Fed up with human inefficiencies, this former recruiter used her math skills to automate a very human process, and save a ton of time in doing so.

Aida Fazylova used her background in mathematics and data science to sketch out a new approach to automate as much of the recruiting workflow as possible using artificial intelligence, automation and chatbot technology. The result, XOR.ai, is a customizable AI chatbot and workflow automation to engage, screen and hire candidates 33 percent faster than the normal hiring process, providing extended analytics about the candidates, including predicted employee lifetime value. With XOR, the recruitment process is completely automated, from the moment the candidate engages, right up to making a job offer.

Now, headquartered in Austin, Texas, with major customers in 15 countries around the world, XOR is the emerging leader in Human Resource/ Talent Acquisition process automation, and we sat down with Founder and CEO Aida Fayzlova (picture below explaining her amazing product at Hiring Success 18 Europe), to hear why this is so important.

Why is your product a necessary tool for any SmartRecruiters customer?

Our product combines the latest in Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, automation, and chatbot capabilities, eliminating the most time-intensive parts of the recruitment process. It’s available on your website 24/7, and can communicate in over 100 languages. XOR moves candidates through the funnel even while you sleep. Our AI will learn from your recruiters, hiring managers and candidates who come to your site, answering questions and gathering information, all to offer predictive analytics regarding future candidates and employees.

Briefly, on the back of a cocktail napkin, how does your product work?

Your candidate experience journey is elevated. XOR is with your candidates every step of the way, communicating conversations and data back to your hiring team in the ATS.

What does your product do that can’t be replicated?

Currently, XOR supports 103 languages and has global hiring capabilities. Our product is also known for its sophisticated scheduling functions.

How does your product help make the hiring process as easy as possible?

XOR automates 60 percent of repetitive administrative tasks that your recruiters are handling every day, which allows more free time for your team to focus on more imperative, strategic tasks.  

At what stage of growth are you, and where is that relative to how big you want to be?

We’re at a healthy stage of growth with a great headquarters in Austin, and major customers in over 15 countries around the world.

How does your product compliment the SmartRecruiters TAS – philosophically and technologically?

XOR is considered a one-stop solution for candidate experience. Providing self-scheduled meetings with recruiters, it’s available 24/7 to answer questions for candidates and walks applicants step-by-step through the entire application process. XOR will keep your candidates continuously engaged and send status updates until the position has been filled. Our software works the front end of the ATS for your candidates, automating a great deal of work for your recruiters and is proven to recruit 33 percent faster.

What led you to partner with SmartRecruiters?

SmartRecruiters has the same sweet spot we do. Most SmartRecruiters clients are enterprise customers and high-volume recruiters, which is really interesting for us. The simplicity and the beauty of the ATS is elegant and modern. Designing products and platforms in that same vein is why we chose to partner with SmartRecruiters.

How long did it take to become integrated into the SR marketplace, and what were the obstacles or adjustments in that process?

Our integration into the marketplace only took about a week, with one person, which was a pretty quick turnaround. We avoided any obstacles through preparation and research. There are some obstacles in getting the API to speak to each other but once we integrated it’s been working great.

How long would it take for the average SR user to implement and take full advantage of your product?

Set up will take about 3-6 weeks, most of this time will be spent with XOR’s customer success team, working closely with TA pros, learning the knowledge piece of the chatbot, going over screening scenarios and linking calendars to chatbots to self-schedule candidates. Our team wants to ensure your chatbot is customized to your recruiters’ needs and goals to be as successful as possible in their recruiting efforts.

What would you say to a company unsure about joining the SR marketplace?

SmartRecruiters marketplace is one of the best on the market. It’s full of incredible partners which gives you a great reach to SmartRecruiters customer base and vice versa. Great events like Hiring Success are organized to focus on bringing as much business to their partners as possible, and during those events, you are able to start building relationships with businesses and close a lot of deals.

What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition and where do you fit into it?

We see it as a rise in conversational interface. Right now, most web interactions are form based. Forms are great, but there are better, more customer-friendly interfaces. Your friends meet you and they want to have a conversation, not fill forms, right? The same thing happens online. Users want to engage, ask questions, and have a personalized experience, not be stuck with one-size-fits-all forms.

SmartRecruiters’ first conference in Europe kicked off today in Berlin, with founder and CEO Jerome Ternynck setting the tone for two days of innovation, inclusion, and hiring success.

SmartRecruiters’ latest Hiring Success conference was inaugurated this morning by CEO Jerome Ternynck, who took the stage at the Glashaus, a former industrial space on the Spree river in East Berlin, promptly at 9:30am.

“Hiring success is a truly universal thing,” his voice reverberated throughout the hall, to 400 attendees, “and you are all here representing over 200 organizations from all over the world.

“All you recruiters, TA leaders, innovators, system owners, optimizers,” listed Ternynck, “all of us who’ve dedicated your career to helping companies find talent, to help people find jobs—we are critical to companies’ success.”

