How Appian Increased Job Applications & Reduced Sourcing Time By 75%

Recruiting teams are constantly under pressure to turn up the heat – every recruitment campaign has to hit home; every passive candidate has to be reached. Some companies have cracked the code on how to compete with the biggest brands on the market, even in the current conditions: Appian is one of them.

Appian, founded in 1999, is a low code automation platform headquartered in Washington, DC. With 1500 employees, the tech leader has enjoyed continuous growth, particularly since its IPO in 2017. With offices around the globe, the company is forecasting a lot of growth in 2021. Sitting at the core of enacting its growth plan is the company’s talent acquisition team.

“We take an extremely strategic approach to talent acquisition and ensure that our programs and campaigns directly align with our business goals. With aggressive growth plans, in an ultra-competitive market, it’s critical that we align our strategies, tactics and results with the business in order to compete to win.” 
Chris Fitzner, Recruitment Marketing Manager at Appian

In order to keep up with its continued growth, Appian relies on Beamery as central in providing a fast, personalized and engaging experience to reach, engage with, and hire, incredible candidates.

Beamery Helps Appian Move Quickly, Personalize, & Inject Data into Talent Acquisition

Appian competes for top talent alongside tech and consumer brand heavyweights, making it critical for them to creatively attract and engage with candidates quickly, and communicate the value of working at Appian, what the culture is like, and paint a picture of how potential candidates can make an impact.

The Employer Brand team at Appian was established 3 years ago to create a sister function (Recruitment Marketing) to their Talent Acquisition team (Sales). In recognizing the need to creatively and quickly attract talent, Fitzner was brought on to transform and build a formal recruitment marketing strategy.

Today, Appian’s recruitment marketing efforts are focused on three key pillars as they seek to find, connect with, and hire, the best talent:

1. Data & Strategy: drive brand awareness and qualified candidates for Appian through a single view of talent data across multiple touch points.
2. Growth & Acquisition: connect with quality candidates in target markets where Appian will grow organically or by acquisition.
3. Nurture & Convert: create a compelling candidate journey that encourages candidates to act – from awareness to consideration, to talent community sign up, to application.

“Today’s talent market is insane, with top brands competing for the attention of, and eventual hire of, top talent,” commented Fitzner. “Pair that with our incredible growth trajectory, and it was clear we needed a better, faster way to automate our recruitment marketing programs to ensure we were better able to nurture candidates, automate processes and personalize the experience – to turn interested candidates into future hires.”

“Beamery allows us to do just that – and provide a single view of talent data across multiple touch points, which injects speed into our process and allows us to provide a higher level of personalization, as well as deliver the insights we need to create compelling candidate experiences.”

Beamery’s Talent Operating System helps Appian to ultimately recruit more proactively, engage pipelines of qualified talent ahead of business demand, and drive more efficient and effective processes.

Fitzner noted, “As we know, it can take several touchpoints and interactions with a brand before a candidate takes an action to apply to a job, making how we interact with candidates during that time absolutely critical in their decision to apply and potentially join our organization. Beamery is pivotal to how we’re able to do that.”

He continued, “Beamery allows us to reach the right candidates with the right message through highly personalized and automated nurture campaigns. With Beamery, we have more confidence in our data as well, with a central repository of candidate information that our sourcers and recruiters can access, allowing us to move quickly and confidently as we support Appian’s growth.”

Appian Reports Results & ROI

With Beamery serving a key role in its talent acquisition tech stack, Appian reports impressive results, including a 75% reduction in sourcing time*. Fitzner said, “Prior to Beamery, to launch a largescale sourcing campaign would have taken several weeks. With Beamery, we are now able to stand up a large campaign in a week’s time, activate the landing pages needed to drive traffic, and ultimately impact our time to fill.”

For example, Appian recently opened an office in Seville, Spain. This was a new talent market for the tech leader, and they needed to launch a highly targeted, segmented and educational campaign to introduce potential candidates to Appian, introduce team members, and extol the benefits of joining the team.

Fitzner’s team was able to stand up a targeted recruiting campaign including landing pages, advertising, promotions and personalized employee stories in a matter of days, driving more than 1200 traffic sessions to the campaign with 77 qualified candidates (those who made it past the phone screen) put forth to hiring managers.

“Essentially this showcases how Beamery allows our talent team to be more agile and responsive to the business,” said Fitzner. “We needed to expand our footprint in an emerging market with technical talent in a matter of a few weeks. With Beamery, we were able to meet that need quickly and attract candidates within days.”

“Beamery helps us quickly pivot with the business and respond to changing market conditions.”

Appian also reports the ability to better execute large candidate nurture programs with Beamery. Given that there is a period of time from the first candidate interaction with its brand to one’s start date, it is critical for Appian to maintain strong candidate relationships and provide valuable touch points and content, throughout.

Fitzner commented, “With Beamery, we now have one central location for all candidate data, which allows us to activate campaigns quickly and connect with the right candidates at the right time. Before, our Talent Acquisition team was leveraging a variety of sourcing channels with different workflows. With the amount of tools used there was no centralized repository of data. Now, our Talent team is armed with all of the information they need in one system, creating a source of truth and providing our candidates an exceptional experience.”

Lastly, with candidate data centralized on one platform through Beamery, Appian reports the ability for sourcers to create highly specialized candidate pools and activate recruiting campaigns on their own. For example, sourcers recently created a three-point messaging campaign to candidates to fill sales, customer success and engineering positions. With Beamery, they were able to quickly create segmented landing pages, execute on this campaign, target the right candidates with the right messages, and fill the pipe with qualified candidates.

But the success doesn’t stop there. The Employer Brand team has grown, adding another member to the recruitment marketing function. And the team has streamlined its recruiting tech stack and integrated them in order to ensure success across the talent function - and help underpin the tech leader’s growth.

At the end of 2020, Appian saw:

• 48% Increase in Career Site Traffic YoY
• 59% Increase in Social Media Engagements
• 34% Increase in Total Applicants

Fitzner concluded, “Beamery has made an impact on all those numbers and we look forward to our continued partnership as we help underpin Appian’s continued growth in the global tech marketplace.”

* From 4 weeks to 1 week