SmartRecruiters vs iCIMS

Better hire quality is a priority for 52% recruiters. Improving hiring time is a major goal for 26% of recruiters. Proactive modern recruiters are embracing technology to realize their recruitment goals.

If you are looking to install a new recruitment tech or upgrade to an advanced tech, this SmartRecruiters vs iCIMS review can be a starting guide.  

Introduction 

The recruitment landscape is continuously changing. Evolving expectations of jobseekers, recruiters and hiring managers are giving rise to new trends. Technology in recruitment made waves during the COVID-19 pandemic. The outstanding results experienced during this period encouraged recruiters to continue relying on smart and reliable technology.

The modern recruiter is proactive. They anticipate changing needs and equip themselves with corresponding tools to make hiring faster, cost-efficient and high quality.

AI-based technology, data-driven screening, social recruiting, talent pool building and focus on candidate experience influence the success of recruitment today. Tools are therefore designed to address these needs of recruiters and candidates.

Modern recruitment technology is thoughtful, feature-rich and delivers outstanding results. But not all technology is designed the same. It is only the best of technologies that deliver success. 

We aim to introduce you to such winning technologies with our reviews and comparisons of leading recruitment software. SmartRecruiters vs iCIMS introduces you to the form and features of some top-notch technologies. You can use the insights to better understand your needs and make the best choice of recruitment tech.

SmartRecruiters vs iCIMS

(Source: SmartRecruiters Website)

(Source: iCIMS Website)

SmartRecruiters

With over 4000 businesses on its client list, SmartRecruiters goes beyond the standard ATS. Where an ATS ends with tracking applicants, SmartRecruiters pushes the path forward to the end and beyond. It includes attracting talents, selecting qualified talents and moving top candidates through the hiring stage to offer acceptance and onboarding.

Recruiters employing SmartRecruiters are equipped with a single platform to manage their entire recruitment process. The 

core competence of SmartRecruiters is evident in its efficient handling of hyper hiring goals and voluminous hiring. 

iCIMS

Available as the iCIMS Talent Cloud, this product is a full-length hiring solution, offering assistance at every stage of hiring. This hiring platform works by offering access to global talents, and intelligent guidance throughout hiring and beyond. If you already have a talent acquisition system, iCIMS can integrate seamlessly with the system.

Advantages of SmartRecruiters

Available as Talent Acquisition Suite, SmartRecruiters is a cloud-based solution designed to deliver an enhanced candidate experience. This solution realizes its objective with features targeted at expanding recruiter productivity and elevating stakeholder collaboration.

Features of SmartRecruiters at a glance:

• ATS
• Direct sourcing through job board integrations
• Hiring app availability
• Customized career sites and pages
• Branded emails and campaigns
• Support for video and text content integration 
• Field Recruiting App to manage career events
• Resume parsing
• One-click mobile and social application
• Text and Voice-to-Text to capture event notes
• Automated job advertising
• Internal Mobility Module for internal talent nurturing
• A centralized hub for all hiring workflows and communications
• Easy and secure resume-sharing
• Interview scorecards for maximum hiring objectivity
• DocuSign Integration with e-signature capabilities 
• Automated onboarding
• HRIS Integration

Widen your Sourcing Slate

SmartRecruiters gives you access to a wide range of channels to power your sourcing. Avail Direct Sourcing where you can discover talents through LinkedIn, CareerBuilder and job boards.

High-volume hiring involving career fairs and campus hiring can be ably managed from start to finish. From branded career sites to branded in-store kiosks and 1-click application, the platform has multiple features for sourcing success. 

SmartRecruiters pulls your CRM talent pool to rediscover talents you may have missed earlier or nurtured for future collaboration. Make an impact using features such as videos and branded emails. 

Leverage multiple features, including career websites and pages, and communication capabilities through hiring app or desktop, to build talent pools. You can nurture these talent pools to discover candidates without having to struggle during times of talent demand.

Market your Job Openings Via High-Performing Channels

Publish your job opening on different job boards for a far and wide reach. Manage postings with one-click on all job boards from a single SmartRecruiters platform. Leverage referrals with SmartRecruiters’ social features such as Facebook Apply. 

Marketing jobs is less of a hassle and more efficient as the platform distributes jobs on high-performing channels automatically. The platform uses predictive posting to get maximum visibility and cost-efficiency for your hiring. There is also a Programmatic Advertising feature to help recruiters identify, reach and nurture talents.

Market your jobs internally and increase your chances of finding the right candidate within. A customizable internal hiring widget is available to market jobs to your employees. An easier internal application and management process helps recruiters find the best fit without too much expense.

Increase Screening Efficiency

SmartRecruiters allows recruiters to view the process and identify any bottlenecks early. Identify a candidate’s status in the hiring pipeline and take appropriate steps to move eligible candidates further into the pipeline.