As HR Tech gets more sophisticated by the day, so does our community become truly global, as evidenced by the diverse crowds at conferences like this one. Plugging into the future of recruiting over the first of two session-packed days, speakers represented stalwart European players like Deutsche Bahn, Zalando and Lidl, as well as institutions as notorious as CERN and Humboldt University—represented by information-scientist duo, Dr. Juliane Stiller and Dr. Violeta Trkulja, linked hiring to one of the great issues of our age: forced migration.

Not everyone knows what it means to leave behind the life you know and rebuild everything, from the ground up, in an alien city. The scientists did a deep-dive with guests from Bayer and a Deutsche Banker, who is a Syrian refugee himself, into the programs available to refugees now, and how your company could start building its own systems to help integrate into the workforce talented people who need and deserve our help.

“Employers are insecure about the skills and language abilities of refugees,” said Stiller, “and applicants have a tough time knowing the systems for applying. Employers can help by accepting applications without cover letters, offer mobile recruiting, and embracing diversity.”

Another essential topic covered was how technology has changed when and where we work, and to assure this new world of remote work runs smoothly, Beat Buhlmann, one of the few people in the world with a doctorate related to managing virtual teams, the current GM for Evernote laid out the benefits of employing a remote workforce and relayed how to address the challenges created by managing off-site teams, from both a culture and a tech perspective. “It may sound simple, but if a candidate isn’t comfortable with video conferencing or sharing their screen,” he said via Zoom, presumably to prove a metatextual point, “it’s going to be a nightmare.”

To close out the day, Robindro Ullah, TA consultant and author, and Artur Skowronski, software engineer, Virtus Lab, ask the audience: What do Tinder, Amazon, and Alexa have in common?

Answer: they were repurposed by corporate recruiters to source quality talent. The keynote speakers shared some of the most innovative recruiting campaigns ever put together, and led an interactive workshop challenging left-brain functions to raise the bar on workplace creativity.

All this boils down to the premise that brought everyone together, from thousands of miles apart, for these two days: that hiring is the frontline of business success, and the more companies understand that, the better things will be for everyone.

“Who you hire defines your company more than any other activity,” stresses Ternynck. “It defines your outcomes as well as your culture. It defines your success as well as your failures. Who you hire defines you as a leader.”

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and check back with the Hiring Success Journal for lots of #Hire18 insights coming soon.

It’s the hottest HR topic not directly related to tech. But to achieve true diversity and inclusion at work we must overcome pesky traits like unconscious bias, and to assure that reality, there is Natalie Mellin.

Natalie Mellin has gained experience from innovative tech companies like Spotify and King, and has played a central role in creating workplace awareness around diversity and inclusion over the last decade. She is one of the pioneers who helped reshape the conversation, and behavioral science inspires everything she does. With cross-functional research, she creates practical tools like process nudges and strategies to help both individuals and organizations make an impact.

With her vast experience from working both in-house and as well as consultancy, she is known as an influencer, dynamic speaker and we are honored to welcome her to Hiring Success 18 Europe in Berlin, September 19-21.

What does hiring success mean to you?

We need to change our hiring structures and processes to make better hires, which in the end, creates better and more sustainable business success. For me, this means identifying where you have the most bias in your process, redesign the steps to mitigate this, and cultivate diversity and inclusion.

How have attitudes towards diversity and inclusion changed over the last while?

Despite years of diversity training and anti-discrimination policies, one could argue we’ve not come very far. In fact, the World Economic Forum reports that the gender gap is widening in their 2017 report. McKinsey’s also reports in their 2017 Women in the Workplace study, that women represent only 18 percent of all c-suite roles. That number compares to 12 percent for men of color and only 3 percent for women of color. This is despite the fact that McKinsey’s 2018 report, ‘Delivering through Diversity’ reinforced the link between diversity and positive company financial performance.

Our brain gets hit by 11 million signals at any given moment in time. But we can only consciously process 40 of those. This means a tremendous amount of signals get processed using prior knowledge and patterns. This is unconscious bias. We need to focus on nudging our unconscious minds to mitigate more of the racist, sexist, and such behavior, and I believe we can do that through behavioral economics. Another way of saying it, my view has changed in the terms that I no longer believe we can train away our bias. We need to design it away.

What do you tell companies the biggest advantage of diversion and inclusivity are?

Besides the fact that it’s the right thing to do, it makes business sense.

1. Driving business success and profits – a McKinsey report on public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 33 percent more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 21 percent more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
2. Drive innovation – Leaders who give diverse voices equal airtime are nearly twice as likely as others to unleash value-driving insights, and employees in a ‘speak up’ culture are 3.5 times as likely to contribute their full innovative potential. HBR
3. Understanding our consumers and essentially making us smarter – In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: non-homogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different than you challenges your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking, which sharpens performance.

What kind of resistance do you get from organizations, and what do you do to get on board?

