The Recruiter's Monday Morning
Picture this: a recruiter at Delaware North opens their inbox on a Monday morning during peak hiring season. Dozens of new candidates have been approved overnight. Each one needs a contract — but not just any contract. Each offer letter has different clauses depending on the role, location, award classification, and employment type. Remuneration has to be calculated based on specific award rates, allowances, and loadings. The right recruiter needs to review it. The candidate needs to sign it. And iCIMS needs to be updated at every step.
Before DocQ, this entire process was manual. Contracts were assembled by hand, clause by clause, with recruiters toggling between spreadsheets, templates, and the hiring management system. Remuneration calculations were performed manually and typed into each contract individually. The finished document was shared for internal review via email, and candidates signed using external tools that had no connection to the ATS.
It worked — technically. But at Delaware North's scale, hiring tens of thousands of professionals across stadiums, airports, resorts, and national parks, "technically works" was no longer enough.
Why the Old Process Couldn't Scale
Delaware North's contracts aren't simple. A single offer letter can contain dozens of clause sections, each with multiple versions depending on the candidate's circumstances. Award classifications, penalty rates, allowance structures, and work condition clauses all vary. Getting the right combination for each candidate was an exercise in careful manual assembly — and one where a single wrong clause version could create a compliance risk.
Remuneration added another layer of complexity. Pay rates weren't just copied from a table — they had to be calculated based on parameters from the hiring system, then inserted into the correct contract fields. These calculations were performed by hand, creating opportunities for error in every offer.
The review process was equally fragmented. Different contracts required different reviewers. Routing documents to the right recruiter meant knowing who handled which role type, then manually sharing the document and waiting for a response. If the assigned recruiter wasn't available, the contract sat in limbo.
And then there was signing. Candidates used external tools to sign their offers — tools that weren't integrated with Delaware North's hiring system. This meant the recruiter had to manually check whether a candidate had signed, then manually update iCIMS to reflect the new status. Signed contracts were stored inconsistently, and producing one during an audit meant searching through email threads and disconnected file shares.
Deployment: Configuration, Not Code
DocQ was deployed to replace this entire workflow. The integration between iCIMS and DocQ was configured using DocQ's no-code iPaaS connectors — no custom development required.
When a candidate reaches the contract stage in iCIMS, DocQ automatically receives the candidate's parameters: role, location, award classification, employment type, and the recruiter responsible for review. These parameters drive everything that follows.
The contract is assembled automatically. DocQ's clause library stores every clause version, and the decision engine tests each incoming parameter to determine which clauses belong in this specific contract. Remuneration calculations are performed automatically based on the fetched parameters, and the results are both inserted into the contract text and pushed back to iCIMS.
The speed of deployment was remarkable. Because DocQ's platform is configuration-driven rather than code-driven, the team was able to go from kickoff to live contracts in weeks. No custom development. No lengthy integration testing cycles. Just configuration, validation, and go-live.
The Moment It Clicked
The real shift happened when the recruitment team realised they were no longer assembling contracts at all. The queue of candidates waiting for offer letters — which used to grow during busy periods — was gone. Not because hiring slowed down, but because DocQ was generating contracts faster than candidates could be approved.
Recruiters who previously spent hours each day on contract assembly were now spending minutes reviewing auto-generated documents. Their role had shifted from document production to quality assurance — checking the small percentage of contracts that needed human attention rather than building every single one from scratch.
For the first time, seasonal hiring surges didn't mean overtime for the HR operations team. The platform handled the volume increase through configuration, not additional headcount.
What Changed Day-to-Day
For Delaware North's recruitment teams, the transformation was immediate and practical:
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No more manual contract assembly. Contracts are generated automatically from iCIMS data, with the correct clauses, calculations, and formatting applied every time.
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Automatic recruiter routing. DocQ identifies the correct reviewer from iCIMS parameters and delivers the contract for review. If the recruiter isn't found among existing users, a predefined fallback handles it.
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Branded candidate signing. Candidates receive contracts via DocQ Signatures — a branded, mobile-friendly experience that builds trust and accelerates time-to-sign.
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Real-time ATS sync. Every contract milestone — generation, review, signature, completion — automatically updates the candidate's status in iCIMS. No manual toggling between systems.
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Secure, accessible storage. Signed contracts are stored in DocQ with full version history, automatically attached to the candidate's iCIMS profile, and emailed to the candidate.
Scaling Without Growing the Team
After the initial deployment proved successful, Delaware North expanded the automation across additional contract types and hiring categories. The platform's configurable clause library and decision engine made this straightforward — each new contract variation is a configuration exercise, not a development project.
In 14 months, Delaware North automated over 5,175 contracts. The time saved — approximately 2,156 hours of administrative effort — translated to roughly 1.2 FTEs of capacity freed up for higher-value recruitment work. Annual cost savings reached approximately AUD 187,000 in HR and admin costs alone.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. The deeper impact is in error reduction (no outdated clauses, no calculation mistakes), brand consistency (every contract formatted correctly, every time), and compliance confidence (ISO 27001 certified, SSO enforced, all data hosted in Australia).
Delaware North now has a hiring process that scales with demand — not with headcount. And for a hospitality company managing tens of thousands of employees across seasonal peaks and troughs, that's the kind of operational advantage that compounds year after year.
