How one school is utilizing HR tech to hire incredible teachers that truly make a difference.

America’s public schools face many challenges, from funding to keeping up with rapid innovation in other industries. Today, the number of teachers is dwindling, with enrollment in US teaching programs falling by 15 percent between 2006 and 2015, leaving many to wonder how schools will find quality educators to prepare the next generation for future challenges.

With the literal future at stake, many schools are stepping up to the challenge by harnessing tech to find the next crop of inspirational educators. One such institution achieving success in rocky terrain is Uncommon Schools, the public charter school whose handy use of tech successfully scaled their employer brand and advertising reach to attract, select, and hire educators to staff all of their 54 locations in six cities across the Northeast.

The results speak for themselves, with 99 percent of Uncommon School’s students being accepted into four-year colleges since 1997, and 76 percent of students earning—or are on track to earn—a bachelor’s degree. This is an amazing feat, considering that 82 percent of the students they serve come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. 

We caught up with Amanda Craft, Senior Director of Recruitment for Uncommon schools, at Hiring Success 19 to discover the recruiting strategy that finds teachers who produce such outstanding results. 

If you want to learn more about Hiring Success EU – Amsterdam, September 10-11, 2019, check out our agenda here!

What are the challenges that your schools face when hiring teachers?

Right now we’re in the midst of a national teacher shortage. There are more teachers leaving the profession than entering, so we have to be both creative and competitive to bring in the top talent and get them excited about coming to our schools.

Diversity is also very important to us, especially since 95 percent of our students are black or Latino, and 85 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.  According to a John Hopkins University study, students of color who have at least one teacher of color in elementary schools are more likely to pursue a college education. So, we place a strong emphasis on recruiting people of color to join our team and lead our schools. It is super important to us that our students see themselves reflected in the people who teach, lead, and guide them. I am proud to say that over 50 percent of our teachers and staff are people of color, compared to a national average of just 18 percent. 

How do you navigate these issues?

We’re doing a lot of brand awareness. We are making sure that people know that our schools are committed to being both joyful and rigorous, full of love and learning, and fiercely dedicated to closing the achievement gap. We also ensure that aspiring and experienced educators know our schools are great places for people looking to develop their craft and grow professionally in a strong teaching environment.

How is your team leveraging HR tech in this process?

Since we’re hiring for over 50 schools, and the majority of our candidates are millennials, technology has become a huge part of our recruiting process. HR technology helps us advertize our job postings and digital branding across platforms like LinkedIn, Handshake, and Glassdoor—all through our SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite (TAS). 

…And what results have you seen thus far?

Since we implemented our new HR technology, we’ve seen a 95 percent increase in applications in the first 30 days after launch. We’ve seen a 60 percent increase in applications and triple the number of leads collected at career fairs. We’ve also doubled the number of conversions from staff referrals into applications. In part, a lot of this success is due to features like automated email messages sent to candidates saying, ‘We’re so excited you’re interested. If you fill out an application, it’ll increase your chances of getting a job.’ That is happening without my recruiter needing to go in and decide who should receive an email.

Additionally, we’ve significantly diversified our sources and improved our job board integrations since using SmartRecruiters. The overall result has not only been an increase in application volume but also the quality – We’ve seen a 93% increase in the number of teacher candidates who qualified for an interview compared to last year despite needing to fill fewer openings.

How has your organization’s candidate experience changed?

Filling out the application is much easier. We’ve already seen an increase in application completions since we implemented SmartRecruiters versus what we were doing before. Furthermore, we now use scorecards and reviews to ensure consistency of interviews across our regions.  We have made it so that when we are hiring someone in Newark they have the same candidate experience as someone in New York City and we’re looking at the same criteria to evaluate both candidates. One of the ways we are eliminating biases is with an objective candidate and interview experience. 

What are you looking at in terms of optimization going into the future?

We’re capturing more data about each candidate through the full-cycle recruitment process. Our long-term goal is to connect the lead and applicant information to how successful the new hire is in the classroom. In the end, we could potentially source more great teachers by tracking all of the information to where we found them and what motivated them to apply.

Any reflections on recruiting in the education industry?

If you don’t have the right people in the building, you’re never going to be successful. The number one indicator of a student’s future is the adult in front of the classroom. The teacher is an essential factor in a student’s ability to grasp a concept or master a standard. Once a school attracts and retains those key difference makers, they have the ability to coach and develop other teachers, as well as create a strong culture that allows students to flourish. 

People are the backbone of any organization. That is undoubtedly true in education, Uncommon Schools and almost any organization for that matter.

