| Colin Day | |
|---|---|
| Born | Colin Day |
| Alma mater | Cornell University (1997) |
| Occupation | CEO of iCIMS |
| Known for | Founder of iCIMS |
Colin Day is an American businessman. He founded iCIMS in 1999 and is the company's President and CEO. iCIMS is a provider of Software-as-a-Service talent management solutions, winner of the 2007 New Jersey Business of the Year Award and one of the fastest growing companies in North America.[1][2]
Contents |
Colin Day graduated from Cornell University with a degree in psychology.[3]
Day began his career at Comrise Technology, a New Jersey-based IT staffing firm. In his sales and business development role, Day was responsible for opening and growing branch offices. In 1998, Day completed the successful opening of Comrise Technology's Washington, D.C. office.[4][5]
In 1999, Day recognized an opportunity to bring Comrise Technology's internally developed recruiting software to the open market. At the time, Day was only 23 years of age.
Day also recognized that the future of workforce management solutions rested in the Software-as-a-Service model, and guided the re-development of the Comrise software into iRecruiter, a completely web-based applicant tracking solution.[6] Day has likened Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, to the "pay-as-you-go culture of your local water utility: you turn on the tap and pay for what you drink, and let the water company worry about the pipes and filters."[7]
In 2000, iCIMS went to market with iRecruiter, selling mainly to companies within the staffing industry. The incredibly crowded market space presented another challenge, but Day recognized a gap: there were no products targeted specifically to mid-market companies. iCIMS began to focus on mid-market companies, which Day thinks of as companies with 500 to 10,000 employees. [4]
Day espouses a "Back to the Basics" corporate philosophy, which emphasizes the value of turning less necessary system functionality into configurable options, creating an easy to use and flexible technology platform, and providing extensive customer support.[8]
In 2008, Day decided it was time to expand the company’s portfolio and offer additional talent management solutions. To reflect this change, iRecruiter was renamed the iCIMS Talent Platform. iCIMS had already added onboarding in 2007. It added employee data management and performance management in Q1 and Q2 of 2011, and recruitment marketing in March of that same year.
Today, iCIMS can power the entire talent management lifecycle in one integrated, single source code platform. Explaining the rationale behind his one platform approach, Day said, "Using the same platform for employee-data management, candidate management, customer-relationship management and more provides enormous benefits to organizations of any size. It saves HR departments valuable time, creates an increased productivity and efficiency of processes, and last, but certainly not least, it is far more economical."[9]
To date, Day has grown iCIMS to a 30+ million dollar company without ever accepting venture capital.[1]. Among their clients are Whole Foods, Enterprise Rent A Car and Amazon.com[4].
In addition to his success with iCIMS, Day also works to develop industry awareness and educate HR Professionals on how best to evaluate recruiting technology. Day has contributed to numerous publications including Information Week, Employment Marketplace,[10] Human Resource Executive Online,[9] and Human Capital Magazine.
Through iCIMS' green partner 3Degrees, Day purchases Renewable Energy Certificates. Additionally, he has implemented a corporate matching policy for donations employees make to renewable energy research facilities. Through the Nature Conservancy's Plant a Billion Trees Campaign, 25 trees are planted for every new hire at iCIMS.[11]
In 2006, Day launched iCARE, a program that empowers iCIMS employees to help the environment through volunteer and donor initiatives. iCIMS partners with eco-friendly organizations like Earth Share of New Jersey and Clean Ocean Action to engineer company-wide beach and park clean-ups.[12]
In 2006 and 2007, Day was rated one of the top 5 forward-thinking innovators in Fast Company's Fast 50 Readers Challenge.[13]
In 2009, Day was one of seven finalists in the Green Executive of the Year category in the inaugural NJBIZ Green Leadership Awards[14]