Nowadays it’s mostly about ‘how’. Something I completely understand, but we have years and years of research showing that diversity is correlated with both profitability and added value. Even so, for some companies or some executives, even the most compelling data seems to require additional rounds of convincing. Probably shouldn’t surprise me either. after all, research has proven facts and data don’t actually change people’s minds. But I found this quote the other day and thought it was quite good.

‘The house burned in front of them but they wanted the data to prove it. That is the audacity and ridiculousness of making the business case: convincing one of the obvious. If the smoke doesn’t alarm you, the fire certainly should.’ – Bernard Coleman III

What are behavioral economics?

I will again borrow the words of a much wiser person; “…the best way to think about behavioral economics is in contrast to standard economics. In standard economics, we think — we assume — that people are perfectly rational, which means that they always behave in the best way for them. They can compute everything, they can calculate everything and they can make, always, consistently, the right decisions. In contrast, behavioral economics doesn’t assume much about people. Instead of starting from the idea that people are perfectly rational, we say we just don’t know, but let’s check it out. So, what we do is we put people in different situations to check how they actually make decisions. And what we find in those experiments is that people often don’t behave as you would expect from a perfectly rational perspective. So, in essence, it’s an empirical and non-idealistic way to start looking at human behavior. And because we find that people behave differently than expected, often irrationally, it also leads often to different conclusions about how companies should be created, what the government should do, and, of course, what individuals should be doing.”  – Dan Ariely

Was there a eureka moment that made you want to address diversity and inclusion full-time? How did that happen?

Well, my mom tells me that I was questioning gender equality as a young kid. Then I took gender studies at university. This was an eye-opener in many ways. I found out about intersectionality, that we are more than one thing and that the power structure today will hand me a completely different experience as a white, middle-class woman compared to a woman of color from a lower socio-economic background. After being inspired by behavioral economics, I got angrier that we weren’t making enough progress in the space of diversity & inclusion in companies. And I thought everyone was tackling it wrong. I couldn’t understand why no one was using cross-functional research to make progress faster.  So I started to get involved. First, it was a project, then it was 10-20 percent of my job, until it took over all of the time I spent at work.

What is one thing even well-intentioned organizations get wrong about diversity and inclusion?

Many companies believe it’s too hard a problem to solve, or they focus too much on how to ‘speak’ to our conscious minds when trying to create change. I hope that more companies will learn from behavioral economics and embed D&I philosophy into the business strategy. It works best when a CEO truly thinks about D&I as a strategy for business success.

What about starting your own firm, how did that come about, and what can you do differently on your own that you could have with your previous employers?

It grew primarily organically. I started getting requests a few years ago, but sadly didn’t always have the ability to help while working in-house full time. This spring I decided that I needed a new challenge, and in the near future, I want to develop a free tool to help companies who may not have the funds to drive change. It’s a very exciting time. I get requests right and left. This is key as we will never succeed here as one, we need to create community and drive change on a bigger scale. That’s what I hope to do with my company.

Get to know one of our most anticipated Hiring Success 18 Europe speakers, an author and advisor to Chancellor Angela Merkel, before she takes the stage next week in Berlin

The bar’s been raised higher than normal in here. Long-legged stools spindle the space between floor and bevelled plank, where Diana Kinnert rests her elbow, leaning forward to sip her lemonade.

In baggy, pineapple-patterned shorts and a floppy Pied-Piper hat, she doesn’t much stand out in this part of Berlin, a cobbled constellation of overnight oats, avocado toast, and working-holiday baristas who forbid sugar in the five-euro cold brew. Clock her on the street anywhere near this cafe, Diana’s just another urban child of the Millennial Left, looking like she’s off to her shift in a vintage clothing shop tonight, not flying to London to speak at a youth conference the next morning.

Those people, down the end of the bar there, they’d never imagine this spritely 27-year-old has worked the nerve-center of the German government, or that she holds the ear of long-serving chancellor Angela Merkel. But being underestimated has always worked in Diana’s favor. Even ten years ago, completing her bachelor’s degree in political science, no one saw her coming.

“I’d be writing all these essays and papers, but my teacher was the only one reading them,” she remembers. “I knew if I wanted an actual audience for my ideas, I had to be strategic, work from within the system. I had to join one of the mainstream political parties.”

So in 2008, the 17-year-old from the mid-sized western city of Wuppertal became a card-carrying member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Traditionally right-of-center, the party currently leading Germany’s minority government, appears, at least post-Trump, more Left, with Merkel siding with Team Trudeau and marching on with Macron. And these conflicts of CDU macro-optics are palimpsest to those inherent in Diana Kinnert.

The more you learn about her politics, her city, and herself, the more a state of contradiction seems natural, normal, even necessary. Growing up with a Polish father and Filipina mother in small-town Germany, a dualist outlook came naturally. She champions feminism, euthanasia and refugee rights. She also appears at numerous Conservative events – by far the youngest person of any party prominence – wearing a side-spun baseball cap and clothing casual if not a little unkempt, and flashing a Jesus tattoo. Yet she says she’s “never felt like I don’t belong in this party.”

