iCIMS puts identity front and centre to support its growth strategy

As a leading provider of talent acquisition technology, iCIMS enables organisations everywhere to build winning workforces. With thousands of customers and users across 200+ countries and territories,  iCIMS invests in best-in-class solutions to optimize experiences for users and job applicants. This means putting Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) at the centre of that strategy.

Identity isn't just important — it’s the cornerstone of applicant tracking, one of iCIMS’ core solutions. However, iCIMS has faced CIAM challenges. Its homegrown identity solution struggled to deliver a seamless experience for its clients’ diverse user types who all coexist in the same applications. These disparate identities across iCIMS’ ecosystem resulted in high costs and difficulties keeping up with clients’ security expectations.

iCIMS needed a partner to alleviate the burden on in-house development teams, support its fast-growing and complex SaaS user base, and safeguard data. Only Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC), powered by Auth0, could provide a comprehensive Identity solution to support iCIMS’ unique CIAM requirements.

Optimising costs by consolidating disparate identities

Flexible options for customer identity deployment are necessary for business growth and market expansion, but building your own can be costly and time-consuming. With CIC, iCIMS was able to choose from a range of deployment options, opting to deploy three private clouds across the United States, Canada, and Europe. This enabled the company to securely meet SLAs, fulfil unique authentication needs, and address data sovereignty requirements. 

Using a custom database connection, iCIMS automatically migrated 500 million user accounts for thousands of existing clients to Okta CIC user store in six months, unifying seven different code bases and applications across geographies. Through Enterprise Connections, iCIMS also federated with commonly used identity systems, such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, with pre-built integrations. These out-of-the-box solutions helped iCIMS simplify user identity management for seamless scaling.

iCIMs has over 250 SSO integrations that use Okta Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC), and clients can easily connect their WIC instance to iCIMS’ Talent Cloud. This ease of onboarding to CIC has contributed to a 9.3 customer satisfaction score and has eliminated the burden on iCIMS’ developer teams to custom-build integrations. 

“We needed to centralise Identity across our Talent Cloud and consolidate into a single solution to support our vision of unified experiences and integrations across the talent ecosystem,” said Eric Connors, chief product officer. “Okta’s vendor-neutral platform was crucial in enabling us to streamline operations and enhance user experiences across the board."

With extensibility solutions, iCIMS’ development teams were able to refocus their resources on core business, leveraging developer-friendly SDKs and documentation to create custom identity flows and differentiate between user types, leading to a 50% improvement in time to market.

“Okta’s developer-friendly toolkits have greatly improved our engineering team's ability to unify identity,” said Bryan Tedesco, SVP of Engineering.

Reducing chair swivels with seamless user experience

The key to long-term revenue growth is delightful user experiences. To serve both internal and external candidates, iCIMS had to solve for disparate authentication methods and identities within the same applications. With CIC, the team found a unified solution that could treat different user types appropriately, providing a seamless login experience for each user type while elevating security.

“The iCIMS Talent Cloud relies on a universal login experience and centralised user and machine authentication,” said Kevin Schmidt, principal software architect. “Identity is a key pillar for having a fully integrated user experience across our solutions.”

All internal and external candidates authenticate through Universal Login within iCIMS’ Okta tenant, using the same login credentials as they move through the application and hiring process. Using Organisations, iCIMS clients can set up separate authentication and authorization workflows for each user type, with the ability to configure identity policies and customise candidate experience based on whether a candidate is internal or external. External candidates are presented with Social Login options, while internal candidates use their corporate identity provider. Organisations also offer customizable email templates and login pages, creating an end-to-end, branded job application journey.

“Okta CIC adoption has accelerated our ability to create vital universal experiences for our global customer community,” says Conners.

Social Login has also helped attract and keep new job seekers by fast-tracking the signup and login process with platforms they already use. With CIC, iCIMS established its Indeed integration five times faster than it could have before, earning 433k users from the platform in a single month.

Boosting security to augment in-house teams

Identity and security go hand in hand. Since iCIMS handles high volumes of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) for its customers, including W-2 and direct deposit details, data protection is paramount to its reputation and business continuity.

“Our customers trust iCIMS, and we have put that same trust in Okta to provide secure access for both our employees and our customers’ employees and candidates,” Tedesco said. “Okta CIC security solutions like Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (AMFA) and Attack Protection, have significantly improved iCIMS’ capabilities to prevent account takeovers and protect our customers.”

Okta AMFA uses a broad set of modern factors to create contextual access policies that assess risk factors — such as device, network, user behavior, IP address, and more — and prompt additional authentication methods only if a user is deemed high-risk. This feature gives iCIMS users seamless access to the applications they need while maintaining strong security. Attack Protection further safeguards iCIMS’ customer data by easily detecting bots, identifying users who were part of a third-party breach, and blocking traffic from IP addresses that attempt too many logins.

“Partnering with Okta shows our customers that we’re using the best-in-class CIAM solution to create secure authentication experiences,” Schmidt said. “Okta continues to raise the bar and helps us stay on the forefront of security standards.”

Partnering for long-term success

Okta’s extensibility and flexibility have helped iCIMS reduce costs, drive user growth, and bolster security across its organisation. In 2023, over 3 million business users around the world used Okta to access iCIMS apps. iCIMS also processed more than 200 million job applications through Okta in 2023, helping its clients hire 5.5 million people. None of this would have been possible without Okta, and the organisation will lean into this partnership as it prepares for the future.

"Without the invaluable support and guidance from Okta's Technical Account Management (TAM) team, coupled with the resources from our Gold Premier Success Plan, we couldn't have been nearly as successful,” Schmidt said. ”Their expert advice and hands-on assistance were crucial in overcoming the challenges we faced."

About iCIMS

iCIMS is an award-winning talent acquisition technology provider that helps some of the most innovative companies in the world – including Lockheed Martin, T-Mobile, General Mills, and Target – hire great people everywhere. Its AI-powered hiring platform is designed to improve efficiency, cut recruiting costs and build exceptional experiences for candidates and recruiters.