Screen candidates faster and better with integrated assessment tools and automated assessments and skill tests. An advanced search capability enables you to quickly screen candidates from talent pools. Advanced search filters, personalized tags, keywords and more parameters, make search fast and efficient. Save complex search queries for easy repeats in the future.

Slash interview time with support for simultaneous multiple interviews. Schedule interviews efficiently with convenient side-by-side comparison screens. Automate interview notifications. Let your teams be up-to-date with their tasks with an automated interview schedule sync.

Improve collaboration among hiring managers, recruiting teams and candidates with task automation and alerts. Features such as customized templates, auto replies and notifications, keep communications clear and on track. Make better evaluations by integrating all candidate communication at one place.  

Whether you are screening, reviewing, approving or engaging a candidate, do it all anytime and from anywhere with 

SmartRecruiters’ Mobile Hiring App. 

Ensure Better Offer Management with a Digital Approach

Reduce offer time with integrated offer letter templates, customizable forms, direct approver notifications and direct candidate communications through the platform. Approvals can be offered on the go through any mobile device.

Candidates can accept an offer and sign required forms from any device fast and easy with DocuSign Integration. Recruiters can make offer acceptance fast by reaching multiple candidates with multiple forms simultaneously, with a single click. 

Implement a Rapid and Compliant Onboarding

Onboarding is smooth and efficient with SmartRecruiters. There are integrated background checks within the platform. You can get access to screening vendors worldwide for task realization. Automation at defined moments ensures smooth and faster completion of onboarding.

Establish a Central Hub for Recruitment Information

SmartRecruiters can integrate with your HRIS and provide you with a centralized hub for all recruitment data. Gather relevant insights on demand through a single platform. With automated workflows, manual intervention and risk of errors are substantially reduced.

Deliver Positive Candidate Experiences 

With SmartRecruiters, you can ensure that you are engaging candidates throughout their hiring journey and beyond. With branded career sites, easy 1-click application process, and quick parsing, journey through the hiring loop is positive.

Keep the hiring process and engagement simple and effective with automated actions, schedules check-ins, timely feedback and reminders.

You can go further and retain engagement of able candidates that have not yet been absorbed into your workforce. 

Automated status updates, alerts on relevant job openings and hiring events, ensure critical engagement of passive candidates. You can also get insights into candidates’ job search updates while being compliant with applicable laws.

SmartRecruiters Pricing

SmartReruiters pricing is available according to selected features. The number of employees in your organization and your recruitment needs, define pricing. A free consultation is available to gather information on pricing.

Disadvantages of SmartRecruiters

Users find many features of SmartRecruiters beneficial. The availability of a free version is impressive for some users. Many find the extensive job board integration a great plus. Features such as referral portals are considered valuable by many customers.

Many recruiters also admit to have witnessed an improvement in collaboration among stakeholders after SmartRecruiters’ implementation. 

Still, the platform can do with a few upgrades, according to some users.

Room for Better Usability 

The platform could do with better usability. For example, the process for reviewing CVs demands more than a few clicks making review time-consuming. Similarly, displaying candidate surveys on the current screen would be great. Right now, the user has to move through different phases for viewing the survey. 

The time drag witnessed while adding a candidate profile to another job can be rectified.

Is SmartRecruiters Right for You?

SmartRecruiters is invaluable for companies with a full-length talent acquisition process. It is great for enterprises that want to set aggressive hiring milestones. 

If you want to explore a SmartRecruiters alternative, then X0PA is a strong contender. An end-to-end recruitment solution, X0PA reduces time-to-hire by 87% and cost of hiring by 50%. Give your recruitment the benefits of timely automation and AI-powered intelligence with X0PA.

Other SmartRecruiters competitors include Jobvite, iCIMS Talent Cloud and Oracle Cloud HCM. 

Advantages of iCIMS

As a full-length talent acquisition solution, iCIMS offer rich features to elevate your hiring and talent sourcing. The solution is up-to-date with the latest recruitment trends, integrating video capabilities for heightened candidate experiences. The platform is also scalable at a global scale.

A quick look at the features of iCIMS:

• Branded career sites
• iCIMS Video Studio
• iCIMS CRM
• Marketing automation 
• ATS (also available as a stand-alone solution) 
• Automated offer management
• Video capabilities
• Integrated assessments
• Omni-channel communication and AI integrations for internal hiring
• Automated cloud-based onboarding

Market your Jobs to a Wider Audience

iCIMS has branded career sites, video creation and sharing capabilities, and extensive reporting features for greater marketing performance. Reach out to prospects through multiple channels, including text, email and AI interfaces. Simplify application with a 1-click process to retain interested candidates.

Leverage Recruitment Marketing Automation to Make Hiring Hassle-Free 

From sourcing through screening and candidate engagement, iCIMS offers intelligent automation to reduce your workload and improve decision-making. 