See more from leaders like Amanda in the next part of the blog series – 10 Things I learned at Hiring Success – where we find out what it is like hiring for a global industry in transition with Jonathan Mears of Visa

Jerome Ternynck and Tracey Allison join Lorne Epstein on his eponymous podcast for a frank discussion on the challenges of today’s talent economy.

“The war for talent is over and the candidates have won,” says Jerome Ternynck, CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, as he sits down with Tracey Allison, Director of Global Talent at Avery Dennison, on the latest episode of the Lorne Epstein “How To Capture Talent In Today’s Candidate-driven Market”, recorded at Unleash Amsterdam 2018. Far from taken aback, Lorne and Tracey laugh in agreement.

“[Recruitment] today is about how you attract talent to your organization,” says Tracey. “You are marketing candidates and bringing talent in, rather than, ‘I have a job – who wants to apply?”

During the next hour, the three experts discuss the needs of today’s talent practitioners from both a strategic and technological perspective, with stories of personal challenges they’ve faced in the field, from diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives to getting a seat at the table. Listen now for the full scoop and check out the top 5 takeaways below.

1. HR technology is a must.

“Why does everyone have great tech except recruiters?” Jerome asks.”Sales, Accounting, and Marketing software are all par for the course, yet people balk at allocating budget for Recruiting systems. Recruiting is a digital function now, and they need the right tools to be successful.”

2.Don’t force candidates to fit your mold.

“It’s about engaging the right way,” says Tracey. “We need to stop ticking boxes and go after talent. Right now, we should be driven more by the individual candidate and how they can be successful – which will really be your department’s ROI – versus just filling a job.”

3. Engage hiring managers, they are your friends.

“The relationship between recruiters and hiring managers is, in many ways, a broken one,” says Jerome. “It doesn’t get supported through technology, which should be the enabler. At the end of the day, hiring managers and recruiters both want to find great people. If you put them together in one place where they can actually work together then suddenly you don’t have the dynamic where hiring managers are the customers and recruiters are the service center. Instead, it’s a shoulder-to-shoulder partnership where recruiters feed the pipe and hiring managers close the deal.”

4. Sell a lifestyle.

“In a candidate-driven marketplace, getting the message of what life is actually like at a particular organization is extremely important,” says Tracey. “More and more, the lines between work and life are blurred, and it’s all about the experience.”

5. D&I every step of the way.

“First, you have to go the extra mile to source candidates from underrepresented groups,” says Jerome.  “And it’s not good enough to do a regular sourcing effort, and then say ‘oh well, only white guys applied, not our fault’. You have to actively go and source people that are underrepresented. Diversity is critical to business success in every organization. Second, you gotta make sure that once you have that diverse talent coming in, that they’re not being discriminated against. Which, in recruiting, means having some objective criteria to rate these candidates throughout the interview process.”

Learn more about creating an interview process that discourages bias in the full episode, alongside other awesome learnings including examples from Tracey on how TA can be a strategic partner for business success.

How one Wall Street bigshot found himself in prison, and the company he launched after his release connects the formerly incarcerated with second-chance jobs.

Approximately one in three American adults have criminal records – that’s 70 million people, and nearly 75 percent of them are still unemployed a year after their release. With few prospects to cover basic expenses, many ex-offenders return to illicit activities. Unable to make ends meet, an overwhelming majority (89 percent) are unemployed at the time of their re-arrest. The stigmas surrounding people with conviction histories systematically exclude them from countless job opportunities, and the current state of affairs shows little sign of improvement.

Back in the late 90s, entrepreneur Richard Bronson found himself in a prison cell, wondering how he would turn his life around. A few years following his release, Bronson became the founder and CEO of 70 Million Jobs, the first national employment platform for people with criminal records.

Seeking to provide second chances for the one in three Americans with conviction histories, Bronson sees his company as providing “double bottom line returns”, doing massive social good as well as building big, profitable businesses.

To understand more about how 70 Million Jobs came to be, we talk to Bronson about his transition from prison cell to the C-suite. This is his story.

Twenty-two months into my sentence the anxiety kicked in. I was sitting on my cot in a federal prison with eight weeks left on my two-year sentence for securities fraud, and my impending freedom made me feel only one thing: dread.

I began working on Wall Street in the early 1990s, and after working at several of the largest investment banks, I made a career pivot into a small brokerage firm on Long Island, Stratton Oakmont. You may know this company better as the infamous Wolf of Wall Street firm. I did so well there I quickly became partner.

