iCIMS Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

iCIMS is a recruiting software platform designed to assist companies of any size with attracting, engaging and retaining top talent. iCIMS offers these tools:

• Branded career site
• Applicant tracking system (ATS)
• Automatic candidate matching
• Digital Assistant
• Internal Talent Marketplace and Career Pathing
• Candidate relationship management via text, email and more
• Interviewing tools
• Onboarding
• Reports and analytics
• Recruitment marketing campaign tools
• Event management
• Employee engagement

Featured Partners

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1

BambooHR

Onboarding

Yes

Employee Records

Yes

Standout Features

ATS

1

BambooHR

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On BambooHR's Website

2

Pinpoint ATS

Applicant tracking

Yes

Onboarding

Yes

Standout features

24/7 customer support, easy-to-use interface, fast and flexible workflows, hundreds of integrations

2

Pinpoint ATS

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On Pinpoint HQ's Website

3

ClearCompany

Applicant tracking/onboarding

Yes

Performance management

Yes

Standout Features

Employee engagement

3

ClearCompany

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On ClearCompany's Website

iCIMS’ Talent Cloud platform provides tools to support recruiters as they source, attract, engage and hire top talent. iCIMS doesn’t stop there, however. It also provides ways for current employees to grow professionally and provide valuable employee feedback.

iCIMS’ Digital Assistant infuses its platform with AI capabilities to enhance the user experience (UX). The Digital Assistant:

• Answers job site visitors’ questions via chat
• Customize job site visitors’ experiences
• Communicates with prospective and current candidates via text and email
• Screens candidates for their skills and experience
• Helps candidates schedule interviews

We’ll dig into each of the ways the Digital Assistant supports your hiring process in the feature descriptions below.

iCIMS features include a dynamic career site, an integrated ATS and more.

Career Site

A job site should look professional and be a direct extension of your company’s brand and culture. Using iCIMS’ built-in content management system (CMS), you can curate your company’s job site. iCIMS’ Video Studio enables you and your employees to create video testimonials that can be embedded on your site to make your company culture come to life.

During our live demo with iCIMS, we saw that the CMS had the same user-friendly look of other website builders, such as Wix or Squarespace, where you can add content blocks, drag and drop them where you like and apply a color palette and typology across the site.

On the user end, visitors can search your job openings and get matched with personalized recommendations by answering a few questions from the Digital Assistant. You can set up on the back end the questions you want the Digital Assistant to ask. Otherwise, the visitor can upload their resume and/or create a profile right in the chat window to start receiving recommendations. They’ll also receive alerts on new, relevant job openings, company news and get invitations to company events.

Interacting with iCIMS’ mobile responsive career site in these ways allows your company to establish a relationship with a potential candidate. As such, the career site is a great entry point for building up a talent pool to tap into when a new job opening arises.

Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Customization

iCIMS’ ATS is configurable to your business’s specific hiring processes, so you don’t have to reach out to an iCIMS support representative to get it set up the way you want.

Approval Chains

You can set up automated approval workflows, from job post approval to onboarding to expedite the hiring process. iCIMS’ ATS also redacts names and other information from resumes that potentially opens the door to bias.

Social Distribution

When you post a job to your company’s career site, iCIMS enables social recruiting via its Social Distribution tool. Social Distribution broadens your job post’s reach by pushing your job post to popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Candidate Matching

Using iCIMS’ database of contacts, resumes and more, iCIMS’ AI-powered candidate matching surfaces the most qualified candidates for you, so you don’t have to sift through hundreds of resumes and profiles manually. The Digital Assistant also sends screening questions to automatically eliminate disqualified candidates and move forward only the most promising.

Recruiters can also compare top candidates side by side as the system also generates candidate comparisons and rankings automatically to help you make the most informed decision on whom to move forward.

Opportunity Marketplace

iCIMS has a solution for attracting and engaging the employees you already have. Employees can set up their skill profiles, and iCIMS’ AI-infused internal talent marketplace makes tailored role recommendations to employees based on their skill set, interests and goals. Alternatively, recruiters can share jobs with internal candidates who make a good match for an opportunity.

