AmTrust Financial switches to best-of-breed recruitment, saves $13M

AmTrust Financial, a multinational property and casualty insurer specializing in coverage for small to mid-sized businesses, was founded in 1998 and expanded rapidly through organic growth and more than 40 acquisitions, becoming a Fortune 500 firm with $6.7 billion in revenue and 7,000 employees across 70 countries.

AmTrust’s manual recruitment processes and disparate HR systems were unable to support its expansive growth. In fact, by 2015, AmTrust was spending $16 million with staffing agencies to source and hire talent and taking more than 80 days to fill open positions, largely due to a lack of visibility into the status of job applications and offers. As Kimberly Bowen, AmTrust’s former vice president of talent acquisition, explained, “We were in the stone age. Our business leaders thought recruiting wasn’t working, that the recruiting team wasn’t doing everything we needed to do to get them good talent -and they weren’t wrong, they couldn’t see it!”

In 2016, AmTrust strongly considered using Workday’s native recruiting module for their hiring needs. It was a sensible option, at least on paper: the rest of the business was already on Workday, and Workday’s ATS was a less expensive alternative than a more mature hiring solution. But having used less ideal option for years, AmTrust opted for the iCIMS Talent Cloud instead. Bowen explained, “I didn’t want someone who did this as one piece of their offering. I wanted a system and a provider that was a subject matter expert. I needed to be with a provider where this was all they did. This was their focus –any dollars they made, this is where they were going to get invested.”

By 2018, Amtrust has saved $13 million, mostly by slashing the use of external staffing agencies.More importantly, AmTrust cut its time to hire in half and increased the number of qualified candidates in its pipeline sevenfold. Here’s how:

1. Delivering a great candidate experience:
   By requesting only the essential information, such as name, address and phone number, from candidates, Amtrust streamlined its application process.
2. Configuring for each hiring type:
   Created three unique career portals for external, internal and agency-based candidates, enabling candidates to move through the entire application process without any recruiters’ manual work effort until a final decision.
3. Scale globally:
   By enabling job board listings to be seen by more candidates around the world.
4. Seamless Workday integration saves time:
   By transferring candidate and new hire data throughout the entire application process until the completion of preboarding, ensures data accuracy, saves time by connecting the recruiting and HR system.
5. Reporting drives improvement:
   Automatically running key reports, specifically time-to-fill, background check status, hires by location, number of daily hires, open/closed requisitions per month, and interviews per month, enables recruiting and hiring managers to make data-driven decisions, and keeps leadership informed.
6. Improving productivity:
   Through iCIMS’ marketplace, recruiters access multiple systems with one login, eliminating the toggling between disparate systems. Additionally, workflow automation, such as notifications every time an action occurs/is required, significantly improves the recruitment team’s productivity.
   

With iCIMS and Workday seamlessly integrated and recruitment processes built to scale, AmTrust is now focusing supporting its international expansion. As Bowen explains, “We have a great foundation, we’ve accomplished the things we have set out to accomplish as far as the build, now it’s about AmTrust talent acquisition 2.0.”