Customer Stories 
Summary
USI Insurance Services (USI) has grown tremendously over the past few years. With an increasing need to attract and track top talent, the insurance brokerage and consulting firm chose to consolidate its recruiting solutions into one platform for talent acquisition. Using Avature, USI’s recruiting team is nimbler, pipelines are better defined, and new decisions are data-driven.
Challenges
USI has over 7,000 employees, up from 4,400 three years ago. During that same period, the recruiting team grew from 10 to over 60 members. This growth in number of employees, geographic scope and revenue base required best-in-class, streamlined processes for strategic HR recruiting and decision-making efforts.
Recruiting Top Talent
USI’s producers (sales agents) are hard-to-fill roles that require a specialized type of recruiting. Recruiters spend many months ̶ in some cases years ̶ pursuing specific senior candidates. For roles such as these, USI often needs to nurture candidates over a longer period of time.
Reporting Hiring Results
Prior to USI’s implementation of Avature, compiling monthly stakeholder reports was a time-consuming process for the company’s recruiting team.
“Last year, I decided to make a strategic shift to a more dynamic and powerful system that could collect and interpolate more candidate information as well as recruiter activity-based data. Having more data in the system meant more intelligent reporting and improved analysis capabilities – enabling us to make informed and timely decisions."
Kim Van Orman, SVP & CHRO, USI
Strategy
USI’s growth primarily stems from the company’s business acquisition strategy and its focus on recruiting industry-leading sales professionals. Recruiters are also looking to attract leading account management, technical and operational resource talent to support the aggressive growth strategies.
Solutions
While USI considered options to integrate its candidate relationship management (CRM) and applicant tracking system (ATS), the company decided on a single solution that would satisfy all of its recruiting needs. USI went live with Avature in March 2018.
“Avature has really transformed our recruiting practice. It’s allowed us to scale our recruiting function, our recruiters are more efficient, and we are using data to deliver quick information and drive change."
Jonathan Moore, Director of Recruiting, USI
Streamlined Candidate Experience
USI divides its hires into three types: sales, leadership and staff. Each type has a different workflow designed in Avature, from targeted phone screening questions to hiring manager feedback forms.
The company also simplified its application process so that candidates were not required to jump through multiple hoops to apply. Additionally, after discovering that complicated login requirements contributed to higher applicant drop-off rates, the company eliminated a forced login. To reach digital-first candidates, the team also optimized their presence across job-hunting websites like LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor.
Improved Pipelining Processes
Although the company still receives active applications, many key hires are sourced passively. The company leveraged Avature to improve its employer branding with a revamped career site and talent communities that deliver industry and company updates.
In addition, USI’s recruiting team recently began taking advantage of new integrations through LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect.
“Having that integration is a critical timesaver in getting candidate data over from LinkedIn directly to our ATS. We can move them directly into the appropriate job folders. We can then automate workflows and outreach efforts based on that."
Daniel Morales, HRIS Manager - Recruiting Systems, USI
Ability to Pivot
Within the past year, USI has continually tweaked the solution to suit new initiatives and changing needs. Flexible technology enables the company to react to market trends and be proactive for internal business needs. Next on the list, USI is building its referral process using Avature and seeking a more geographically flexible workforce.
“Being able to shift our focus quickly, then measure it, is huge for us. We’re a very data-driven organization, so we need to be able to measure performance at all levels of our recruiting process."
Kim Van Orman, SVP & CHRO, USI
Real-Time Reporting
Leveraging real-time analytics, the USI team can now easily report on the health of their pipelines and recent successful initiatives, and they can deliver relevant, actionable information down to regional and recruiter levels. USI analyzes outreaches, phone screens, interviews and hires based on specific periods of time.
Insights for Implementation
Instead of simply going through the motions of getting the system up and running, USI’s recruiting leaders opted to learn the key features of the system, as well as best practices from their consultants and fellow customers.
From an early stage, they involved key stakeholders from the executive leadership team in addition to end-users. In the case of USI, recruiters sat in on vendor demos and took part in the decision-making process. Now, they understand the pros and cons of different systems and have been equipped to leverage Avature since the system reached their fingertips.
“You’re going to grow with this vendor over time. Being able to pick the strongest partner and the strongest tech stack is what I always consider most important in these pursuits."
Daniel Morales, HRIS Manager - Recruiting Systems, USI