As soon as I heard Jerome Ternynck talk about creating a Hiring Success movement in his opening keynote, and reminding us that we’re all in this together, I knew that we were going to have a great two days. And I was right. This conference is about a community of recruiters, leading the effort to drive hiring success.

This week at Hiring Success 17, we were so lucky to meet and talk with hiring professionals from around the world. With over 400 thought leaders, recruiters, vendors, and hiring managers all talking about how they manage recruiting in one place, it seems like everyone had something new to talk about.

If you missed this year’s event, we hope to see you next year at Hiring Success 18, where we’ll have even more recruiting insights, professionals, and hiring strategies to take back to your organization.

For those of you who missed Hiring Success 17, or want to relive it again, here are some highlights from this year:

Mainstage Presentation Highlights:

Starting the conference off, SmartRecruiters’ CEO Jerome Ternynck spoke about the future of talent acquisition with Michael Ross, the EVP of HR of Visa. They explained the critical need to expand the talent function beyond the borders of HR. At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that hiring is a team sport. The success of a new hire in the long term takes more than just recruiters and HR. With this extra effort, retention and overall candidate experience went up. Michael Ross also showed off his Visa Payment Ring!

Lou Adler, CEO of The Adler Group dished out some great advice. He recommends “swim where the big fish swim” to find the best candidates. Also recommends that we focus on smaller sets of candidates who have performed well, as opposed to a wide net of many different candidates.

“Balancing your Marketing Mix” focused on the need that every touch point you have with a candidate is considered recruiting marketing. Just like marketing, you need to create a memorable, positive experience. And this needs to occur long before someone wants a job at your company, or long before you want them for a job.

Stacy Zapar, a Consultant, Trainer, and Speaker with Tenfold spoke about optimizing the end-to-end candidate journey. I thought she was AMAZING. She reiterated that through the candidate experience you have the opportunity to create fans for your company, even if you decline that person as a candidate they can be a great source of referrals or a perfect fit for a role in the future

Highlights From Breakout Sessions:

One of our most popular sessions spoke about diversity. The panel showed research that companies which have more diverse workforces grow faster, innovate faster, and disrupt faster. And that diversity is about more than just race or gender, but you also need a diversity of thought, background, and ability. If you don’t know your own bias, you may be missing diversity goals.

Our women in tech panel stressed that addressing the issue is more than just gender parity. It’s about speaking to the types of candidates you want to attract. The programs around gender equality recognize the value of work over the value of time spent. They also found that after increasing maternity and paternity leave durations, they were able to increase employee engagement, retention, and is a great way to attract new candidates.

Diana Ferguson, Vice President of Talent Acquisition at OppenheimerFunds spoke about “relational recruiting”, in that you should create relationships with your potential candidates long before you ever need them. Recognize the expanded network of your organization, and empower your network to be your recruiters and evangelists for you. Make everyone at your company a recruiter for you.

The Smarty Party:

Of course, I have to mention our annual Smarty Party, this year at SPiN. With table tennis matches galore, tons of networking, handshakes, smiles, and pictures, it was the event to be at this year. I took so many pictures, met so many people, and made connections that I’ll have for years.

Awards:

BEST QUALITY OF HIRE

WINNER – EQUINOX: The Best Quality of Hire award recognizes companies that put the maximal amount of thought and passion into the candidate selection process. These companies pay close attention to the effectiveness of their sourcing tactics, diversity of candidates moving into the interview rounds, and are extremely efficient from offer to hire. The winner will have a thorough and consistent hiring process that allows them to truly source, identify, interview and hire the best talent out there.

BEST PLATFORM DEPLOYMENT

WINNER – VISA: The Best Platform award recognizes that transformative talent acquisition requires the process enablement that comes from a Talent Acquisition Suite like SmartRecruiters. The award for Best Platform will recognize a company that has crisply and engagingly implemented the SmartRecruiters platform. The winner will have envisioned a future-state hiring process, rolled-out the SmartRecruiters platform to enable it, integrated internally and externally, and successfully brought all stakeholders into the fold.

BEST HIRING ENGAGEMENT

WINNER – SCALITY: Collaboration across hiring teams and especially with hiring managers has long been a hurdle for talent acquisition teams. The Best Hiring Engagement award will recognize a team that has transformed this reality by making it easy for hiring managers to engage in the recruiting and vetting process. The winner will have a controlled yet accessible process that makes it easy for hiring managers to collaborate with their hiring team. Speed of feedback, use of scorecards, and elimination of workarounds are hallmarks of success.

