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Set against the stunning backdrop of the Arizona desert at Scottsdale’s Phoenician Hotel, #AvatureUpfront US 2024 brought together over 260 HR leaders, business analysts and technical professionals eager to explore the future of work.
More than just a conference, it was a forum for innovation, collaboration and real-world problem-solving. With dynamic sessions led by industry leaders, in-depth workshops and cutting-edge product showcases, attendees gained fresh strategies to navigate a rapidly evolving talent landscape and leverage Avature’s powerful platform to drive meaningful change.
Let’s dive into the key moments that defined #AvatureUpfront US 2024.
Gaining a Sustainable Advantage With AI
#AvatureUpfront US 2024 kicked off with CEO Dimitri Boylan’s opening remarks, urging attendees to navigate the disruptive wave of AI with intention and adaptability. Emphasizing that we are in the midst of a technological leap, he underscored the critical need to understand and harness AI’s transformative potential.
Boylan highlighted how artificial neural networks, though still limited to prediction tasks, are unlocking new dimensions of machine intelligence and facilitating unprecedented knowledge transfer. As these technologies continue to evolve, businesses must seize the chance to leverage AI for strategic advantage, he advised.
Avature’s platform, Boylan explained, is designed to help organizations stay ahead in this rapidly shifting landscape by offering intelligent, flexible and scalable solutions. By fostering agility and embedding AI across HR processes, the platform empowers clients to create sustainable competitive advantages in a world where AI’s role will only grow more prominent.
AI’s Role in Enhancing, Not Replacing, Human Decision-Making
Continuing with the theme of AI, industry leaders explored its pivotal role and how it’s transforming traditional HR functions in an insightful panel discussion. Erica Rutherford, Director of Technology at Bain & Company, shared how her organization is currently leveraging AI to transform the entire recruiting value chain for all key stakeholders. Use cases include reducing the time recruiters spend on tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks and leveraging Avature’s chatbot to make it easier for candidates to navigate career sites.
Echoing Rutherford’s perspective, Gina Drew, Sr. IT Manager at Xerox, emphasized the need for AI to support, not replace, human decision-making. While you wouldn’t want AI to be responsible for performance management ratings, she affirmed, it’s a powerful tool to reduce the administrative burden of writing performance reports, as long as human decision-makers have the last say.
Beyond maintaining the human touch, the speakers also emphasized the need for rigorous governance, guidelines and compliance when using AI.
There are a lot of guardrails and guidelines that we’re putting in place around AI, just to make sure that we’re legally compliant, to make sure that we’re not letting it make decisions for us.”
Erica Rutherford
Director of Technology at Bain & Company
Recognizing that organizations are at very different stages in their AI journeys, Steven Kurtz, Principal of People Consulting at EY, recommends that instead of waiting for IT to spearhead change, HR can already start leveraging AI, even if it’s as simple as using generative AI to write job descriptions.
Please keep experimenting with it… I think that’s the way to move it forward as things are rapidly changing.”
Steven Kurtz
Principal of People Consulting at EY
How Data Is Powering Strategic Hiring
Erica Abrams and Chris King, Sourcing and Intelligence Leads at Booz Allen Hamilton, captivated the audience with their story of how standardizing candidate conversations into actionable data has revolutionized their sourcing strategies. Five years ago, their recruitment processes were hindered by limited candidate data and reliance on Excel trackers. Today, the American government and military contractor has transformed its data capture and analysis with Avature CRM.
Real-time dashboards, custom reports and standardized processes are now central to the organization’s talent acquisition strategy, enabling them to track candidate skills, interests, location preferences, qualifications and market trends. With data now deeply engrained into its culture, Booz Allen Hamilton revealed how it’s leveraging:
- Extensive data insights from an easily searchable candidate data repository to understand and optimize the candidate journey, pre- and post-application.
- Detailed market intelligence, enabling target outreach and a 64 percent growth in person records aligned to top competitors.
- In-depth analysis of sourcing activities and efforts to foster a culture of transparency and collaboration, enhance funnel and pipeline management and drive more strategic resource alignment.
Winners of our Best Presentation Award, Epic’s creative and polished presentation gave us an exciting glimpse into the future of data-informed decision-making. Maria Szychlinski, Chris Cisler and Jeff Sonntag revealed how they’ve harnessed nearly a decade of data in their Avature ATS with advanced reporting tools, including dashboards and custom reports, to empower stakeholders at all levels to make real-time, insightful decisions resulting in significant time and cost savings:
- Epic now has an easy-to-understand overview of hiring trends and recruiter activity, allowing the healthcare software company to streamline processes and optimize resource allocation.
- Using the insights gained from custom reports, Epic has reduced time in process from 60 days pre-Avature to 28 days currently, beating the industry average of 42 days.
- Extensive data on campus recruiting, including ROI of campus events and top schools by hired role can be harnessed quickly and easily.
Gina Drew, Xerox’s HR IT Manager, also demonstrated the benefits of Avature’s dynamic data model by showing how it can automate salary and wage transparency. Faced with expanded legal requirements for wage transparency across North America, the office technology pioneer needed to remove the administrative burden of publishing standardized salary ranges for its wide range of roles.
