iCIMS Convenes Top Analysts, Key Customers and Strategic Partners to Identify the Biggest Challenges Facing Recruiting

• Dramatically improve the candidate experience. For most people, the job search and application process is convoluted, repetitive and impersonal. It involves an array of middleman job boards, databases and social platforms that get between candidates and employers with opportunities.

  “The next two to three years belong to the candidate, which means employers need a new playbook because competition for the best talent is fierce,” said Colin Day, CEO and founder of iCIMS. “Recruiters can no longer settle for a jack-of-all-trades human resource technology. They need a dedicated, easily configurable recruiting platform to support texting, video, chatbots, data privacy and compliance, to deliver an exceptional experience to their candidates.”
   

• Simplify employers’ recruitment and technology tools. Employers need the process of integrating third-party solutions into their recruiting platform to be a ‘shoppable,’ seamless and swift experience that’s customizable to their needs. Instead, recruiters are often required to use software primarily built for other human resource functions such as benefits, compensation and performance management.

  “We know that the companies that deliver a superior experience to future employees are better able to attract and hire the best talent,” said Craig Cohen, GM, ADP Marketplace. “To support recruiters and talent acquisition professionals with a single sign-on and seamless transfer for candidate data, we provide integrations with the iCIMS recruiting platform and our HRIS and payroll system for clients who choose iCIMS.

  Event attendee, Albert Pang of Apps Run The World stated, “Smooth integration between iCIMS and First Advantage for background screenings has resulted in better hiring results because some recruiters could not tolerate any delay switching from one app to the next.”
   

• Enable recruiters to also act like marketers and build qualified talent pools. Recruiters need to take a page from marketers and sales professionals by engaging and staying connected to prospective candidates using relationship management tools and rich content to mine as required.    

  “We’re in the business of saving children’s lives, so recruiting the right people is our number one priority,” said iCIMS customer, John Leech, director of talent acquisition for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “With iCIMS, we can go best-of-breed with all aspects of recruiting and produce targeted content that helps attract and engage the top medical researchers in the world.”
   

• Reduce the spiraling cost of advertising to attract qualified candidates. Employers are spending roughly $3-4 billion annually on their recruiting ad spend. Retooling employers’ career sites for Google for Jobs helps candidates find the latest, most relevant job opportunities and be taken directly to the career sites, bypassing costly third-party job boards. Using AI-powered, programmatic advertising capabilities can also significantly cut spend since employers receive relevant data and recommendations in areas like job title, compensation, job distribution outlets, and more to produce targeted job ads.
   
• Protect candidate’s data. People upload their most personal information – driver’s license identification, salary, social security and cell phone number – to dozens of career sites and organizations they don’t know. Given GDPR and rising concerns on data privacy, the protection of applicant data must be a priority, and candidates need more control over their data rights across the entire hiring process. 
   
• Better tools to engage candidates through mobile devices and AI. Because recruiters are three times more likely to get a response from a candidate with texts than any other method, employers need mobile-friendly technologies that are fully compliant with data-protection laws and integrated into their recruiting platform.

  “In the retail industry, our biggest challenges are high-volume hiring and high turnover,” said Lawrel Aufmuth, VP of talent acquisition at Advantage Solutions. “We hire tens of thousands of people every year, so having the ability to ask 90 percent of our screening questions, schedule candidate interviews 24/7 and onboard new hires via text and chatbot has enabled us to get new hires up-and-running in four days or less.”
   

• Data-driven recruitment. Most organizations don’t know what advertising and marketing tactics result in new hires because they don’t track or analyze key metrics. By analyzing job and portal data such as what drove candidates to their career site, number of visitors per job, and the conversion rate of completed applications, recruiters can predict what marketing activities will improve their recruitment.

The iCIMS iNFLUENCE and Customer Advisory Council events were attended by some of HR’s top industry analysts from firms such as Gartner and IDC, along with clients including Uber and Goldman Sachs, and strategic partners ADP and First Advantage at the company’s headquarters on October 16-18, 2018.

“iCIMS’ updated product strategy is as ambitious as it is far-reaching,” said Kyle Lagunas, research manager at IDC. “One thing’s clear: This isn’t your run-of-the-mill applicant tracking system. It’s on track to be the recruiting industry’s true end-to-end platform from innovating how to catch the candidate’s attention early on to prioritizing their data privacy, there’s strong indication of the momentum coming out of their corner of the HR tech market.”

“Many of the investors, best-of-breed software and full suite vendors should look at the vision and direction of where iCIMS is headed to understand the next generation of recruiting platforms is far more than just hiring the next candidate,” said Sarah Brennan, CEO of Accelir.