iCIMS has unveiled a new look to its brand and launched iCIMS Talent cloud, its new AI-powered platform. It has also launched a new customer community at the same time. Steve Lucas, CEO of iCIMS since March this year commented: “We are thrilled to launch iCIMS’ new solution and brand to support employers as they navigate this new era of work. With Talent Cloud, iCIMS is leading from the front, doubling down on innovation to arm our customers with the best technology, critical data insights, and the industry’s strongest community of customers and partners to support them in the next generation of work.” Lucas also talked about the new brand and Talent Cloud in a new video.
Enterprise Times had the chance to talk to Susan Vitale, iCIMS chief marketing officer about the announcements. The company is also focused on more international expansion in the coming year. During 2020 the company saw the addition of several people to its leadership as Lucas built out the team . Diane Fanelli was hired as Chief Operating Officer, Anand Mehta was appointed SVP Global Revenue Operations, Mark Brandau as GVP, Portfolio Marketing & Strategy. It also promoted Michael Wilczak to the role of Chief Strategy Officer.
The company also acquired Opening.io and subsequently launched iCIMS Talent Logic, now a component of the new Talent Cloud. Vitale revealed that iCIMS is looking to make more acquisitions in the coming months.
iCIMs also forged stronger partnerships with both Ceridian and Microsoft Dynamics 365, bring its best in class talent acquisition solution to those solutions. Vitale revealed that the relationship with Microsoft is going well. There will soon be some more announcements about integration with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams
Talent Cloud
The new Talent cloud intends to give a stronger message about what the iCIMS solutions do. It consists of four themes that help to drive talent acquisition within an organisation.
- Attract: New candidates to role, both internal and external.
- Engage: Communicate and collaborate with talent through the acquisition process and beyond.
- Hire: Manage the hiring process for new employees or those changing roles.
- Advance: Ensure candidate profiles are updated from other sources to identify suitability for new roles. It also means that internal employees have their profiles. The system updates them automatically, which means they can more accurately map to new opportunities within the organisation.
Underpinning this are technology solutions to support
- Applicant tracking
- Candidate relationship management
- Onboarding
- Career Sites
- Text engagement
- Offer management
iCIMS Talent Cloud also delivers analytics to provide insights around candidates and talent acquisition. Vitale also shared her view on how the acquisition is evolving saying: “There’s a firm belief internally that it’s not just about this transactional hire any more. It’s about this Je ne sais quoi that happens when you pull together the right people on the right team. Even really talented people have a different outcome within a business based on the people they’re sitting beside or working with. So the concept of teams is paramount to this rebrand. And with that, it’s really about how do people think about this new feature of work related to teams, project-based work, internal gigs, how do we think about mobility in a new way, etc.”
The Talent Cloud aims to address this, and iCIMS will release more information about the platform next month.
On the new Brand
The new logo is a subtle shift from red to teal and a softening of the letters. Vitale explained that the initial “i” represents a person, that the dot is a circle is also important.
She commented: “The circle becomes a very big part of the brand moving forward. You’ll see it in a lot of our creative and the concept around the circle itself is this idea of a round table. At a round table, everybody has an equal seat; there’s no head of the table, everyone has an equal voice.
“This concept of diversity inclusion is really important, and it’s not just of the moment. This has been an important area for our business for years. Teal we felt was a bit more welcoming as well. You’ll still see some other colours as part of our palette, which again, reflects this concept of diversity and inclusion, purples, gold, red will be there as well. We also thought it was time to make a bit more of a modern and welcoming face for our brand.”
Customer Community
iCIMS has a huge community, but Vitale believes they should be more to the engagement with and within it. She commented: “We have a community of 332 million users, including candidates here. There are also over 2 million global iCIMS platform users in the talent space. We need to do a much better job of facilitating this community and enabling them to better learn from each other, and how to use the products, etc.”
iCIMS will share more about what it is doing at its upcoming virtual conference iCIMS Inspire, which starts on November 17th 2020. Though core to this announcement is a new website.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
A new iCIMS is emerging under the leadership of Steve Lucas. Vitale commented: “Steve has been an incredible leader for us, has interjected a tonne of new energy and inspiration for the team, cares significantly about ensuring that innovation becomes really the forefront of what we do as a business again. Quite candidly, we needed a little bit of that injected in us again. He’s been just wonderful.”
Vitale is excited; she has been at iCIMS for 15 years and is one of the longest-serving on leadership team. She has now led the creation of a new brand and completely revised and modern marketing message. iCIMS is already recognised as a leader in the Talent Acquisition space by Gartner, and with the new team, there is a hope and expectation that it will continue to expand its market share.
What is sensible is that the new look has not changed the company name, that was considered but rejected. Not changing name was probably a wise move. iCIMS is well recognised in the market, and it would have taken time and money to gain the same traction for any completely new brand.
The number of global platform users was updated to the correct figure in the above article following feedback from iCIMS.