BEST CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

WINNER – BOSCH: Marketing to qualified candidates is the starting point of recruiting excellence. The award for Best Candidate Experience will recognize a talent acquisition team that makes it easy for high quality candidates to learn about opportunities, to engage in a way that respects them and builds the employer brand, that makes it easy for them to apply, and that facilitates clear communication throughout the recruiting process.

HIRING TEAM OF THE YEAR

WINNER – INDIGO: Quality of hire is the ultimate goal of transformative recruiting, making Hiring Team of the Year the ultimate SmartRecruiters Award. Accordingly, the award for Hiring Team of the Year will be based on the hiring score, an NPS-like measure for quality of hire. This award will recognize a talent acquisition team that has succeeded in delivering a consistently elevated hiring score and is therefore delivering on the promise of Hiring Success.

Recruiters are going to have to make a few changes over the next few years. A new generation is beginning to enter the workforce – those that have absolutely no memory of the 20th century, nope not even 1999.

Monster’s fact-filled report and survey is a must-read because as Generation Z — generally defined as those born since 1997 — enters your candidate pipeline, it’s going to look a lot different.

Sure, some workplace needs remain universal — pay and benefits, for example — but attracting young people into your organization requires seeing how their expectations differ from their parents and grandparents.

Think about it. When those born in the mid to late 1990s think of “media,” it’s always going to be social. What the heck is “non-social” media? What’s so “smart” about a smartphone? They’re all just phones.

Mobility. Purpose. Flexibility.

Compare Gen Z to their millennial predecessors and you’ll see some striking differences. According to Monster’s survey, measured against millennials, this generation is:

• 64% more willing to move for a good job opportunity
  (74% vs 45% for millennials)
• 64% more likely to believe that work has a greater purpose than earning a salary
  (74% vs 45% for millennials)
• 28% more willing to work nights and weekends for higher pay
  (58% vs. 45% for millennials)

“Must haves,” for a job?  Gen Zers roughly agree with the rest of the workforce on standards like competitive pay, a boss they respect, and health insurance, but they do put a lot more value on flexibility in changing roles within a company (32 percent vs. 25 percent across all working generations).

Digital natives demand a connected workplace

Your Gen Z employees won’t be joining you if you’re not connected. There’s no split between an “online” vs. “offline” world, so they’ll be demanding tools they see as essential in communicating with colleagues and customers:

• Smartphone: 39% vs. 25% across all working generations
• Texting: 23% vs. 13% across all working generations
• Social networking: 21% vs. 9% across all working generations

We’ve only just begun

Generation Z totals more than 60 million young people – and 77 percent are still students. As you begin to recruit from colleges and other educational institutions keep these tips in mind:

• Communicate your values: Standard job ads won’t attract younger people who value transparency. They see right through the platitudes many organizations continue to emphasize in their job postings. Who you are – your employer brand – needs to ring through loud and clear.
• Be there: Your career site – and even third-party career sites – are less effective reaching generation likely to be elsewhere. Older social channels grow passé quickly — so be prepared shift gears as discussions move elsewhere.
• Get to the point: Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. You only have a few seconds to make your point, so communicating in a fast and visual way is key to reaching a generation that’s grown up using emojis and acronyms.

As more Gen Zers enter the workforce, be ready to adapt. Fortunately tools such as SmartRecruiters makes it easy and flexible to quickly shift the way you recruit and hire.

Be sure to read the Monster report. The only question it doesn’t seem to answer is what comes after Generation Z?

We’re out of letters in the alphabet, so it will probably be an emoji.

We’re so excited to be a part of HR Tech World in London next week from March 21-22, 2017 at booth 208. It’s an amazing event with a killer lineup of speakers, and we know there’s going to be a lot of great things to do.

That’s why we’ll be in London, and we want to meet you there! More and more companies are joining the SmartRecruiters family, and we can’t wait to share them with you. In addition to that, we’ll have giveaways, speakers, and best practice talks.

If you stop by booth 208, we’ll have plenty for you to explore on the SmartRecruiters platform. We’ll also have recruiting experts to help you think about different ways to improve hiring in your company or organization.