In 2015, this ambitious, mixed-race Merkel Youth became the youngest-ever Bundestag chief of staff, reporting to Vice President of Parliament Peter Hintze until his death in 2016. When not fully occupied by office duties, she’d observe school tours of the Reichstag, and realized there was much to be done to engage young people – future voters – in ways that were relevant to them. Diana had a knack for bridging gaps both generational and ideological. Sometimes they overlapped, sometimes they crashed together. She’d sit in on meetings with senior party officials, all several decades her seniors, “who’d tell me they ‘wouldn’t know how to approach a gay issue, let alone a gay person, and I had to tell them, ‘Well, you’ve been sitting next to one this whole time’.”

How many progressive cred-boxes can one twenty-something check? Immigrant background/ biracial/female/feminist, and homosexual? She’s a Lefty’s dream, repping just about every group on 2018s Most Marginalized list. Those preoccupied with identity politics, political correctness, “staying in your own lane” and such, have no idea what to make of Diana Kinnert the Conservative CDU activist. 

A contradiction in point: how could a gay person have so long ago devoted themselves to a government that didn’t legalize same-sex marriage until last year?

“I know,” she says, rolling her eyes, “even hyper-Catholic countries like Mexico and Ireland solved this problem years ago.”

Her justification is, that operating from within a party, even one so long opposed to gay marriage, was the only way to affect real change. She was biding her time. Hard to tell whether this is ethical truth or easily justified hindsight.

“I’m not in those rooms of power because I’m smarter than anyone,” says Diana. “I’m there because I can reframe the message from that room to people outside, people like me.”

As such, Kinnert sees herself as a conduit, and is conscious that being vaunted for her racial background and gender identity could be taken as tokenism, a test-run on future votebanks. And having had Diana positioned out front for the CDU does fit with Merkel’s propensities to sway with the winds of whatever’s blowing at the time.

“It’s not me in particular, it’s a matter of under-representation,” she says. And Berlin seems like the right city to be wrestling with this right now. For all the talk of her city being the Coolest City on Earth, when compared with London, Toronto, or New York, of issues related to gender, diversity or multiculturalism, Berlin has a decade or more to make up for (probably a big part of why Diana has been, within her party and without, forefronted to this degree).

“I think everybody has a story, but because my categories are, like, the urban person, the digital person, the young person, the lesbian person, my storytelling is even more important.”

Not just storytelling that would make a good election campaign, she means actual books –  as much as the two can be detangled when it comes to her. Most political memoirs are written by retired leaders after decades of service, but the social vacuum filled by Diana Kinnert is such that she’s already published a book, For the Future I See Black – black being the CDU party color – already in its second printing, with a follow-up commissioned and in the works.

“The second book is about technology and values, the grey areas between different narratives of young people,” she says, but beyond the buzzwords and the hashtag outrage, Diana can talk reasons and consequence behind some essential, however unsexy, political realities. No surprise to hear, even her national labor theory is non-partisan.

“Germany is strong thanks to its workers’ unions,” she says. “For centuries, everything’s been about stability. We’re risk-averse and change happens slowly. We are, in essence, a conservative country, and now our companies have to transform, thanks to globalization, digitization, etc. We’ve been winning the championship on exports. Our products are really good, but we’re not there yet with the sharing economy, and compared to markets like Hamburg, or Munich, everything in the countryside is 500 times slower.”

But she still finds links between rural supply chains and urban ideology. “All these organic fruits and vegetables that progressive urban hipsters love? They all come from farms that are owned, more often than not, by very conservative people.” Urban, rural; liberal, conservative. “You can’t separate the two.”

Diana understands it’s difficult for some to square her circle, don’t get her wrong; to confound is to bring discomfort. Given the number of “progressive” social mores we now take for granted – especially in anything-goes Berlin – it still takes time for even the least squeaky bureaucracies to catch up. In this sense, Diana Kinnert could be considered progressivist, a Trojan Horse wheeled into Fortress Europe.

“The right-wing populists, in their simple narratives, will tell you who’s guilty for this that or the other and why that’s making things difficult for you – ” she’s animated, but contained, as she sucks more air than lemonade through her straw, seeing on her lockscreen it’s time to head to the airport “ – only when we have a diverse representation in all political parties can we make politics good for everyone.”

If that’s her opening line for tomorrow’s conference, it’s as good as any.

Recruiting’s digital revolution has been a boon for job seekers around the world, and now students and recent graduates have a tool designed to connect them with the best employers possible.

Your first job out of college probably felt like the most important event of your life, and for many, looking back, it was as pivotal as if felt back them. Imagine there’d been tech to tailor-match your skills to prospective employers looking for students and recent grads just like you? Well, let Melissa Weir, Head of B2B Marketing at WayUp tell you a few things about what WayUp can do to help you with that.

Check out WayUp and others on the SmartRecruiters marketplace!