With her live demo of Avature’s Datasets, Wizards and Views, Drew offered Avature system admins a deep dive into how Xerox has leveraged multiple datasets to automate and auto-populate data. The session offered an exciting glimpse into how datasets and automation can not only save time and help organizations remain compliant across geographies but also drive better hiring outcomes — the applicant success rate improved by 50 percent once candidates were provided with more transparency.
Driving Talent Innovation With Digital Transformation
When RGP saw its legacy tech tools hindering its ability to scale, it knew a global digital transformation was needed. This sparked a multi-year journey to modernize its infrastructure with a community of cloud-based applications centered around Avature as its single source of truth.
Avature’s flexibility and configurability made it the ideal partner for this ambitious project. With built-in reporting, customizable workflows and a collaborative user community, Avature enabled RGP to take full control of its transformation. Early victories confirmed the long-term value of this strategic investment, including an estimated $65K in annual savings from AI-powered talent matching, $72K saved through automated candidate outreach and $150K saved thanks to self-service pipeline management.
RGP’s advice for organizations embarking on a similar digital transformation?
- Select the right partner.
- Manage scope and expectations carefully.
- Use a phased approach.
- Get certified.
- Tap into Avature’s community and support groups to maximize ROI and innovation potential.
Much like RGP, Deloitte embarked on a digital transformation of its own, driven by the need to modernize and streamline talent processes across its vast global operations. In 2020, Deloitte teamed up with Avature to overcome the distinctive challenges of its global scale and complexity, marking the company’s largest and most impactful transformation to date.
Avature’s highly configurable platform enabled Deloitte to standardize talent practices across business divisions and geographies, enhance self-service capabilities and provide leaders with real-time, mobile-optimized workforce data. This tailored approach has revolutionized Deloitte’s talent strategy and set the benchmark for its future vendor relationships.
Transformation in Onboarding
For nearly twenty years, IA HR has helped some of the world’s most complex organizations thrive, serving as a trusted advisor to clients in 190 countries. One such client, an expanding global holding company, was at a crossroads with its processes, technology stack and onboarding experience. Founder and Managing Principal Mark Stelzner shared how IA HR streamlined the company’s 1,374-step onboarding process, drawing on deep insights from complex people transformations.
Stelzner emphasized the importance of identifying priorities, understanding current practices and securing quick wins as key steps to driving change. He stressed that assigning ownership is essential, especially in onboarding—a process that “everyone and no one” owns. To ensure accountability, he recommended assigning onboarding responsibility to a single center of excellence (COE) while maintaining clear expectations for shared ownership across teams.
Unlocking Efficiency With Automation
Automation was another key focus at #AvatureUpfront US 2024, with leading companies showcasing how it can transform talent strategies, boost efficiency in high-volume hiring and increase focus on strategic tasks.
Before Avature, Intercare Therapy’s recruiters struggled with time-consuming manual tasks like interview scheduling, which slowed their hiring and hindered team collaboration.
In her compelling demo, Grace Taylor, Director of Talent Operations, explained how the organization leveraged automation to streamline scheduling using Avature timeslots and the Auto Scheduler. Beyond boosting collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers, automation drove some impressive efficiency gains and cost-effectiveness, including:
- A remarkable 40 percent increase in the number of monthly hires.
- A 56 percent decrease in average cost per hire.
- 750 more hires annually.
The transformative power of automation was also echoed by Unifi, the largest aviation ground handling services in North America, with over 35,000 employees in a wide range of roles at over 230 US airports. Neha Sharma, Senior Vice President of HR, explained that the organization often made tradeoffs regarding speed versus quality and candidate experience versus efficiency. Partnering with a technology provider who could overcome the challenges of high-volume recruitment was therefore vital.
By leveraging advanced automation capabilities such as automatic offer letter generation, triggering appropriate onboarding tasks and using the Avature Auto Scheduler to streamline interviews, Unifi transformed its recruitment and onboarding, achieving impressive results—a 25 percent boost in conversion rates, a 20 percent improvement in time to fill and a 5 percent reduction in new hire attrition.
Forvis Mazars also underscored the transformative role of automation during its own digital journey. Facing the complexities of a multi-company merger, Rob Wilson, HRIS Senior Administrator, shared how Avature’s flexible platform helped the company automate critical workflows to streamline employee lifecycle management, enhance compliance and minimize human error. By automating key tasks like data purging, Forvis Mazars dramatically cut administrative workloads, enhanced reporting accuracy and delivered critical insights for operational efficiency.
Elevating the Candidate Journey
In today’s competitive talent market, capturing the attention of top talent requires a standout candidate experience. Sheena Barthold, Global Product Owner and Senior Recruiting Partner at Jacobs showcased how the organization transformed its recruitment process to create a more seamless, personalized journey. By streamlining the application process – prioritizing simplicity, speed and mobile accessibility – Jacobs reduced drop-off rates and boosted engagement.