Additionally, our CEO Jerome Ternynck will be speaking at the conference about “Big Data and The Future of Recruiting.” From his breakout description, Jerome knows that “there is a tremendous amount of data about candidates and jobs, but it is very rare that companies put the dots together and learn from that data. Jerome will share insights from SmartRecruiters’ millions of candidates, jobs, and recruiters to illustrate how Big Data can help us predict recruiting performance.”

Our customer Ubisoft will also be there to talk about how “64% of employees feel that their company is late in terms of digitalization and simultaneously [have] new digital habits that didn’t [exist] 5 years ago. In this context, [Ubisoft will show] how HR can take advantage of this digitalization and play an important role in reconciling the professional world with the personal one.”

Stop by booth 208 and you can enter our hourly Apple watch giveaway, learn more about the SmartRecruiters platform, and talk to our many hiring experts.

If you’d like to schedule an appointment, you can do that here.

And if you’re not attending HR Tech World in London, but are interested in learning more about SmartRecruiters, you can request a demo here!

The speakers at Hiring Success are some of the best Talent Professionals in the world, and we can’t wait to share every session with you. With a diverse set of speakers, panels, and learning, there will be something for everyone to take back to their company to achieve hiring success!

With over 30 sessions to attend, it’s hard to cover every single one in a blog post, but here are some of the ones we’re excited about attending ourselves!

TA Health Diagnostic Through Analytics

Erika Keough, Head of Talent Acquisition at MicroStrategy, shares the tools and processes she uses for diagnosing the health of a TA organization. With processes and data, she’s able to target improvements, and highlight the value that TA brings to the rest of the company.

Can Artificial Intelligence Find Better Talent?

Crystal Miller, CEO at Branded Strategies, will share how AI can impact and improve your recruiting efforts. She’ll lead a panel of innovators focused on how to use AI to multiply your team’s impact and increase the quality of your candidates.

Hiring Success In The Scarcity of Talent Economy

Lou Adler, CEO of The Adler Group, shares his thoughts on the Talent Economy. This includes focusing on telling stories, removing job descriptions when taking a recruiting assignment, engaging a hiring team, and so much more.

What Recruiting Trends Are Worth The Hype, and Which Are Total BS?

Matt Charney, Executive Editor at RecruitingDaily, has his finger on the pulse of recruiting trends. In this session, he’ll take an honest approach in breaking down the business speak that sometimes surrounds recruiting trends, and which ones are worth your time and budget.

Can Bots Replace Recruiters?

Join a panel of founders to discuss the prospects and limitations of adding technology and bots to your recruiting stack, and if they’ll help or hurt your current, or future, processes.

How Diverse Are Your Sourcing And Hiring Practices?

This forum will discuss the importance of diversity at companies, as well as how it can positively affect your bottom line. Our panelists will give you the information about the how, the why, and the “win” of a diverse workforce.

Hiring Success is turning out to be the ultimate recruiting event of the year, and we can’t wait to see you there. We’ve got lots of great speakers, and you can see the entire list here.

What? You don’t have a ticket yet? Well hurry over to our registration site to make sure that you get access because tickets are going fast! Don’t wait!

A recent article published at the Harvard Business Review, “Why Do Employees Stay?” examines key reasons why employers suffer high turnover, pointing out that replacing an employee costs about 21 percent of their annual pay.

That’s not so surprising. We all know (or should know) that there’s a high cost to organizations with reputations as poor employers, especially as reflected in online reviews.

But what I found very interesting is not just costs to replace an employee, but the premium employees demand from companies that don’t demonstrate that they value their teams.

The HBR article written by Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, director of research at Glassdoor Economic Research, acknowledges that many employees leave a company to move into a new role along a logical career path. Yet his research shows that online reviews are a major factor in the decision to seek a role in a new company or where they are already employed.

As he explains, “We found that raising a company’s overall rating on Glassdoor by one star (on a one-to-five scale) was associated with a four-percentage-point higher chance that employees would stay for their next role.”

Employer brand value measured in dollars

Given that employees naturally want to move into more responsible positions as their careers progress, it makes sense to maintain a valuable employer brand to boost the chances that team members won’t be as susceptible to recruitment from outside the organization.

As Dr. Chamberlain notes, even a one percent improvement in the odds that employees will stay “can translate into hundreds of retained employees at a 10,000-person employer.”

The article includes a link to a Glassdoor research report (PDF), “Why Online Reviews Matter for Employer Brand.” In it, there’s data from a study including how much of a raise it would take for an employee to accept an offer from another company for a similar job.

