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White Paper

Your People. Our Passion. How Strategic Automation Can Improve Your Hiring Success


Most employers know that talent acquisition is a mission critical part

of business. They recognize that finding the right people impacts

overall success, but also see that as the talent acquisition landscape

has evolved, it has become exceedingly competitive. Forty percent of

employers said they struggled to find qualified candidates in 2016.1

Employers have used applicant tracking systems

(ATS) to meet hiring challenges for years,

automating manual processes and digitizing the

hiring experience. However, automation has

progressed just as rapidly as the talent acquisition

landscape itself and applicant tracking systems can

now go beyond basic automation. Technology

providers are serving up software that automates

in more innovative and proactive ways. Through

configurable, cloud-based software, it’s possible to

be more strategic about the end-to-end recruiting

process than ever before.

Yet, many employers choose to stick with applicant

tracking systems with limited automation, or

which are a part of legacy ERP systems not

intentionally built for applicant tracking. These are

the systems that haven’t quite kept up with the

latest revolutions in recruiting, like social, mobile,

video, and recruitment marketing. Employers

that prefer to maintain these systems for the

sake of convenience or out of fear of automation

replacing jobs, may be missing the point: getting

by is getting left behind. The reality is that strategic

automation is at the core of hiring success.

Employers that invest in it set themselves up for

long-term success. Here’s why.

The Business Benefits of Better Automation Employers that prioritize recruiting automation are

in a better position to increase their overall returns

on investment. 76% of HR professionals said they

receive a strong ROI.2

The additional benefits of better automation include:

The Benefit: More Employee Referrals for Faster Hiring and Lower Turnover

It’s widely known that employee referrals have a

positive impact on hiring. That’s because referred

employees tend to perform better and stay longer:

forty-three percent of companies said their best

candidates come from employee referrals, and

fifty-six percent of referred employees have been

in their current position for more than five years.3

With the right automation, employers can increase

their intake of employee referrals with the ability

1. ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage Survey | 2. Hiring Insights

Talent acquisition ranks number one among all HR topics for

having the highest impact on

revenue and profit margins.– Boston Consulting Group

White Paper | Your People. Our Passion. How Strategic Automation Can Improve Your Hiring Success


to automatically post job openings to employees’

social networking feeds. Recruiting software

features like iCIMS Social Distribution make this

type of “set it and forget it” automation possible,

and gives employers the ability to track which

applicants came from an employee’s social job

post. Asking for employee referrals is no longer a

word-of-mouth initiative or repetitive email blast—

it’s automatic.

The Benefit: Better Candidate Communication for Stronger Branding and More Applicants

Sixty-seven percent of job seekers have a positive

impression of a company if they receive consistent

updates throughout the application process.4 But

it’s difficult for recruiters to provide those updates

to each candidate when there are hundreds

of applicants to manage and recruiters lack

automation. Consider that the average job attracts

two hundred and fifty candidates.5 When recruiters

don’t communicate with these candidates though

(and about seventy-five percent of job seekers

say they never hear back from employers6), sixty-

nine percent say they’re less likely to buy from

the company again, while forty percent say

they’ll never apply at the company again.7 Poor

communication can mean fewer future applicants

and customers.

An applicant tracking system with email

automation makes it possible to create and send

email templates in bulk, triggered when a position

is filled, or when a group of candidates do or don’t

make it on to the next screening round. This not

only makes it easy for recruiters to keep candidates

informed, but because these automated emails

are still personalized by first name and the job

applied for, they also work to support positive

employer branding.

The Benefit: Automated Candidate Profile Creation and Searching

Automated candidate profile creation goes a

step further when applicant tracking systems can

automatically pull and organize information within

those profiles based on requested search terms. For

example, you want to find out which candidates

that applied to an opening note they’re proficient

in Excel. Forget visiting each candidate’s profile

individually and making a list—just enter the term in

your system’s search bar and generate query results

organized by a candidate’s relevancy to the search

term. This not only saves time but contributes to

more effective screening.

The Benefit: Real-Time Reporting for Smarter Investments

Talent acquisition teams that used data to inform

their recruiting strategies were two times more

likely to improve their recruiting efforts and three

times more likely to reduce costs, while improving

efficiency.8 Companies with a high level of HR

analytics also had twenty-four percent higher net

operating income.9

Applicant tracking systems with robust reporting

capabilities make it possible for employers to not

3. iCIMS Hiring Insights | 4 Ideal | 5. ERE Media | 6-7. CareerBuilder | 8. LinkedIn | 9. MIT & IBM

Top performing companies don’t just invest in the infrastructure needed to perform analysis at a high level: they drill down metrics to a deeper level and communicate to decision makers more effectively. As new tools become more powerful, lagging companies will fall further behind.– HRO Institute



only automate data aggregation and display metrics

on real-time dashboards, but provide the ability to

easily create and export reports from multiple hiring

systems (ex: metrics from your applicant tracking

system, your candidate relationship management

software and your onboarding software).

The Benefit: Automated New Hire Onboarding for Increased Retention

When digital onboarding is used in the hiring

stage, new employees are more productive in their

first few weeks of work.10 The right automated

onboarding solution makes it possible to offer

new hires online portals that are specific to their

job type and that provide electronic resources

and forms that can be reviewed before their very

first day. Automated reminders can also be sent to

new hires and internal stakeholders to ensure tasks

are completed on time. Seventy-seven percent of

employees that went through formal onboarding

met their first performance milestone.11 Better

onboarding can make for better hires.

