ICIMS Hire is an enterprise applicant tracking system (ATS) that supports core hiring workflows. With comprehensive support for screening, interview management, offer management, and onboarding, it is built on enterprise‑grade technology and designed to support complex, global hiring at scale.
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SmartSearch ATS
Score 6.6 out of 10
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SmartSearch is an enterprise-grade native recruitment platform that unifies applicant tracking, CRM, onboarding, and reporting. Purpose-built for staffing and talent acquisition teams, it automates workflows, improves visibility, and reduces reliance on disconnected recruiting tools.
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StepStone
Score 10.0 out of 10
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StepStone is an online job board from the company of the same name headquartered in Dusseldorf.
$34.75
per month
Pricing
ICIMS Hire
SmartSearch ATS
StepStone
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
License
$34.75
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ICIMS Hire
SmartSearch ATS
StepStone
Free Trial
No
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Entry-level set up fee? - Implementation pricing is determined on a per-company basis.
Starting price (does not include set up fee) - Pricing is determined on a per-company basis, tailored to organization size, configuration, and selected solutions.
iCIMS Hire is a life saver for high volume hiring teams and it does so by providing excellent auditing trails. It forces a "paper trail" for every decision made, at all stages, making it much easier to pull reports and track movement. For me, it's essential to ensure we are not missing steps as a TA team and if we do, to ensure we address those gaps quickly. If you’re a team of 60 and only hire 5 people a year, this is not your tool. The implementation in my experience is robust and thorough, you won't get your ROI unless you're constantly hiring and expanding your talent pool.
I think our environment has stretched SmS and their capabilities (positively) but we have grown together and developed an enormously capable system together that is now very well integrated into our business. For doing applicant tracking, requisition management and offer management that has really been strong. I think we can partner together and build some better analytics and reporting capabilities that would be better suited for our business.
The opt-out message after the 1st text helps weed out the people who are not interested.
Having the ability to have templates/answers to frequent questions saved and ready to use makes it easier/faster to talk to multiple people.
Being able to schedule text campaigns is amazing. Every Saturday I set up my campaigns for the next week. This gives me more time to focus on other things.
The search functions are outstanding. It is the reason we originally went with SmartSearch many years ago. The ability to do very simple or complex searches gives the recruiting staff great flexibility in how they look for and narrow down candidates.
The hire and onboarding traks allow us to create very specific processes we want our staff to follow to insure a consistent and repeatable result. I can create traks that can be very general or traks that literally provide emails and reminders to all of the players (recruiters, managers, candidates, etc...) every step of the way. This is particularly helpful where we have customers who have extremely stringent contractual guidelines that must be followed.
Support. Their customer support is second to none. We always joke that they are our favorite vendor to deal with.... Anytime we have an issue or question. They are there to walk us through it. The training is on target and the staff has always been friendly and more than eager to help make us successful with the tool.
SmartSearch has a steep learning curve if you want to extensively use the features like automated tasks and the report writer
Technical support is spotty and sometimes very frustrating, they don't respond for weeks at a time.
SmartSearch user interface is old and has far less ability to customize the interface than other tracking systems
SmartSearch has virtually no ability to connect directly with other software and allows now other software to connect in - so no Microsoft Flow, no Zapier, no mail parser, etc. and since Smart Search capabilities are limited, not being able to integrate it with other platforms easily is unfortunate.
We would highly likely renew iCIMS Hire because it consistently delivers strong value across our recruiting process. It streamlines workflows, improves collaboration between teams, and provides reliable reporting and insights. The system is scalable, user-friendly, and continues to evolve with new features, making it a dependable long-term solution for our hiring needs.
I believe over the past 30 or so pages (or so it seems), you have every reason for my business to continue as a SmartSearch ATS client and user. The support is off the charts great the few times I need them (generally not even once per year). My business has been a client since 2004. That should say it all.
The platform is intuitive once configured and makes managing candidate pipelines, status updates, and communication straightforward. However, certain tasks—like custom reporting, bulk updates, and navigating between modules can feel a bit cumbersome and could benefit from a more modern interface. Overall, it’s reliable and effective for structured, high-volume recruiting environments like federal hiring.
There are so many facets of SmartSearch, that to know everything about it is nearly impossible. While it is mainly straight forward, there is a lot. After using the program for a while, you become pretty comfortable with the basics and can start adding some of the other features.
There is always ample advance notice before the software goes down for maintenance and this is usually done at off-peak hours. As for system failures - I can't think of any that have effected us in over two years od use.
My license for SmartSearch goes back to 2004. It has always been available for me - don't remember a single time it was not available in all of those years.
We can think of no dissatisfaction with our daily use of iCims, involving its response time to commands or incompatibility with any other software we presently use.
Before pandemic and iCIMS Talent Cloud acquisitions I would give 10 without a doubt. Unfortunately, I see a strong decrease in the support model, which seems to be mainly connected with the fact that acquired companies/tools/features need to be integrated with the platform, and knowledge of newly provided services and tools were not yet incorporated fully into the support.
Once you get the 1 person on the phone they are very knowledgeable and tend to solve the problem. The issue is there are not enough resources to handle all the clients. Their primary clients are "recruiting firms" and I think that is where most of the their support resources go
I would say I believe iCims online training is very good. It's informative, visually appealing, and simple in explaining all the different aspects of iCims. I also really like the new candidate onboarding, and all the other training curricula you have up to be able to inform or send out to the candidate. I like you can attach a URL link for videos as well so you can really customize the training. I feel that overall, I would like to see more. Perhaps, more robust options with the training, if that's something iCims is expanding on in the future.
Using the basic functions of SmartSearch is an easy implementation. But consider carefully what your organization needs to really drive placements. Because we only did a basic implementation first, we were caught off guard when later trying to implement more functions and realizing that the capabilities were limited or were difficult to learn and implement and realizing that tech support was not going to be consistent.
Fully available automation, lesser bad data quality, more information is gathered at the time of applicant profile creation without having the need to ask for any follow ups or additional notifications. Integrates better with Oracle, Workday and SAP than other similar systems. Service tickets are resolved faster than other vendors we worked with.
Functionally, SmartSearch is not on the same page as ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter as a platform is much more geared toward helping applicants and is essentially a glorified resume database. SmartSearch offers so much more in terms of features and abilities, that would not really be appropriate to try and compare the two. Similarly, the overall use of SmartSearch is an apples and oranges comparison to LinkedIn Talent. LinkedIn is great for sourcing and attracting talent, but in terms of tracking candidates all the way through a hiring process and tracking a heavy volume of job orders across a variety of states and locations, the two just don't really compare.
iCims is currently pretty good and the best TAS for us at our stage of growth - but further improvement and enhancements will only help make it even better.
We implemented iCIMS Talent Cloud right before the pandemic. The pandemic created the most difficult recruitment environment ever. I cannot say that iCIMS Talent Cloud has helped us realize any advantageous success in this battle we are fighting. It gets the job done, but we have realized anything like filling jobs faster or having resources within iCIMS Talent Cloud to allow us to attract candidates differently. Status quo, I guess.
That's easy - they have helped us grown and make more money. The core element of their technology (e.g. the ability to search for, identify and contact candidates is excellent).
They are a business partner and do their very best to help us succeed.