What was the inspiration behind WayUp?

When Liz Wessel, co-founder and CEO of WayUp, was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, she was a campus ambassador for Anheuser-Busch, where the company asked if she could help recruit mechanical engineering candidates. Liz was floored that such a big company would reach out to a sophomore, and she realized there was a huge opportunity to help companies recruit straight from college campuses.

What were some issues in the hiring process you thought needed changing?

The college campus recruiting model wasn’t efficient. There were only a handful of people in career services, tasked with supporting thousands of students ready to find an internship, or their first job after graduation. This unbalanced system doesn’t provide students with resources to find jobs suited to their interests, or to discover new opportunities.

Companies can’t visit every college every year, and when they get the chance, it’s usually for career fairs attended by a small portion of the student population, which makes it difficult to target and source for specific roles, especially in STEM and Finance. There had to be a better way to reach, recruit, engage and hire quality early-career candidates.

Why is WayUp a necessary tool for SmartRecruiters customers?

For over 5 million early-career professionals, WayUp is the go-to platform to explore job and internship opportunities, receive advice, and be discovered by employers. Top companies from startups to Fortune 500s use WayUp’s platform to reach, recruit, and engage early-career talent. WayUp students and recent graduates represent over 6,600 campuses in the US, and WayUp’s candidates are currently growing at 35,000 new students and recent graduates per week.

So how does it actually work?

Employers post targeted job listings, invite candidates to apply, and directly message them, all on one platform. We also offer industry-leading employment branding, to help employers build awareness among Gen Z and Millennials.

What does WayUp do that can’t be done through normal job boards?

Where traditional recruiting platforms may focus on years of experience, certifications, and professional networks, WayUp allows students to showcase their personal and professional experience, interests, and areas of study.

For employers, traditional job boards and recruiting marketplaces lead with quantity over quality. They simply don’t satisfy the recruiting funnel for students and recent graduates. WayUp bridges that gap, leading to the highest hiring rate among all early-career recruiting platforms.

How does WayUp make the hiring process as easy as possible?

For every job you post on WayUp, you can apply filters to guarantee only the most appropriate candidates can see the job and apply for it. Employers can directly message and invite individuals to apply.

What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition?

We feel strongly that opportunity belongs to all. People should never be limited by their economic status, race, sexual orientation, gender, who they know, where they went to school, or where they’re from.

Meet the company out to prove there aren’t “bad employers” or “bad candidates”, there’s just “bad fit.”   

Using a proprietary psychometric algorithm, Good&Co helps companies increase employee engagement, reduce turnover and make better hiring decisions, all the while empowering millions of employees to make smarter, more informed career decisions. Good&Co was founded in 2012, is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and is part of the SmartRecruiters Marketplace family. We sat down with the senior product manager, Jay Jernigan to dig a bit deeper about what makes this quirky new startup tick.

What is the inspiration behind the company?

Good&Co was built around the idea that there are no bad employees or bad companies – just bad fit. Our free apps have helped companies, managers, and employees from every industry discover their strengths and learn how to build stronger, more productive workplace relationships.

What makes team Identity so important?

Hiring mistakes due to poor culture fit have huge financial and social implications. It’s demoralizing for employees, and incredibly expensive for employers. We designed our tools to help companies seamlessly add the right talent to high-performing teams without sacrificing productivity or sabotaging chemistry. That’s why we’re on a mission to create happier, more productive workplaces – a solution that not only helps people, but eventually impacts companies’ bottom lines. Our approach aims to fundamentally fix the human capital crisis by empowering both job seekers and companies with the information they need to make smarter, more informed job-matching decisions.

On a cocktail napkin – how does Good&Co work?

Our tools leverage psychometrics research, big data, and AI to enable companies and managers to make better-informed hiring and infrastructure decisions by identifying organizational strengths, based on company culture, to boost employee engagement and reduce turnover. Good&Co’s Proprietary Psychometric Algorithm (PPA) leverages over 30 years of research in career psychometrics and psychological analysis to provide quantified, science-backed culture insights for more than 10,000 companies worldwide. In short, we’ve discovered what elevates a candidate and a team from good to great.

Ok that’s at least both sides of a cocktail napkin. What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition and Onboarding?

The quantification and understanding of human capital is currently one of the least efficient in our economy. As software and social connectedness transform the old world, the inevitable outcome will be global, efficient markets for human capital. That’s because creating value, now more than ever, depends on people’s talents and a deeper understanding of each other.

At Good&Co, we’re taking big steps in that direction: using influences of big data, quantified self, psychology, and social networks, we are creating inherently valuable data assets through authentic engagement. We’re creating a people-driven system to define, diagnose and evolve environments with purpose.

How can workplace integration of new hires make or break recruitment?

We know the process of hiring can be time-consuming, and hiring the wrong candidate can be costly and hinder success in today’s fast-paced work environment. Good&Co’s Teamwork Pro gives a better understanding of a candidate’s fit within your teams, with your hiring managers, and provides valuable engagement tools to ensure that your employees are happy in the workplace.

