iCIMS has announced the winter release of its talent acquisition platform. The headline feature in the release is a new generative AI recruiting copilot which aims to significantly improve the efficiency of the recruiting process through the automation of some less obvious tasks. The update also provides a host of other improvements across the platform.
Al Smith, Chief Technology Officer at iCIMS, “iCIMS Copilot gives talent acquisition teams a competitive hiring advantage and unparalleled productivity across the talent lifecycle. We’re harnessing the power of generative AI and delivering new capabilities and experiences in our latest product release to help companies transform how they find, hire and mobilize the best talent.”
iCIMS Copilot blows away inefficiency
iCIMS has further developed its AI Copilot with some new generative AI capabilities. There are two new capabilities: iCIMS Copilot for Job descriptions and iCIMS Copilot for interview questions.
Drafting job descriptions can be tedious, or recruiters sometimes find descriptions are re-used and errors creep in. The Copilot assists users in improving job descriptions. The Copilot will mark up a Word document in real-time with recommendations that can be accepted or rejected. This collaborative implementation of generative AI gives control to the recruiter but provides a powerful assistant to help make better job descriptions.
Preparing for interviews can be time-consuming, and where different recruiters are involved can lead to imbalance. The new iCIMS for interview questions will create tailored interview questions in seconds based on the criteria given to the Copilot. The prompts can include the number of questions required, industry, experience and skills. The Copilot will respond with a list of questions to be used in the interviews.
Customers are excited by the new feature. Jeff Battinus, Head of Talent Acquisition at Dental Care Alliance, said, “As a longstanding customer, our talent acquisition team uses iCIMS to engage and hire the talent we need to build strong teams and provide great care.
“We’re always looking for new ways to improve the experience and create more efficiency across the talent journey to hire smarter – and iCIMS helps us do just that. We’re excited to use iCIMS’ new generative AI innovations built directly into our current system to accelerate hiring, improve productivity and provide intelligent recommendations for better decision-making.”
Taking standardisation to the next step
Recruiters struggle to find the balance between broadening their candidate pool, managing them and managing the volume of responses. The new iCIMS Apply Network assists recruiters with standardisation across multiple recruiting networks.
Historically organisations would have to manage the question sets of each third party job site manually and often struggle to collect a consistent set of data for each candidate. This new feature enables organisations to select a consistent list of questions and then post these to a variety of job boards with a single click. Job boards supported within this release include Jobcase and ZipRecruiter. However, iCIMS will also add Indeed, LinkedIn, Dalia and Veritone “soon” later this year, according to iCIMS.
The new feature enables organisations to standardise job applications across multiple boards easily. It also removes another administrative element of the recruitment process. This feature is available free to all US-based ATS customers. It is not known whether there is a cost or if this feature is available outside the US.
Video Studio enhancements
iCIMS has added two new features to Video Studio. Video Studio Discover Questions is a library of video prompt recommendations. Effectively, it presents employees with questions to which they can create video answers, guiding them through the process in a more focused way. Questions include:
- What opportunities for development and training exist at the company
- What should candidates expect during an interview
- What does a day in your job look like
- What has your internship experience been like so far
- What is your favourite part about working here
- What did the application process look like for your role
- How do you collaborate with your team
The questions cover topics such as pride, career growth and mentorship.
For employees, a new Employee feed provides videos organised across a range of topics, including culture, DEI, Day in the Life, hiring manager, internal mobility, internships and perks & benefits. These provide examples of how other employees have asked questions and potentially provide a resource for learning about internal initiatives such as mentorship.
Streamline recruiting operations
iCIMS has also introduced the new iCIMS Career Site CMS dynamic job widget. The feature enables recruiters to highlight recent relevant vacancies on the iCIMS career website. The intent is to improve engagement. It means that visitors to the careers site are presented with jobs relevant to their skills and experience that might interest them, rather than a default list which might not initially include suitable roles.
An update to the scheduling tool enables interview schedulers to drag and drop interviews using the visibility of all attendees to pick the optimal time. This feature was available in the legacy product and is now available in the new user experience for interview scheduling. It will be interesting to see when and how iCIMS introduces AI into interview scheduling.
iCIMS has also enabled a bulk update feature within iCIMS CRM, enabling users to select more than fifty candidates and apply bulk actions to them. Actions include:
- Mark as attended
- Email (perhaps to say the opportunity is closed)
- Add or remove from the pipeline
- Download resumes
- Export
- Subscribe/Unsubscribe
Where recruiters are dealing with large volumes of candidates, this could increase efficiency and also enable them to deliver a much better experience to candidates. Again, the introduction of AI to personalise emails for these bulk actions or even to generate the text for such an email is not apparent, perhaps in a future update.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
A feature-rich update from iCIMS. It demonstrates the capabilities that generative AI features can bring organisations and, specifically, their recruiting teams. There is no doubt there is more to come, and iCIMS continues to invest in generative AI capabilities.
The feature with the most potential in this release is the bulk update. At present, it gives users a simple way of updating a database. However, with the introduction of generative AI, it could become a very powerful tool. Perhaps where a recruiter is able to ask iCIMS to create a personalised rejection email for all candidates who were unsuccessful in applying to job reference “A1524”. It will be very interesting to see where iCIMS takes its platform next.
