our clients who readily share feedback with us about our product, customer support, and more. We wouldn’t be where we are as an organization without you and hope you’ll continue to share.

On Friday, iCIMS competed in our third HRchitect Beauty Pageant for Talent Acquisition Systems. We've gotten fairly familiar with the HRchitect stage (and crown!)… back in November iCIMS won this pageant when we were competing with Authoria, ADP VirtualEdge, MrTed and Silkroad. In January, iCIMS won our 2^nd pageant – this time for Mid-Market Talent Acquisition Systems. Competing for the mid-market crown: Click and Hire, nowHIRE, SmartRecruiters, SmartSearch, SonicRecruit and of course iCIMS.

We were really proud of both wins; we felt they showed that:

1. iCIMS continues to dominate the mid-market, and
2. the fundamentals that iCIMS has always focused on (system speed, ease of use, configurability and customer service) continue to be what matters most.

This time around, we were up against a (mostly) new group of competitors – Taleo, Silkroad, HRSmart and HodesIQ. While we didn’t take home the top prize (kudos to HodesIQ, who iCIMS both competes with and works alongside for some clients), we were really happy to be named first runner-up. While some may not be content with being 2^nd or 3^rd, we were proud of our performance and the overall results. This is a fierce group of competitors and iCIMS not only held our own; we rose against three of the four participants. Over the three pageants, we’ve come in first or second among a group of almost 15 unique players in an increasingly competitive industry. That feels great.

But enough about iCIMS. What did the pageant show us about the space itself? I walked away with a few key thoughts:

1. It's not about the bells and whistles.We’ve always touted this concept, but it was confirmed on Friday. While a lot of technology providers are able to impress the audience with a flashy feature here and there, what matters most are the basics. A system demo can look incredible, but if it’s not true SaaS; if it requires a lot of technical assistance or additional software to run it; if it looks cool, but doesn’t solve an overarching business problem – the talent acquisition system just doesn’t come out on top.
2. It's all about the experience. This doesn’t necessarily mean the years of experience of the vendor, although that’s important too. What almost all vendors displayed was a general understanding that as technology partners, it’s our responsibility to help provide a great user experience (for HR, recruiting and hiring managers) as well as to candidates. Sometimes it’s best to leverage third-party partners who specialize in this, but generally speaking – it’s important that candidates and end-users alike have a positive experience interacting with the technology and the people behind that technology.   Web 2.0 may be a part of this, but I think what it really comes down to is whether the application process is cumbersome or candidate-friendly, whether the system is reliable, and whether there are service professionals available to help along the way. (Shout out to iCIMS; we provide support to all clients and even their candidates 24 hours a day, free of charge.)
3. There are distinct points of view in the industry. Almost all the participants had a unique perspective on whether systems should be delivered as one platform vs. as modules (iCIMS sticks with the former); if there should be one scalable solution for small, mid-sized and Enterprise clients vs. different technologies (read: different interfaces and source codes) for different sized companies; and different models around customer support (unlimited service & training vs. paying for tiers of service). While I’m obviously biased to iCIMS’ point of view (one true SaaS platform that scales up and down without purchasing different modules for clients of all sizes…along with an unlimited service offering) the fact that there are different opinions and offerings on the market are part of what makes the space interesting and competitive.

While the pageant is a great way to get an overall read on how the industry feels about iCIMS’ story in the context of the entire landscape, direct customer and prospect feedback is what we really look at in determining iCIMS’ successes and areas for growth. We always say that our customers are our best engineers, which is why we rely on them for candid feedback. And trust me, with almost 800 customers, it’s a lot of feedback…whether through our surveys, user groups, online forums, annual Customer Advisory Council, tweets, or whatever other forms of communication sprouts up.

Huge thanks to Tiffany, Matt and the rest of the HRchitect team for producing another fantastic event. iCIMS was happy to participate and is looking forward to the next pageant!