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Is flexible, self-scheduling your missing piece to digital transformation in recruiting?

March 15, 2021
 
iCIMS Staff
3 min read

Today we see more and more inquires focused on driving digital transformation to deliver better candidate experiences.  American Heart Association (AHA) is a model for digital hiring practices.  With over 225,000 new applicants a year, they depend on technology like iCIMS Talent Cloud to push the boundaries of their talent acquisition process so that every applicant has an exceptional experience regardless if you hire them or not. The Director of Talent Acquisition and Attraction at AHA has publicly reinforced the role of digital and automation in the company’s hiring processes. “Embedding automation into our workflow frees up time,” he said. “It allows recruiters to do more interviews, source passive candidates, and engage and build relationships with candidates we otherwise wouldn’t have access to.” To keep pace with our businesses’ constantly evolving talent requirements, we need to focus on faster candidate engagement and offering more digital experiences.

Flexibility is necessary for success in talent acquisition software

Speed and automation are essential, but even the most well-planned digital strategy could be a challenge to execute without flexibility. Talent acquisition software that offers hybrid (human and automated) experiences adds value to the recruiting process.

A perfect example is scheduling. Interview scheduling has always been one of the most frustrating and time-consuming chores of recruiting. 60% of recruiters say that they regularly lose candidates because they can’t schedule them for interviews fast enough.  As a result, hiring teams have widely adopted automated scheduling tools.  It saves teams valuable time, helps make placements faster, and improves the candidate experience. However, scheduling automation can create scheduling silos when interviewers don’t sync to calendars from one system. Recruiters hit added friction when hiring managers don’t want to share a link to their corporate calendar or, in some cases, may not use a corporate calendar to manage their time. This is common in deskless and distributed industries like retail, restaurant, and hospitality. Our research tells us by focusing on integrated tools that allow hiring to happen from anyone and everywhere, organizations are transforming experiences for both the candidate and hiring teams.

Self-managed calendars that work with recruiting chatbots and text recruiting

iCIMS continues to innovate its interview and assessment scheduling capabilities and recently launched a self-managed calendar in iCIMS Text Engagement. The new calendar bypasses the requirement to sync to Office 365, Outlook, or Gmail. Yet, it still allows users to block free and busy time, set reoccurring events, and provide candidates with a link to schedule time on their calendar, which a human or iCIMS Digital Assistant can initiate. Interviews or events made on the calendar can also be viewed and managed by iCIMS ATS users with a Text Engagement license.

To dramatically improve scheduling efficiencies, hiring teams need flexibility to self-manage their free and busy time and automate interview scheduling (and rescheduling) with technology like recruiting chatbots or conversational AI. We are seeing this shift with our iCIMS Talent Cloud users: last year, the number of interviews and candidate profiles created from our AI-powered recruiting chatbot grew more than 207%.

There’s a growing desire among organizations to drive digital transformation to improve candidate experiences. Core to this transformation are integrated tools and trusted AI that will help you move your teams away from the menial, manual tasks and toward future types of work.

You can find more information on flexible self-scheduling and integrated recruiting technologies in this month’s quarterly software release. To learn more about the latest innovations to the iCIMS Talent Cloud, check out iCIMS’ Q1 2021 Winter Release highlights and video.

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