Candidate Relationship Management

iCIMS’ system captures contact information from active and passive job seekers, potential and current candidates alike and from a variety of sources, perhaps from the job site, a recruiting event or an application.

No matter the source and type of contact, iCIMS nurtures a relationship with that contact through personalized text and email campaigns. Plus, it can do so in 25 different languages from the recruiter side and in 37 languages on the candidate side, which is a plus for companies that hire in a variety of countries.

In addition, recruiters can get in touch with candidates through a variety of channels, including text, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. iCIMS keeps track of conversation history between recruiters and candidates. That way, if you have multiple recruiters on your team, they’re all on the same page about where the candidate is at in the process.

iCIMS’ robust outreach features aren’t just for potential and current job candidates. They’re also useful for pushing company-wide announcements and reminders, such as for open enrollment or mandatory employee training.

SkillSurvey

iCIMS’ SkillSurvey is available as a standalone product that automates candidate reference checking, garners referrals from candidates during the hiring process and administers employee surveys, which we’ll dive into below.

iCIMS sends a job-specific survey to each of the candidate’s references who then rate the candidate on key competencies relevant to the job. SkillSurvey contains a library of “Pre-Hire 360” surveys, but you can also customize them by adding your own questions.

When trying out the 30-day free trial of SkillSurvey, it was difficult to know where to start or what to do with the interface, even though we already had an understanding of its basic functionalities. The interface looks as though it’s an ATS since you can view open positions.

Home screen of the iCIMS SkillSurvey

It was also unclear at first what “filing” means in this interface, but after some clicking around, we learned that “filing” a candidate means “hiring” them. After marking a candidate “hired,” the candidate moved to the “filed candidates” section.

We were able to see reference information and who submitted feedback. However, it wasn’t immediately clear how to view the reference feedback. We eventually found a link to a candidate’s report within their profile. Viewing the report, we were impressed by the amount of information that it displays, from average scoring among all references to scoring by each reference contact.

You can view the reference report as a graph or a table. Besides predicting the likelihood of candidate turnover within the first year of hire (not pictured here), the report also displays ratings and comments (not pictured here) from managerial and non-managerial references.

Interviewing Tools

iCIMS offers built-in video interviewing to conduct live interviews or to have candidates prerecord their introduction and answers to interview questions. You can set up an interviewing scheduling template with preselected time slots that the Digital Assistant then sends to candidates, so they can self-schedule. Recruiters can rate interviewees on a range of predetermined criteria.

Onboarding

iCIMS’ onboarding software enables you to create a personalized welcome message with the help of embedded video content.

You can also set up customized onboarding task sequences. New hires can view and take care of their onboarding tasks, such as signing forms, from a desktop or mobile device. The human resources (HR) team members can keep track of onboarding progress and send reminder emails if needed.

Reporting and Analytics

iCIMS analytics has configurable dashboards that can be tailored to the group, role or individual level to present only relevant information to users. It also delivers reports on key metrics, such as number of open positions, time to fill, source of hire and cost per hire. You can produce reports on any data that’s tracked in the system.

iCIMS advanced analytics provides user-friendly data analysis and predictive forecasting to stay ahead of what’s to come for your company’s hiring strategies, whether it means preparing for an upcoming hiring surge, hiring freeze or some other trend that impacts your talent acquisition.

iCIMS does not publicly post its pricing information. According to our live demo with iCIMS representatives, there is a one-time implementation fee and a recurring licensing fee that’s based on the products a customer chooses, how many users they have and how it gets set up. Pricing is thus established on a case-by-case basis.

While iCIMS ATS is bundled with its onboarding and CRM products, these products are available for standalone purchase:

• Career Site
• SkillSurvey
• Video interviewing
• Video Studio
• Text Engagement
• Digital Assistant
• Marketing Automation

A few more standout features in iCIMS’ platform are worth mentioning, namely, its marketing automation, event management, employee engagement and Insights+.