Why is Good&Co a necessary tool for a SmartRecruiters customer?

Candidate reports provide insights around eight distinct factors of personality, showing how a candidate might interact with others, their leadership style, and their approach to work. These insights compliment a standard resume, and help you choose the best candidates to shortlist, interview, and hire in today’s candidate-driven market.

How does Good&Co compliment the SmartRecruiters TAS?

Our reports offer key candidate insights to sift, sort, and match candidates quickly for your roles, saving you time compared to other assessment providers.  

What have been some benefits of partnering with SR?

The flexibility of the SmartRecruiters TAS provides recruiters and hiring managers the ability to introduce our Candidate Reports automatically at any stage of the recruitment process. Our reports offer sample interview questions tailored to the candidate’s individual insights, so you may want to request a candidate quiz prior to a phone screen, the first interview, or when a candidate is placed in your shortlist.  The flexibility of SmartRecruiters means you can tailor the timing to best suit your needs.

How long would it take for the average existing SR user to implement?

The process to add our reports to a candidate’s profile is quite simple – just select our complimentary assessment from the assessment menu. The quiz takes less than 20 minutes to complete, and most candidates are done within 48 hours. Your results are delivered immediately after the quiz is completed.

What would you say to a recent SmartRecruiters customer unsure about further integration into the SR Marketplace?

SmartRecruiters has a strong partner support team in place that can help answer any questions you might have, the API documentation is clear, well documented, and flexible to suit your needs.  

New state privacy laws mean doing business in California will come with new levels of compliance. To avoid complications – and hefty fines – follow this simple guide.

The first half of fiscal 2018 was festooned with the lead balloon of the General Data Privacy Regulations. An EU initiative years in the making, GDPR aimed to protect European citizens’ personal data online, and as any international company would include a European employee, customer, or contractor somewhere along the way, failure to comply with Brussels’ legislation would result in the kind of fines that could put your lights out for good.

Like the fidgety lead-up to Y2K, there were prognosticators and doomsayers, but aside from a few lawsuits aimed at big game trophies like Facebook or Google, GDPR’s implication date of May 25th passed mostly without incident.

Now, just when you thought it was safe to kick back and congratulate yourself on your glocal business being GDPR compliant, some yahoo in California’s gone and added another layer to this digital tiramisu.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a bill passed as AB-375, means that a business collecting, storing or selling any Californians’ personal information will have to fall in line to this new legislation. We’ve got until January 1st, 2020, to get this done.

As it was with GDPR, firms have some time to lawyer-up and get CCPA compliant to avoid fines currently set at $7500. This amount, as well as what the act will actually enforce could change between now and activation day, the underlying premise remains: Legislators “are concerned that misuse of personal data may have ‘devastating’ effects for individuals, including financial fraud, identity theft, unnecessary costs to personal time and finances, destruction of property, harassment, reputational damage, emotional stress, and even potential physical harm.”

Providing the kind of legal advice market innovators will need to assure compliance, international law firm Cooley has put together an FAQ on the subject, starting with who will need to get what straight in the next two years.

If you are a company with annual gross revenues over $25 million; if you obtain personal information from over 50,000 California residents, households or devices per year; or if selling any combination of this information accounts for more than 50 percent of your annual revenue; best pay attention and call Cooley.

Hey, my business isn’t based in California, this doesn’t apply to me.

Although there are grey areas state-by-state, if your business is online and you have even one customer from California, best to consider yourself as on the hook.

Ok then. Define customer.

California law would define customers as Individuals in the state for other than temporary or transitory purposes, and Individuals domiciled in the state who are outside the state for a temporary or transitory purpose. But since this definition is not limited to residents that buy goods and services, “consumers” would also include others, like, for example, an organization’s employees residing in California.

Fine. Now what does the CCPA define as “personal information”?

Well, a lot. There are the obvious things like your real name, postal address, IP address, email address, social security number, or driver’s license number. But it also encompasses commercial information, including records of personal property, products or services purchased, obtained or considered, or other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies. And of course, your geolocation data. See a more comprehensive list in the Cooley FAQ.

But my company already went through GDPR and passed with flying colors.

Congratulations on that. Must have been no small feat. However, you will have to address the CCPA framework separately. Obtaining consent, for example, is a different process, and EU regulatory enforcement has, to date, been limited. In the US we expect more rigorous regulatory oversight. As such, to reduce clear and present risk, CCPA compliance will necessarily be more involved and precise. You’re not out of the woods yet.

And if one were to just ignore it?

Those found to be in violation would be subject to penalties pursuant to a civil action by the California attorney general, as set forth under Section 17206 of California’s Business and Professions Code. This provides for penalties up to $2,500 per violation, and a company found to have violated the CCPA intentionally would be liable for up to $7,500.  

So if I take care of all this now I’m good.