Automation to Unify All of Your Hiring ToolsStrategic automation also means pulling together

all of an employer’s hiring systems, through

integrations. Integrations make it possible to

consolidate for even better efficiency and greater

returns on investment.

For example, when your background screening

solution is integrated with your applicant tracking

system, screening results are automatically

imported into the candidate’s profile in your

ATS. Reports on background screening (like the

number of background screens you carried out

in a month, or the percent of candidates who

failed background screening) can be created from

your ATS, too. Because these systems are

integrated and can talk to each other, recruiters

no longer have to log into separate systems or

re-enter information. It’s all automatic. And when

you have integrations with all of your talent

acquisition solution providers (your reference

checker, your job boards, or even your payroll

system), you gain an entire view of your operations,

including the ability to review aggregated data

and make more strategic decisions. iCIMS UNIFi

is one such Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) option

that brings together companies’ hiring tools

through integrations.

In a nutshell, a hiring Platform-as-a-Service solution

can provide key benefits like:

• Automated data sharing between systems

• Consolidated log ins for easy user access

• Holistic views of recruiting operations, for better resource allocation

Recruiting technology that can pull together

all of an employer’s hiring solutions are what

progressive companies leverage to stay ahead

of their hiring competition, and they’re what

companies with legacy systems need to consider

if they wish to keep up. As the Brandon Hall

Group notes, “The landscape for talent acquisition

has evolved into a multi-faceted end-to-end

process that requires a well thought out strategy.

Organizations today need to seriously reflect on

the notion that in order to have the most efficient

and effective talent acquisition strategy they must

think about their technological choices in terms

of a platform.”

What About Automation of the Future?

10. Talent Board | 11. Urban Bound



There’s every reason to believe that recruiting

automation hasn’t reached its peak. If we judge

by the ways in which automation is advancing in

other areas of business and consumer technology,

there may be miles to go. While we can’t know for

certain if artificial intelligence or machine learning

will be an important part of recruiting in the future,

the automated information sharing and data

aggregation already offered by some recruiting

technology providers suggests it’s a possibility.

For example, imagine a scenario in which your

unified talent acquisition platform automatically

aggregates and analyzes troves of data from your

own hiring records and those of all the companies

it connects to. With that information, it can then tell

you which job title is the associated with the position

that you’re hiring for, or it could note that if you were

to raise a position’s salary range by $2,000, you’d

have a sixty-seven percent greater chance of filling

the position within ten days. Or, it could use historical

data to determine which candidate characteristics

best predict success in a role at your company.

Or, imagine a recruiting system that’s intelligent

enough to coordinate scheduling in full with

candidates—no email creation and deployment

required by the recruiter. Think that’s not possible,

or that candidates would know it’s a computer?

Successful models are already in use.13

Ultimately, this type of automation could mean:

• Predictive analytics for better candidate match-ing and resource allocation

• Increased ability to analyze risks and course correct effectively

• A more seamless view of your holistic recruiting operations, for better returns on investment

Today’s executives can plan for recruiting

automation of the future by progressing with the

pace of technology today (opting for solutions that

make the most of the automation we have available).

Those that don’t keep up with automation advances

(and let that mediocre ATS be “good enough” or

stick with the provider that only thinks about the

here and now), will one day have to leap to catch up

Artificial Intelligence is a huge market,

predicted to surge from $8 billion

this year to $47 billion by 2020.– IDC

13. Fortune


The iCIMS integration is key to what

makes this work so well. Without it

you won’t get the efficiency, real-time

data, or metrics that come with having

a strong integration partner.

Since complete automation and

integration with iCIMS and SHL, DeVry

has saved an average of $100,000 yearly

on mail costs, and averages a 30-50%

decrease in time to fill positions.


to competitors that seem light years ahead. Making

that leap will probably mean highly disruptive change

management within the organization, as teams go

from minimal collaboration with automation to full

interdependence that might require taking on new

job responsibilities.

So consider:

1. Are you taking full advantage of the recruiting automation that’s available today?

2. Is the automation you’re using poised for future innovation?

Recruiting technology that uses automation

strategically, brings together all hiring tools, and

has a vision for continued advancement is here. It’s

what progressive companies leverage to stay ahead

of their hiring competition, and it’s what employers

with outdated systems need to invest in if they wish

to keep up.

Investing in strategic recruiting automation isn’t

just about convenience for the individual recruiter

or championing the HR team, it’s about better

outcomes for the entire business.

How iCIMS Can HelpiCIMS is the leading provider of talent acquisition

solutions that help businesses win the war for top

talent. iCIMS empowers companies to manage

their entire hiring process within the industry’s

most robust Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Built

on the foundation of a best-to-market talent

acquisition software suite, iCIMS’ PaaS framework,

UNIFi, allows employers to expand the capabilities

of their core talent acquisition technology by

integrating with the largest partner ecosystem

in talent acquisition to help them attract, find,

screen, and manage candidates. Offering scalable,

easy-to-use solutions that are backed by award-

winning customer service, iCIMS supports more

than 3,500 contracted customers and is one of

the largest and fastest-growing talent acquisition

solution providers.

Connect with iCIMS on social media!


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