Automation played a key role, with targeted drip campaigns showcasing company culture and engaging candidates through personalized content. Jacobs also improved rejection communications, delaying automated emails to offer a more respectful experience while freeing recruiters to focus on strategic tasks. These enhancements have set Jacobs apart, creating a tailored and engaging recruitment process that nurtures lasting relationships.
National Veterinary Associates also shared a compelling story of enhancing candidate experience by harnessing data. Reannon Gonzalez, HRIS Analyst, gave us an in-depth insight into how the organization gathers candidate feedback via survey automation. Leveraging automatic workflows, forms, email templates and variants, Gonzalez’s team was able to create simple and user-friendly surveys to capture insights into every stage of the candidate journey without overwhelming applicants or recruiters.
Similarly, The University of Phoenix also wanted to enhance the candidate journey. Julie Fink, VP of Talent Management, alongside Senior Talent Acquisition Managers Kristy Geed and John Goodison, shared how AI and automation can streamline the candidate journey from pre-posting to onboarding.
Explainable, AI-powered candidate recommendations allowed their team to filter candidates quickly, and one-way video interviews increased the number of candidates reviewed per hour from one or two to up to five. Automating interview feedback ensured a consistent process for evaluating candidate performance, providing crucial insights to improve hiring outcomes.
Revolutionizing Executive Recruitment With Avature Executive Search
Finding top executive talent is a complex process that demands a tailored approach. Drawing on customer feedback, we developed Avature Executive Search and unveiled its official launch at #AvatureUpfront US 2024. This brand-new tool is designed to address the unique challenges of executive recruitment, streamlining and enhancing every aspect of recruiting for C-Suite roles, board members, senior managers and specialized positions.
Peter Dube, Global Head of Executive Search at Kimberly Clark, one of our clients who actively shaped the development of the solution, demonstrated how it empowers recruiters to conduct highly customized searches with unparalleled confidentiality and precision. What’s more, he explained how the solution fosters strong relationships with talent while presenting data seamlessly—all within a secure, executive-focused environment.
Since its inception in 2023, Avature Executive Search has delivered outstanding results for Kimberly Clark:
- Over $10 million saved in search fees.
- 50 percent of 2024 external hires sourced from Avature pipelines.
- 90 percent of hires come from high-quality sources like target companies, executive referrals and internal candidates.
- Offer acceptance time was reduced to 82 days, compared to the industry average of 100 days.
With its highly configurable features, this tool has already proven to be a game-changer for organizations seeking top-tier talent.
Maximizing Avature’s Potential
With new features released every fortnight, keeping up-to-date can be a challenge. To help our clients leverage the platform to the full, Avature specialists Corinna Birnzain and Pamela Vannucci showcased the latest features and how you can use them to optimize the end-to-end talent acquisition process for all key stakeholders.
From sourcing to onboarding, attendees discovered new ways to enhance productivity and reduce biases with features like AI-powered candidate recommendations, LinkedIn CRM Connect and blind screenings in the Hiring Manager portal.
In addition to exploring how to leverage Avature’s latest features, attendees learned how the platform’s highly configurable nature is empowering organizations to solve talent and recruitment challenges creatively. Megan Deville, Senior HRIS Analyst at Laitram, and Jeff Sonntag, Recruiting Manager at Epic, shared how their companies have gone beyond traditional use cases — streamlining processes from benefits management to offboarding.
Deville emphasized that to fully unlock Avature’s potential, continuous learning and innovation are essential. She encouraged the audience to prioritize Avature education, get certified and actively engage with the Avature community. By joining the monthly System Admin User meetup, teams can exchange ideas and stay on the cutting edge of the platform’s capabilities. Deville also urged attendees to experiment with new knowledge and solutions in their sandbox instances, fostering a mindset of innovation and discovery.
Road to the Future
At #AvatureUpfront US 2024, we unveiled a host of new features and updates set to give you a competitive edge in the coming year.
One of the most anticipated updates was the enhanced chatbot, designed to boost candidate engagement while reducing administrative tasks for recruiters. With capabilities like sending job alerts, conducting screenings and scheduling interviews, this feature promises to streamline the hiring process from start to finish.
We also introduced the Avature Copilot, a game-changing tool that will supercharge recruiter productivity by drafting job descriptions, writing emails and even generating code based on simple text inputs.
Throughout the Tech Track presentations, our experts showcased the latest AI advancements and real-world applications of Avature’s Data Lake. Attendees also learned how to build a more comprehensive and dynamic Careers Portal using our Portal Apps Builder, now featuring generative AI to personalize candidate experiences.
CEO & Founder Dimitri Boylan and Product Marketing Manager Nicolas Bader closed the conference with a comprehensive overview of Avature’s product strategy, leaving attendees excited and inspired about the platform’s future.
As always, #AvatureUpfront provided an inspiring forum for collaboration, creativity and knowledge-sharing. Attendees left Arizona energized, armed with the tools to elevate their HR strategies and set new benchmarks for excellence in human resources.
We can’t wait to see you next year!