Marketing Automation

If you’ve got a recruiting strategy and just need tools to execute, iCIMS’ marketing automation can help with that. Marketing Automation is iCIMS’ automated recruitment marketing tool that helps you roll out effective, far-reaching recruitment marketing campaigns. This tool works great if:

• Your company has a team of recruiters with a strategy in place
• Those recruiters have identified their campaign target audience, for example, mid-career sales professionals
• The recruiters know what content they want to pitch to this population through advertising and other means
• The recruiters already have a database of potential contacts

With those in place, iCIMS’ Marketing Automation can take it from there and deploy an automated recruitment marketing campaign at scale by:

• Sending automated messaging tailored to the recipient based on their interaction with your company and its digital presence.
• Tracking and scoring candidates to prioritize based on their level of activity with your company.

You can set the categories for engagement, such as “hot” or “cold,” to denote who’s ready for outreach. You can also set up the scores and scoring logic. For example, when configuring your automated outreach workflows, you can specify that if a recipient opens a second email from one of your recruiters, their engagement score goes up by a specified number of points.

Event Management

iCIMS enables recruiters to manage in-person and virtual career fairs by setting up customizable sign-up forms, sending out invitations, scheduling one-on-one interviews and tracking interactions with attendees. You can also set up an email campaign reminding attendees of the upcoming event as well as sending follow-up thank you emails.

At in-person events, you can easily capture attendees’ information either beforehand through the virtual sign-up process or by scanning in their resume or business card on the spot through a mobile device.

Employee Engagement

iCIMS not only helps with attracting and hiring talent. It also offers tools to retain talent with its employee engagement features. Its SkillSurvey product helps you administer employee surveys and make sense of employee feedback. iCIMS provides a library of surveys designed for various stages of the employee lifecycle, from new hire to exit interview. iCIMS then helps you make sense of the results. It can break down employee feedback by demographics to shed light on how well your diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are performing.

Insights+ and Insights Advisor

Insights+ gives you access to industry-specific trends and metrics that affect your recruiting strategy. You can also access community events and private think tanks.

Insights Advisor is one step up from Insights+ in that it offers competitor comparisons and one-on-one talent expert guidance on how to best build and execute a winning recruiting strategy for your company.

Support for iCIMS Talent Cloud platform customers is available via live chat, phone, online documentation and support tickets.

While testing iCIMS’ SkillSurvey product, we tried contacting support through the built-in chat function during normal business hours. However, we received a message that no one was available at the time, and we were prompted to provide an email address to set up a virtual meeting with a representative.

	iCIMS	JazzHR	Workable	Zoho Recruit
Rating
Starting Price	Contact for quote	$49 per month under annual billing	$149 per month	Free; $30 per user, per month, or $25 per user, per month, billed annually
Free Trial	SkillSurvey only	21 days	15 days	15 days
Syndicated Job Postings	Yes	18 job boards	200-plus	Included
Social Media Integration	Yes	Yes	Yes	Paid plans
ATS	Yes	Yes	Yes	Paid plans
Candidate Matching	Yes	No	Yes	Paid plans
Candidate Relationship Management	Text, email and chat	Text (add-on) and email	Email only	Text, phone, email and chat
Customizable Workflows	Yes	Yes	Yes	Paid plans
Automations	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Scheduling Tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Included
Interviewing Tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Onboarding	Yes	Yes	Yes	Available with Zoho People
Analytics and Reporting	Yes	Yes	Yes	Paid plans
Templates	For emails, job descriptions, offer letters, text messages and interview schedules	For emails, job descriptions and offer letters	For emails, onboarding and profiles	For emails and job descriptions
Third-party Integrations	750-plus	116	70-plus	40
Customer Support	Chat, phone, online documentation and support ticket	Email, online documentation, plus live chat and phone for advanced tiers	Chat, phone, email and online documentation	Chat, phone, email and support ticket
Mobile App	iOS and Android	No	iOS and Android	iOS and Android
Read Reviews	‘-	Read JazzHR Review	Read Workable Review	Read Zoho Recruit Review

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iCIMS offers the most ways for recruiters to nurture contacts as well as the most template types and integrations, making it a flexible, time-saving solution. iCIMS is also the only one among this group that provides features to retain talent, such as the AI-powered internal job board and employee engagement tools.

