iCIMS made big news this week by acquiring the best-of-breed recruiting software TextRecruit. TextRecruit is a program that uses text messaging, live chat, and artificial intelligence to help companies hire faster.

One of my 2018 predictions was that ‘Text’ messaging for recruiting would go mainstream. When you look at most corporate TA tech stacks the one missing component, surprisingly, is still the lack of integrated text messaging capability. Sure your recruiters are sending text messages to some candidates through their personal smartphones, but all that data is lost.

Companies like TextRecruit and GoCanvas.io are offering organizations the ability to text message candidates, from an integrated platform that is much more effective than single text messages from smartphones. These newer text recruiting platforms allow organizations to message many candidates at once, and ensure this data from both sides is captured and usable for the future.

Capturing both sides of a text conversation between organization and candidate should be a big deal for organizations who take compliance seriously.

So, what does this merger of iCIMS and TextRecruit mean?

Right now, it will be mostly business as usual. iCIMS will keep selling their recruiting platform with TextRecruit being an integration partner in the iCIMS marketplace, and TextRecruit just got some giant inside information on selling to iCIMS current and former clients.

In the future, it’s fairly easy to see that iCIMS will probably take advantage of developing fully integrated text messaging and screening into their main platform. Within the next three years all organizations, large and small, will be using some sort of messaging capability to connect and maintain a connection with candidates. Email isn’t dead, but it surely isn’t the primary means of connection for GenZ and Millennials.

iCIMS is really the first best-of-breed unchained HCM talent platform on the market to go all in on messaging. Some ATSs in the market have text messaging capability, but nothing close to what TextRecruit is capable of, so this is a huge win for iCIMS. Full enterprise HCMs with talent modules, for the most part, aren’t even close to having this capability, and it might be years before they can get there.

iCIMS will still have aggressive competition from Greenhouse, Jobvite, Lever, SmartRecruiters, etc., who are all building much more robust messaging capabilities with their ATS systems. iCIMS true advantage from buying TextRecruit will be on the enterprise side of the market where Taleo, Silkroad, Workday, etc. are now even farther behind iCIMS from a capability standpoint.

2018 should be an interesting year for merger and acquisition within the TA-Technology space as the five years prior to this year the amount of money invested into TA technology has been off the charts. You have a ton of small TA tech companies that are ripe for purchase and a bunch of ATS providers looking to build out a full function Recruiting end-to-end platform.