• For a company with a negative employer review, it would take an average raise of about 55 to 60 percent to create that incentive.
• For a company with a positive employer review, that average raise would only need to be about 35 to 40 percent.

Consider the difference between being required to pay 55 percent more vs. 40 percent more to acquire new talent already earning $100,000 per year. That’s $15,000 just for one employee!

Multiply that by hundreds of hires and you can see how essential it is to protect your valuable employer brand and that online reviews really do make a difference.

This month, we’ve got three more excellent reasons to checkout the SmartRecruiters Marketplace. With more integrations and partners added every month, it’s the perfect way to make SmartRecruiters your recruiting operating system. Of course, if you don’t see your preferred vendor yet, you can easily request it either through your vendor or through us!

For the month of March 2017, we added many new partners, including America’s Job Exchange, BetterCompany, and Ideal. For more information on these great partners, read below:

America’s Job Exchange (AJE)

“America’s Job Exchange (AJE) is a leading destination for employers seeking best–in–class solutions for diversity recruitment and OFCCP compliance.”

BetterCompany

“BetterCompany Interview provides candidates a truly informed view of what it’s like to work at the particular company they’re interested in by providing a safe, private place for a company’s candidates to anonymously interact with employees chosen to serve as anonymous advocates.”

Ideal

“Ideal uses artificial intelligence to screen resumes, uncover past applicants for new roles and initiate candidate outreach. Ideal’s AI can instantly screen and shortlist new candidates, uncover strong past candidates who are a great fit for a new role. Shortlisted candidates can be imported into SmartRecruiters.”

And those are our partners for March. Are there any vendors you use today that you want to add? Then head over to our marketplace, and add your favorite HR tech vendor!

69% of Americans would turn down a job offer from a company with a bad reputation — even if they were unemployed. That’s almost 7 rejections for every 10 offers you extend! Clearly, to get the best candidates, you need to sell your job and company as you would sell your product.

The big question is – how do you make candidates beg to be a part of your company? Easy: an employer brand strategy.

On March 2nd, 2017 from 10-11 AM PST, SmartRecruiters and The Muse are teaming up to show you exactly how to create the employer branding of your dreams.

We’ll be covering topics like:

• How and why you need to conduct an audit of your public facing candidate experience.

• Why telling a story is much better than speaking to job requirements.

• What the right candidate targeting looks like for your organization.

With Kris Osborne, Head of Talent Acquisition at SmartRecruiters, and Lauren Roberts, Talent Acquisition Manager at The Muse, we guarantee you’ll learn something new.

Impress your team with how you’ll upgrade your employer brand after this webinar, and finally attract the candidates that you’ve been searching for.

Register now

Donnie is integral to our Marketplace partners here at SmartRecruiters. As Donnie says, he’s a “worker of small miracles”, but to us, he handles all the operations around growing and maintaining our Marketplace. If you interact with a job board or an integration, he’s the man at the top!

I recently took some time out to speak with Donnie about his role here at SmartRecruiters, and why he loves working for the company that strives to reinvent recruiting:

TS: Thanks for taking this time out of your busy day Donnie. Talk to me about how you found SmartRecruiters.

DS: I think my story is similar to Eden [Monet’s] experience. I was applying for jobs, and saw that some of those jobs were using SmartRecruiters. I was really impressed by how easy it was to apply, and thought “hey, if they’re making my life so easy, maybe I could do the same others.”

So I went to the careers page to look for openings, applied, and here I am!

TS: Cool! We’re happy to have you. So then you got the offer, and you accepted it. There was something that attracted you to SmartRecruiters. Can you talk about that?

DS: For me, it was a lot of things. Number one is the social mission: we’re here to help recruiters find great candidates, but also make it easier for candidates to apply. There’s a big opportunity there, and I’m glad to be a part of it.

After that? Probably the company size. We’re kind of in that sweet spot where we’re not a full blown corporation with thousands of people, but not a small startup of 10 people. We’re a growing company, and it’s cool to be a part of that ride.

And the people are awesome. I love the people I work with everyday, including the crew out in Poland. No matter which office I work at, I always feel like I’m in a friendly home with people who are making cool stuff.

TS: Yeah, I can understand that feeling. Going back a second, what stood out to you about our interview process?