Given this law being passed so quickly, and the number of companies that would be affected already kicking up a fuss, the details will have to be monitored as January 2020 approaches. Stay tuned as we report new details as they come to light.

You’ve already heard the buzz around Berlin’s venture capital swarm. Now meet one of the fastest movers in the hive.

MoBerries is a Berlin-based HR AI technology company, founded in 2015. CEO Terence Hielscher developed the idea while working for one of both Europe and Southeast Asia’s predominant Venture Funds, having observed the value in establishing a shared talent pool for their portfolio network. After only six months, over 50 portfolio companies were actively sharing and referring candidates within the network. Together with his best friend from University, Mo Moubarak, and a trusted colleague from within the Venture Capital Fund that built StudiVZ, Andre Zayarni, MoBerries introduced itself to the German market.

Why is your product a necessary tool for any SmartRecruiters customer?

The fact that you are using SmartRecruiters means that your company is in a state of growth. MoBerries is today’s largest shared-talent platform and a new candidate sourcing channel for SR customers with over 10,000 weekly candidate referrals. The partner network consists of leading DAX and digital companies, as well as venture capital funds.

Briefly, on the back of a cocktail napkin, how does your product work?

MoBerries sources actively searching candidates to be placed in open positions in real time.

What does your product do that can’t be replicated?

The network effect. Every partner company contributes to an exclusive candidate pool, enabling partners to access quality applicants when they need them most. Over 10,000 referred and active candidates join the platform each week. Profiling candidates and companies alike helps drive matches based on a reinforced learning approach, derived from live interactions on the platform. The AI further uses neural network methodologies to source faster, by taking into account your feedback in order to identify the perfect company/candidate match.  This is especially helpful for non-traditional roles where not all candidates have the prerequisite skills clearly represented in their CV.

How does your product help make the hiring process as easy as possible?

Traditional recruitment consists of three steps: Posting a position to job boards, screening candidates, and hiring the most suitable one. MoBerries eliminates the first two steps for its partners, and our platform identifies where talent can best unlock their potential based on predictive models centered around their interactions within the job market. Essentially, we are a scalable sports agent leveraging a technology to get people where they need to go, as fast as possible.

At what stage of growth are you, and where is that relative to how big you want to be?

MoBerries is rapidly expanding, already working with leading DAX companies, VC funds, and the majority of digital companies in Germany, as well as other European countries. Next step for us: Expansion to the US. We are driven by the mission to be the world’s leading shared talent platform.

How does your product compliment the SmartRecruiters TAS – philosophically and technologically?

SmartRecruiters and MoBerries share the same values, which are reflected in our talent acquisition (TA) strategies. Both of us see the market as an ecosystem within which we need to adapt. We are in the business of people, and people, as well as the greater marketplace, are in a constant state of change. To be able to keep up, sourcing tools & applicant tracking systems (ATS) alike need to be flexible and able to evolve to meet new market norms.  

Offering a smart and effective solution is not merely about finding candidates a dream job, but how technology can help them build their dream career. To ensure integrity, both solutions work in parallel towards a transparent, honest and feedback driven marketplace.

What led you to partner with SmartRecruiters?

HR is becoming more and more consolidated, and the best providers find ways to come together to form a recruiting stack. A company should be about how to integrate these various services seamlessly and provide the most robust HR experience. As a sourcing channel, we integrated because SmartRecruiters is all about the managing of talent and efforts of a company partner whereas we are about the analysis and optimization of talent sourcing. Not to sound cliche, but it really is all about people.

How long did it take to become integrated into the SR marketplace, and what were the obstacles or adjustments in that process?

From all the integrations we’ve run, this was one of the easiest. It took approximately 60 days.

What were some benefits of partnering with SR?

The main benefit is the consolidation of two tools for the end customers. By integrating our systems we provide a more seamless experience to hiring managers.

How long would it take for the average existing SR user to implement and take full advantage of your product?

The integration only takes seconds. You will have to be a member of MoBerries in order to take advantage of this integration and connect both accounts. For anyone interested in trying MoBerries we encourage you to reach out to us and your SR account manager. Once contacted you simply click a button under your MoBerries integration tab within your dashboard and you are ready to get started.

What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition and how do you fit into it?

As the recruitment market starts to move at a more rapid pace, the onset of AI-based technologies are intended to work alongside humans in order to enable HR managers to focus their attention on the element of better marketing their firm and lasering in on the best fitting talent.

HR managers are becoming more like sports agents, understanding the importance of constantly reinventing the way they market their team, culture & vision. A technology stack allows them to focus on what they do best, and that is selling the brand to perspectives.

We want our B2B partners to hire faster by focusing their efforts on selling to the most suitable talent. We continue to build our technology stack around creating value for all parties, which in the end allows us to offer a smart and efficient online platform.

This recruiter wants you to know: he’s not an external headhunter, and he’s not afraid of being “tech-augmented”, either.

