The secret to top-tier recruitment marketing? Working smarter with iCIMS CXM

May 16, 2024

 

Alex Oliver

5 min read

Talent databases are a bit like the junk drawers or messy garages of the recruiting world. They’re full of stuff, much of it valuable – useful in theory, because they house pretty much anything we could possibly need. The challenge is finding that specific thing – or in this case, person – we know is there. Often, clutter and disorganization mean we don’t find what we need when we need it.

Knowing this, most of us plan to clean and organize our spaces. But that’s a lot of work.

This brings us back to your talent database. It’s universally understood that having well-organized talent pipelines is a good thing. We can save significant amounts of time and money sourcing talent when we’re able to go to our pipeline and find who we’re looking for right away – and know with reasonable certainty they’re ready for a hiring conversation.

Until now, candidate relationship management (CRM) tools and repurposed marketing software have been the traditional methods for attracting and engaging candidates. Nice in theory, they’re often expensive and impersonal and require a lot of manual tinkering.

Introducing iCIMS Candidate Experience Management (CXM), our solution to the messy junk drawer of talent acquisition.

What is iCIMS Candidate Experience Management?

CXM is a next-gen CRM designed to help you get more out of your recruitment marketing with far less effort.

Merging iCIMS Marketing Automation with our existing CRM, iCIMS CXM gives recruiting teams the power to create self-driving, behavior-based campaigns and automated talent shortlists. The result? Qualified, engaged talent ready when you need it.

Why alternative solutions for engaging talent have fallen short

Traditional marketing automation systems are great – but they’re designed for marketers, not recruiters. The capabilities are good, but most features aren’t relevant for talent acquisition. Their biggest downfall is not being able to integrate with your ATS.

Then there are old-school CRMs and recruiting-specific solutions. Many of these make big promises when it comes to marketing automation. Unfortunately, they don’t always deliver. These systems still require a lot of ongoing management.

Lastly, there are HRIS and HCM systems. These offer candidate engagement features, many of which are pretty good. However, they’re nowhere near comprehensive enough to build a complete recruitment marketing strategy – let alone maintain one.

Key features of candidate relationship management

There’s a lot that goes into making iCIMS Candidate Experience Management a next-gen CRM. Here’s a deep dive on how your team can use the system to automate the sourcing and engagement of top talent.

Seamless integration with iCIMS Applicant Tracking. iCIMS CXM imports past applicants and employees from your iCIMS ATS. For most organizations, this represents a huge pool of untapped talent waiting to be rediscovered. Easy-to-use, automated marketing campaigns help lower recruiting costs by engaging talent you’ve already invested time and resources into.

AI-powered candidate shortlists. Provide your recruiters with a shortlist of truly engaged candidates without needing to lift a finger. CXM provides automatically generated engagement scores so your team’s time is freed up to be spent on the most qualified and leaned-in candidates in your database.

Behavior-based campaigns. Set up automated email campaigns that speak directly to candidates and their interests. This is helpful when engaging candidates from diverse backgrounds, as specific campaigns let them know they’re valued and understood. Not sure if your messaging is right? Simple A/B testing can help you refine and increase performance.

Event management. Recruitment events are a great way to find and engage motivated job seekers face-to-face. But what happens once the event is over? Your field team can collect job seeker information at the event on a mobile device or tablet. Job seekers can then be placed into personalized recruitment marketing campaigns that align with their interests and goals.

Engaging candidates on multiple channels

For those looking to take their recruitment marketing to the next level, we offer a host of additional ways to engage candidates discovered and nurtured by CXM.

Alongside email campaigns, many organizations have immense success reaching candidates anytime, anywhere with automated text message campaigns. You can also leverage the power of employee-generated videos embedded directly into emails, landing pages or job descriptions. Lead capture landing pages make for an inviting “front door” for active and passive job seekers – one that’s more powerful with a digital assistant to help engage and screen candidates.

What’s next for iCIMS Candidate Experience Management

Our vision for iCIMS Candidate Experience Management is to address a major gap in recruitment marketing. On launch, there’s no other solution that’s quite like it. The alternatives are either unequipped for the nuances of recruiting or simply lack the automation and engagement scoring features a truly capable recruitment marketing solution requires.

We have no plans to rest on our laurels. We’re incredibly excited to bring CXM to market. It’s new and innovates in areas that are in desperate need of change. But new and innovative is only useful when it adjusts to changing market and candidate expectations.

CXM will be enhanced with more configurations, automation features, integrations with other iCIMS Talent Cloud products, connections with external candidate sources and campaign personalization.

In the long term, you can expect to see behavior-based campaigns embedded across the Talent Cloud, touching on every milestone of the candidate lifecycle, from sourcing to internal mobility.

Final thoughts on recruiting marketing

Finding and engaging talent isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. It’s expensive and time-consuming, and the results aren’t guaranteed. There’s a better way – and that’s taking the best of marketing tech and applying it specifically to talent acquisition.

iCIMS CXM is designed to help recruiting teams source better and get the most out of the time and money they spend on recruitment marketing. By creating a hyper-personalized experience for talent, you’ll be better positioned to find the right person in the right place and at the right time – which is the secret to strong applicant conversion rates.

Ready to learn more? View the iCIMS Candidate Experience Management product page by clicking here.