Marketing automation helps you in the following ways:

• Manage hiring pipeline better with insights into the candidate status. You can engage candidates better, knowing if they are passive or interested in an opportunity.
• Assess candidate interest with intelligent action tracking and scoring.
• Reach out to previous candidates with on-demand information, engage with automated messages, nurture talents and reduce time of hiring.  
• Create full-length recruitment marketing campaigns efficiently. Whether you want to scale your campaign or make it hyper-personalized, marketing automation shows the way. 

Increase Screening Velocity with Integrated Assessments

Cut down screening time with iCIMS ATS. It is easy to use and facilitates feedback- gathering. 

Screening efficiency can also be increased with iCIMS’ capability for video interviewing. Language Assessments feature can be used to evaluate candidates better and move only qualified talents further into the hiring funnel.

iCIMS also facilitates easy third-party assessment tool integrations. If you want additional background checks or assessments, then you can accomplish the task with simple iCIMS integration. 

Make Offer Management Bottleneck-Free

Reduce the rate of candidate drop-off at offer stage with iCIMS’s relevant features that make offer management faster and smooth. 

• Embed videos into offer letters and engage candidates. Videos are an efficient way to convey your work culture and brand values to candidates. Humanize your brand with videos and increase the chances of retaining candidates at the offer stage.
• Reduce manual intervention and speed up offer management with automation at multiple hiring points. Scale the process on demand without losing efficiency.
• Enhance ease and convenience by allowing candidates to review offer letters and accept them online, using any device.
• Reduce administrative stress by ensuring compliance. Features such as pre-designed templates, clause management, and language approvals, make compliance easier to attain.   
• Keep candidates connected to your brand with integrated branding. iCIMS offers letters customized to your brand for every role.  

Make Onboarding Exciting and Mess-Free

iCIMS automates onboarding and makes it virtual, which saves you substantial time. Brand- customized platform keeps candidates in a familiar environment. 

• Make the journey personalized for candidates with branded content including videos
• Automate onboarding tasks. Reduce staff workload while eliminating the risk of missing a crucial beat in the process.
• Give new hires a complete round-up of the process and guide them on their next steps clearly. An onboarding portal, accessible online, guides new hires on their tasks and training.
• Absorb new hires into your workforce and track their progress with applicable platform integrations. 

Create Better Candidate Experiences with Well-Crafted Brand Experiences

iCIMS equips recruiters with extensive brand-embeddable and candidate-friendly features, which deliver best candidate experiences.

• Reach out to global talents using CC (Closed Captions) in over 100 languages
• Improve talent attraction by including employee testimonials in job descriptions on your career site
• Include videos in virtual offer management and onboarding for new hires 
• Embed videos in your passive candidate outreach programs and raise levels of engagements to new standards
• Cut costs on hiring video studios for your recruitment campaigns. Create top-notch videos with iCIMS’ video creation, editing and integration features. Reach out to prospects faster with iCIMS’ custom templates and social publishing features. 

iCIMS Pricing

iCIMS pricing is not readily available on its website. Interested users can talk to the company’s sales contact or contact the company on the number specified on its website.

Some users however opine that the cost of installing the platform and integrating it, is pricey, compared to its alternatives.

Disadvantages of iCIMS

Customers find iCIMS technical support assistant very useful. According to one user, this assistant finds solutions to all issues. Customers find some platform features highly efficient. For example, bulk printing and accessing candidate resumes are easy. Reporting function allows for great customization.

But the platform can do with some improvements.

Performance and UI Issues

The platform goes down more than once, leading to business downtime. Prior notifications would be valuable. Outlook integration can be more flexible to include clients’ work email address for better candidate response. Support for data compliance can be widened to include more accurate global data compliance.

Is iCIMS Right for You?

iCIMS can be a great addition for large enterprises looking at bulk or aggressive hiring.

You can also try X0PA as an iCIMS alternative. It is a comprehensive solution delivering the benefits of high-quality hires, high customizability, effortless scaling and improved candidate retention.

Other iCIMS competitors include Jobvite, SmartRecruiters and Bullhorn.   

Conclusion

The right recruitment tech offers immense benefits for all stakeholders involved, including candidates and recruiters. From addressing talent shortage to streamlining recruitment and enhancing candidate experience, tech can address key hiring and post-hiring challenges.

As the recruitment landscape evolves, your tech must be capable to evolve to changing needs. Invest resources to discover a technology that works for your current hiring objectives as well as evolving talent needs.

Let this SmartRecruiters vs iCIMS review serve as a starter guide in your quest for the right tech. 

Author Bio:

In her role as a Senior Recruiter, Susan Clark has handled entire recruitment processes for 8+ years. From sourcing candidates from multiple channels to screening the right talents and generating offer letters, Clark has experience with every segment of hiring.

An ardent tech lover, Clark has managed ATS and different other recruitment software. She reviews tech products aligned with the recruitment and talent industries. Visit her space for more on hiring tech.