DS: It was weird, because it wasn’t too casual, but also not overly formal, know what I mean? I don’t know… it was a good balance. People were very friendly, and I clicked with them right away. As soon as I had my interview with SmartRecruiters, I knew exactly what to expect from the role, and my position within it.

TS: Awesome. I was in your interview right?

DS: Yep! We talked about languages.

TS: That we did! I wish I was as good as you were with foreign languages. Anyway, just one final question here: what do you like about SmartRecruiters now that you’re here?

DS: Going to what I said before, it’s people, people, people. This place has the best coworkers I’ve ever had. It’s a really great place, and I enjoy coming to work everyday. And also, I’ve always felt support around my personal and professional development. Who I am now is a different, and more skilled person than I was when I came in.

What happens when you encourage your entire software development team to experiment out in the open? Well, that’s what we’ve asked our engineering team in Krakow, Poland to do. Our team is comprised of some of the best developers out there, who love experimenting, hacking, and creating new things to not only drive their own projects, but build some of the coolest features for your SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite.

That’s why we started “Smart Up”, our developer blog: it’s where our engineering team can share their thoughts on the state of software engineering. We know that their experiences will not only shape our thoughts on product, but might help you in discovering the secrets in your own development as well.

Here’s a summary of the insights we’ve shared so far:

Amazon Alexa: 5 Tips To Hear Before Starting Development (In NodeJs)

Artur, one of our software engineers, explains what he learned when building an Amazon Echo application. He found the Echo development interesting as “AI assistants seem to be a virgin territory,” and ripe for new innovations in software engineering. The Amazon Echo has exploded in popularity, and now is a great time to explore its development.

Devoxx Belgium 2016

Wojtek, our Senior Software Developer went to Devoxx Belgium, the biggest Java community conference in Europe. In this article, he shares what he liked about the conference. There was a lot of discussion around Machine Learning, Artificial intelligence, Security, Drone Technology, and more.

What Is A Framework?

Przemek works on our Frontend technology team, and wrote a piece of how to a select a framework that’s right for you (hint: popularity isn’t the first piece of criteria). Why reinvent the wheel when a decent framework is ready for you to build your software on top of it? Plus, frameworks give developers a common language to communicate problems they’re looking to solve.

We Tried Groovy EE – And What We Have Learned From It

Artur is back again with an explanation of Groovy: a Java Virtual Machine Language that first appeared in 2003. In Internet years, that’s practically ancient! So why use it now for full fledged development? It has it’s caveats and traps, but for building microservices, it can be useful.

Alert Or ActionSheet Style?

When trying to get your users to progress forward on an action, what works better? An alert or an ActionSheet? Tomek, one of our iOS Developers and Software Architects, discusses how and when to use each based on Human Interface Guidelines, popular discussions, and experience.

Our developers are working hard everyday to create the best hiring experience out there, and the trials, experiments, and experiences are shared here to help you and your team develop your own great experiments and products. What development technologies are important to you and your team? Let us know in the comments!

Hiring Success 17 is just two months away and if you haven’t registered yet, now is the perfect time to do so. If you’re looking to grow your recruiting skills and learn what’s happening in the world of recruiting, we’ll have the best speakers there to show you the way.

That being said, here are three MORE speakers we’re announcing to help you and your team reach hiring success in the next year:

Diana Ferguson, VP Talent Acquisition, OppenheimerFunds.

Relational Recruiting

Diana Ferguson will speak on how to build a talent attraction machine from scratch. OppenheimerFunds built a program to attract and engage talent before they had an open position, and she’ll share the details.

Matt Charney, Executive Editor, Recruiting Daily

Beyond The Buzzwords

Matt Charney is a powerful voice in the trends and traditions of recruiting. He’ll set the record straight on which hiring efforts are worth your time, and which ones are fluffy recruiting buzz words.

Marilyn Miller, Chief People Officer, Alfresco

Real World Application of SmartRecruiters Analytics

Marilyn Miller from Alfresco Software will share how her team was able to create a culture of hiring with actionable Key Performance Indicators and Analytics.

And we’re not done yet! Check out the latest agenda to see the full list of sessions available. We’ll be announcing more speakers to make sure that there will be something for everyone who attends. For last week’s announced speakers, click here.

And don’t forget: Early bird pricing ends on February 10th, so it’s your last chance to save $500 off your ticket!

We can’t wait to see you at Hiring Success 17!