Fairview Replaced iCIMS CRM with Hellora: Lifting Candidate Reply Rates from Under 3% to 49%

The Problem

Outreach from iCIMS CRM got replies under 3% – so recruiters stopped using their own database entirely

Fairview runs on iCIMS, layered with Infor, and was transitioning parts of its tech stack toward Workday. Across their team, three problems kept surfacing:

Low reply rates. Outreach campaigns felt robotic and impersonal, sent from generic addresses that frequently landed in spam or promotions folders instead of a recruiter's inbox. Reply rates sat under 3%.

Poor search. iCIMS's keyword-based search couldn't flex to natural language, missed strong matches when terminology didn't line up exactly (e.g. RN vs. registered nurse), and had no way to reliably filter out current employees from search results.

Fragmented, manual workflows. Texting lived in a separate tool (TextRecruit), disconnected from the CRM – meaning recruiters had to bounce between systems, and the system had no way to learn or improve over time.

The result: recruiters increasingly bypassed the CRM altogether, defaulting to Indeed and LinkedIn Recruiter instead of searching the thousands of candidates Fairview already had in its own database.

Solution with Hellora

Hellora went live in June on top of iCIMS and Infor – no IT work required as it was aready integrated

The rollout focused on three things:

Natural language search across Fairview's full candidate database, removing the keyword-matching guesswork and automatically excluding current employees.

AI-personalized, multi-channel outreach – combining email and text in a single sequence, sent from each recruiter's own inbox and dedicated number rather than a shared, generic address.

Daily candidate surfacing, so recruiters no longer had to actively search – Eve delivered matching candidates for open reqs directly, reducing reliance on Indeed.

The Results

In 3 months, reply rates hit 49% and 78% of candidates submitted to hiring managers were hired

Reply rates went from under 3% on iCIMS to 49% with Hellora – a more than 16x lift – at a median reply time of one day.

Of the 395 candidates contacted, 193 replied, 95 expressed interest, and 41 applied. Nine were advanced to hiring managers.

Seven of those nine received offers, and all seven accepted – meaning 78% of every candidate put in front of a hiring manager was hired. Of the 41 candidates who applied, 17% were hired.

The seven hires were registered nurses and nursing support roles, plus one Life Enrichment Director – all sourced from candidates Fairview already owned, with no new job postings and no additional job board spend.