As if HR Tech wasn’t moving fast enough, hiring for an industry that’s changing equally quickly is no small task. Ahead of his imparting wisdom in these shaky media times at Hiring Success 18 Europe, we sat down with Sergej Zimpel, senior recruiter at ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE, founder of Purple Squirrel Society for HR, and editor-in-chief of the blog for hardcore recruiters, Dinosaurs Will Die, to pick his brain.

What does hiring success mean to you?

As a recruiter, you are somewhat in the middle between hiring managers and candidates. For me, success means both sides are happy with the outcome.

Why recruiting?

I did a couple of internships as a student, and my first job in HR involved recruiting. I liked it so much that I became a recruiter in my job after that.

In hiring for your specific industry, what is the most unique, or most specific, skill you need a candidate to have?

The digital industry is very dynamic, so candidates have to be very tech-savvy, open to change,  and curious about new stuff.

What has changed most about your job since you came on board, for better and for worse?

I got even more responsibility, which is definitely a good thing! 

How many people do you hire in a year?

About 50-70.

Do you feel what you do is given the value and credibility it deserves?

I think we have to work for a good standing with our hiring managers and managing directors. I think I can say that most managing directors I work for understood the crucial role of recruiting.

What is one thing people tend to misunderstand about what you do?

Some people think I’m an external headhunter. And some people think recruiters have to be really tough and mean in interviews.

What is one thing you’re proud of having accomplished in your current role?

My network! It feels good when I can fill a role two weeks after the briefing because I have the right candidates in my network.

You are obviously not a Luddite when it comes to tech. What can you do now, thanks to tech, that you couldn’t before?

I think tech helps us with a lot of boring admin stuff – and I hope it will help us with even more automatization of administrative tasks in the future (interview coordination, I am looking at you!). Another field where tech helps us is of course direct search. I can’t imagine how I would find a Senior Javascript Developer without Linkedin and Github.

What are you most looking forward to as tech plays a bigger role in recruiting?

I like the concept of a “(tech) augmented recruiter” – I think/hope that tech will be able to support us with admin tasks and longlists, then we can focus even more on networking in the future.

AI, good or bad?

Good! Recruiters should be the first movers with these technologies.

What started as a misadventure to grandma’s house turned into the car-sharing app that’s taken over the EU. Frédéric Mazzella tells us how he did it.

Have you ever looked beside you on the highway and noticed another lone driver and thought, “What a waste?” That’s what happened to Frédéric Mazzella while riding with his sister, and it happened again and again, as car after car whizzed by with no passengers, and those countless unfilled seats began to haunt him.

So this three-time Masters holder and researcher for NASA put his mind behind the issue of how to put those untapped vacancies to work. The result? BlaBlaCar, the ride-sharing app that goes beyond city jaunts to take, otherwise carless urbanites, to the farthest reaches of the sprawling countryside, and the EU is smitten. The company has expanded to 22 markets and 60 million people in its 12-year lifespan with no sign of slowing down – unless it’s to pick up another passenger.

We sit down – stationarily – with Founder and President Mazella to discuss how he got to where is today, and what advice he has for growing companies.

(Catch Freddy at Hiring Success 18 September 19-20th in Berlin!)

The idea for your company came with a bit of a eureka moment, didn’t it?

The idea dates back to Christmas 2003, when I wanted to get home to my family in the French countryside. I had no car and the trains were full. As a last resort, my sister made a detour to pick me up. When driving down on the highway, I noticed that the roads were full of mostly empty cars. That was my eureka moment: I realized that there were millions of available seats, except they weren’t in trains, they were in cars. If only we could match drivers with passengers heading the same way! From that moment onwards I have been on a mission to build a people-powered transport solution, where drivers can offer their empty seats and passengers share the cost of the ride.

How many people does your company employ now? How long did it take to reach this size and what are your future growth plans?

We are 350 globally today, serving 22 markets. We used to double the hiring figures each year, and we are still hiring, but as of now, we’re concentrating both on key market growth and tech talents.

How have your hiring needs changed over the years?

Talent acquisition is key to our growth, especially in the scale-up phase where we needed to hire the best people, and fast, to reach a sustainable growth and expand our business. We are now hiring for more senior profiles, whether in terms of management or on key specialties (market, technology, etc…)

What were the first positions you needed to fill? Which ones were the easiest/most difficult?

As we were building our marketplace, we needed tech/developers, but also marketing and communications talents. Today, tech talents remain the most difficult ones to hire as they are scarce, and we see a global talent war.

How important should hiring be to a CEO?

In the early years, convincing complementary talents to join the adventure and help you turn the vision into reality is key. A huge amount of my energy went into finding the right co-Founders, and bringing great talent onboard. Second, as your company grows, you also want to retain a strong culture to go in the right direction, and keep everyone motivated with a strong sense of purpose.

What would be your advice to your younger self-starting the company?

Find strong business partners with skills complementary to yours, as you can’t be great at everything. Hire people better than you in their area of expertise, and when hiring, never compromise on culture for skill.