iCIMS introduced a new version of itself this week, gathering all of its products into a single package it calls the iCIMS Talent Cloud. The company describes the offering as “a unified, AI-powered platform” that can help employers attract, engage, hire and advance the right talent.
Those four verbs—attract, engage, hire and advance—are at the heart of the move. Rather than market separate products with separate capabilities, iCIMS wants to simplify how users approach its solutions.
With its new Talent Cloud, @iCIMS is signaling intentions to wade aggressively into the market for identifying and developing internal talent. #HR #HRTech Click To Tweet“We want to reposition our portfolio from a whole bunch of suites with their own acronyms and their own product names into something that’s just straight easy to understand,” iCIMS CTO Al Smith told the HCM Technology Report. “The first thing that should catch your attention is that we’ve gotten rid of product names and gotten rid of acronyms that we’d used all the time.” Offering separate products under separate names made it difficult for users to understand all of the company’s capabilities, Smith said.
To emphasize the new approach, iCIMS also unveiled a new logo and brand identity, as well as a Customer Community made up of talent professionals from around the world.
Leveraging iCIMS for Internal Talent
While gathering all of its products in one place will certainly make iCIMS simpler to use, the prominence of Advance is worth some extra attention. With it, the company is signaling its intentions to wade aggressively into the market for identifying and developing internal talent. Smith said the core capabilities of the module have were already in place, though the company hasn’t focused on them. Now, he said, iCIMS plans to favor Advance with “a lot of new investment.”
Even though iCIMS has traditionally focused on attracting external candidates into an organization, Smith said 20% of the company’s customers use its technology to facilitate internal career advancement.
“We realized we have a wealth of tools that we apply when you’re external but don’t apply when you’re internal,” he explained. As an example, he said iCIMS profiles, which include background checks and similar information, are no longer updated once an employee is hired. However, that same employee continues “to gain skills and experiences and projects and new job assignments and learning and other things,” Smith observed.
Combine that with the tendency of many employers to hire from within and you realize that even full-time staffers are candidates—just internal candidates, he added.
“We really do think there’s an inflection point in the industry going on right now,” Smith said. “I do see our progressive employers engaging their employees around ‘where do you want your career to go?’”
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