Customer Stories 
Summary
Epic has inspired fellow customers for over seven years, using Avature to drive innovative and creative problem-solving. Their talent team showcases their recruitment ROI by crafting a clear, holistic strategy across talent acquisition and talent management while leveraging reporting capabilities to track the performance of each initiative.
“Since implementing Avature, we have been able to improve the candidate experience, improve the happiness of our recruiters, and save time and money.”
Maria Szychlinski
Recruiting and Onboarding Lead at Epic
About Epic
As a 12,000-employee software company, Epic has high expectations of the technology it uses to drive business value and deliver the experience candidates want and the high-volume functionality its recruiting team needs.
With a small and centralized team, Avature’s capabilities were able to fulfill their need for efficiency and autonomy. Epic leverages Avature’s automation and configurability, combined with a well-defined recruiting strategy, to meet ambitious hiring goals and report on its undeniably epic recruitment ROI.
“Through automation in Avature, we’ve been able to make sure our staff is doing impactful work, actually making decisions on candidates instead of just clicking buttons. We’re leveraging workflow actions in Avature to handle the mundane, process-oriented work.”
Jeff Sonntag
Avature Team Lead at Epic
One-Platform, Endless Talent Strategies
When evaluating their previous systems, they noticed their legacy ATS wasn’t giving the company the functionality and flexibility it needed to engage and hire.
In addition, not having a CRM meant that they didn’t have the sourcing capabilities to efficiently create, contact and engage talent pipelines. It was time for Epic to reconsider their overall strategy and the technology with which they were enabling it.
Epic started its journey with Avature with a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve for all the stakeholders involved in the talent acquisition process. One of their initial goals was to eliminate siloed systems and embrace a holistic approach to its talent suite.
Since rolling out this holistic approach, Epic has achieved impressive results, including:
- Over 150,000 applications received per year.
- Between 3,000 and 4,000 openings filled.
- Hiring two to three percent of the candidates that apply.
- A 31 percent reduction in candidate time in process.
Epic now uses Avature as its single source of truth, centralizing information that was previously scattered across countless spreadsheets and its legacy ATS. Let’s examine each stage of their strategy.
Proactive Sourcing with CRM
Investing in workflows has allowed Epic to re-engage with many candidates while nurturing those relationships over time. Building this process into Avature has significantly reduced time and decreased the cost per hire.
“One of our biggest takeaways here is focusing on investment in your workflows. The time and energy spent taking a step back and thinking not about how to fit your current workflows into Avature, but rather starting with a blank slate and considering “how do we want this to work” almost always ends up leading to ROI.”
Jeff Sonntag
Avature Team Lead at Epic
Another of the initiatives they’ve implemented is their Talent Community. It’s a vital source of talent that was lacking in their legacy system. Interested candidates can create a profile through a user-friendly portal.
This strategy gives recruiters a constant stream of candidates to consider and with whom they can re-engage for newly opened roles. By leveraging automation, they link candidates to specific pipelines based on answers to knock-out questions.
When a new role opens, recruiters now go to the CRM first. This saves time when finding and engaging candidates unfamiliar with the organization, as well as money spent on sourcing initiatives and job postings. Since going live with the CRM, Epic has hired over 1,600 employees directly sourced from Avature, comprising 11 percent of their total hires.
Engaging Hiring Experience with ATS
Epic was seeking an ATS that could help its small team meet its high-volume hiring needs. In the past, rejected candidates that might be a good fit elsewhere in the organization would get lost. But Avature ATS enables the team to keep track of previous applicants, facilitating future searches.
Implementing Avature has allowed the team at Epic to consistently reach their goals, fill roles rapidly and reply to every candidate that applies, due to the high-touch approach they envisioned.
Since going live, they have:
- Conducted final interviews with over 28,000 candidates.
- Hired almost 15,000 people from all 50 states domestically and 24 countries internationally.
- Filled 230 unique roles for 10 business entities, including international offices.
Seamless Campus Recruiting
Focusing on entry-level jobs and early talent, campus recruiting is another central sourcing channel for Epic, as they attend hundreds of events each year. As a tech company headquartered in Wisconsin, they’re constantly competing for talent with Silicon Valley companies.
With this in mind, their team started rethinking how campus recruitment efforts could benefit from a revamp. They wanted a low barrier to entry for students, enabling them to apply directly to any open positions or join their talent community.
Epic currently provides a 90-second application experience. Students can use iPads to share basic information in a form specially designed for this use case or apply by scanning a QR code on their phones, which links them directly to the event folder in Avature.
By digitalizing and automating its processes, Epic has:
- Saved over $11,000 per year. The team no longer has to bring resumes home, scan them, have a vendor import and match them to existing applications. This post-event process used to take two weeks to complete.
- Saved time. Currently, when a candidate applies for a job at a career fair with a printed resume, on-site recruiters can take a picture of the resume and save it directly to the candidate profile in Avature. Qualified candidates are invited to schedule a phone interview within three hours of visiting the booth.
Digitalized Onboarding
“After a future employee has accepted an offer with us, we direct them to Avature’s onboarding portal. It has all the information that the future employee may need about their offer, about their benefits and about relocating to the Madison, Wisconsin area. We use all of that to help set the stage for another powerful moment on their first day of employment with us through a personalized experience.”
– Jeff Sonntag, Avature Team Lead at Epic
Over the years, Epic extended its one-platform approach to include the onboarding process. Some benefits of completely digitalizing the experience for new hires include:
- $15,000 saved per year in postage and materials by integrating with DocuSign and delivering a paper-free experience with electronic I-9s.
- Over one hundred hours saved per year coordinating relocation and temporary housing.
- Over 60 hours of printing time and 130+ hours of assembly time saved by eliminating employee handbooks.
You can learn more about how Epic has improved its onboarding process and driven ROI in this story.
Recruitment ROI Best Practices
Epic has some final advice for large organizations looking to drive tangible results from their recruiting strategy and promote value to their talent journey:
- Understand the value of taking the time to pause and reassess your strategies. Audit your processes continuously and identify improvement opportunities before implementing changes.
- Lean on the platform to yield reportable results at every point of contact with candidates.
- Implement a one-platform approach. It will empower you to provide the candidate experience your organization envisions while eliminating siloes and centralizing data.
“Overall, building this process into Avature has significantly reduced the time spent and decreased our cost per hire.”
Jeff Sonntag
Avature Team Lead at Epic
A mindset for continuous improvement combined with the platform’s configurability has enabled Epic to bring its evolving vision to life and maximize its Avature ROI. As for what the future holds, the sky’s the limit.
“In the future, we continue to plan to use Avature as the backbone of our entire recruiting process, which means that we’ll continue to innovate, we’ll continue to implement new features and we’ll continue to constantly improve the system. This way, our recruiters will be more successful and use the system in the best possible way, and our candidates will have a positive and seamless experience when they apply to Epic.”
Maria Szychlinski
Recruiting and Onboarding Lead at Epic