However, iCIMS might have more features than small businesses need. That’s where competitors JazzHR, Workable and Zoho Recruit come in to offer more highly rated, easier-to-use features and better customer support and some of them do so at a relatively low cost.

iCIMS vs. JazzHR

iCIMS and JazzHR tend to serve different customer bases. While iCIMS’ customer base is largely enterprises, JazzHR serves mostly midmarket businesses.

Comparing the features, iCIMS has a mobile app, more templates and more integrations to streamline your hiring process. The biggest advantage it has over JazzHR is that it offers automatic candidate matching to save you the manual work of looking through resumes and ranking candidates yourself.

For its part, JazzHR does offer a free trial and transparent pricing, so you know upfront whether JazzHR is the right solution for you before ever reaching out to a sales representative. Plus, users find JazzHR easier to work with and set up. JazzHR’s customer support, social recruiting, candidate relationship management and several other features also earn higher ratings than those of iCIMS.’ JazzHR has a comparable texting feature available as an add-on to send personalized and bulk messages to candidates.

iCIMS vs. Workable

Workable has transparent pricing and a free trial, so potential customers know what they’re getting into before committing to the product or ever contacting a representative. Users tend to find Workable easier to use and set up. According to user reviews, Workable also outperforms iCIMS for candidate relationship management, even though it only offers email communication. It also outshines iCIMS in terms of social recruiting, customizable workflows, applicant tracking and other key metrics.

iCIMS, however, earns higher ratings for onboarding software, compared to Workable’s onboarding ratings. It also offers more integrations, more templates and more ways to get in touch with candidates.

iCIMS vs. Zoho Recruit

iCIMS serves mostly enterprise customers, while Zoho Recruit serves very small businesses primarily.

Zoho Recruit has upfront pricing information and customers find it easier to use and set up. Nearly all of its features earn higher ratings than the same features offered by iCIMS. Comparable to iCIMS’ Digital Assistant, Zoho’s Zia chatbot interacts with candidates by answering their questions and informing them of application status updates.

iCIMS’ customer support ratings beat Zoho Recruit. It also has more templates, more third-party integrations as well as more communication channels for interacting with candidates than Zoho Recruit does.

iCIMS offers an impressive range of communication channels to establish and nurture relationships with current and potential job candidates. It also incorporates AI capabilities throughout its platform to automate and streamline talent acquisition. Finally, those at iCIMS understand that the work doesn’t stop after hiring an employee. It provides features to help companies keep that talent in the organization.

iCIMS Is Best For:

• Midsized to enterprise businesses
• Companies that hire in large volumes
• Companies that need personalized candidate interactions at scale
• Companies that have an internal recruiting team
• Companies that hire in multiple countries
• Companies focused on employee retention

iCIMS Is Not Recommended For:

• Startups and small businesses
• Companies that hire sporadically or in small numbers
• Companies with one-person or very small HR teams
• Companies that only need an ATS

The iCIMS Talent Cloud applications offer an impressive array of features that support not only talent acquisition but also professional growth and retention. It boasts AI-powered capabilities throughout its platform to deliver intelligent recommendations to current and potential job candidates and employees. The platform also enables automated recruiting campaigns and personalized, automated candidate interactions at scale.

Yet, it’s difficult to know if iCIMS’ solution is right for you, as iCIMS doesn’t offer pricing or package information or specify what’s included and what’s an add-on. The range of features may therefore scare off smaller businesses that are interested but assume they have to commit to the entire platform as a whole.

Ease of Use

iCIMS only offers a trial account of its SkillSurvey product which we didn’t find intuitive. It took some clicking around to figure out its features and how it organizes information. We were also disappointed that the built-in chatbot couldn’t connect us to someone during regular business hours.