My ambitions were greater than Stratton Oakmont, and after a year I left to found my own financial services firm. Our success was swift; in 18 months, I had 500 employees, and was generating $100 million in annual revenue. I was getting very rich very fast.

As portrayed in Wolf of Wall Street, our success came from conducting business the wrong way—the illegal way. I knew my behavior was wrong, but I told myself “everyone’s doing it.” I wish I could say it was a mistake or they got the wrong guy, but none of that was true. I was guilty of securities fraud. So, despite having paid everyone back, I was still—rightfully—punished with a prison sentence.

I came out of prison destitute and nearly homeless—thank God for a sister and her couch. I wanted to put the past behind me and live an honest, productive life. However, accomplishing this proved more daunting than I ever expected. Old friends deserted me and new acquaintances feared I was “radioactive”. Once they learned about my incarceration, many kept me at arm’s length. Over the next several years I went from one bad situation to another. I thought I fully learned the lesson of humility, having scrubbed toilets for hundreds of inmates, but class had just begun.

I eventually ended up working at Defy Ventures, a prominent non-profit in the reentry space. I loved the opportunity to help my brothers and sisters as they struggled with their transition to freedom. It was deeply rewarding work—very good for my karma—but over time I became convinced that reentry was ready for disruption, specifically with a for-profit approach.

So I launched 70 Million Jobs, not knowing if large, national employers would be willing to pay to access our large community of job seekers. We got our answer almost immediately: while we don’t sell them all, the vast majority have been highly interested in our work, while many have discovered that hiring folks with records is not only a great way to fill jobs but also a powerful step in asserting their leadership as fair-chance employers.

The real heroes are our job seekers. Studies show that many of them become an employer’s best hire. For the simple fact that they have few alternatives, they know they have to perform well to retain their job. And they know that their employer took a chance in hiring them. So, unlike many in our workforce, they typically reward their employer with greater retention. Great performance and retention is a home run for any HR professional.

MoBerries created a networking platform that offers equal opportunities for candidates of all backgrounds, and here’s why they believe efforts of inclusion are the responsibility of all HR professionals.

Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji suggests that “we behave in ways that are not known to our own conscious awareness, that we are being driven to act in certain ways not because we are explicitly prejudiced, but because we may carry in our heads the thumbprint of the culture.”

One of the driving principles at MoBerries is to proactively tackle bias, particularly implicit bias, in HR. A recent study by the Ascend Foundation found that “white men and white women in five major Silicon Valley firms were 154 percent more likely to become executives than their Asian counterparts.” Racial bias is just one example of the type of prejudice that negatively impacts all levels of the hiring hierarchy, from internships to C-level management. As such, it’s imperative to business success that companies and employees work against bias in the workplace, especially when it comes to hiring practices.

At MoBerries, our team shares the vision of creating an accessible job market for everyone. Launching MoBerries in new markets like Southeast Asia was a crucial first step in making this dream a reality, but our inspiration for creating a level playing field is rooted in our personal experience seeing disadvantaged people work hard to prove themselves and fight for equal access to opportunities.

Learning from Experiences

Victoria’s Secret model-turned-programmer Lyndsey Scott recently made headlines when she spoke out against internet critics who belittled her accomplishments as a computer programmer. In addition to her role as Lead iOS software engineer at RallyBound, Lyndsey is also a highly active contributor on the computer programming website Stack Overflow, and previously held the top spot for most iOS question answered on the platform.

“The whole reason I started answering questions on Stack Overflow and writing tutorials in the first place was because I was struggling to have companies take me seriously,” said Lyndsey.

Lyndsey’s bout with internet haters reveals that even the most talented professionals face biases if they are in the minority. What’s more, research consistently reports that “a team with diverse backgrounds has diverse ideas and approaches to problem-solving.” Hiring diverse candidates sounds like a no-brainer for companies, right? Yet, the struggle for women, people of color, and other minorities in STEM jobs shows no signs of slowing.

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Winning the war for talent is not solely about attracting the best candidates on paper, but learning how to capitalize on people’s strengths, and good managers understand that talented individuals can take non-traditional paths—like Lyndsey Scott—on their career journeys.

Though we worked together for only a short time, Nasir Zubairi was an important mentor for both me and my partner, Lucio. After observing our existing business strategies, Nasir refined our sales pitches and follow-ups to be more impactful and engaging. He also proactively changed our hiring strategies for sales positions, allowing us to build a team of complementary personalities for our different team functions that affect how we run our business to this day.

It is our job as HR professionals to create opportunities of inclusion that facilitate business success and have positive impact on people’s lives. MoBerries salutes companies like 70 Million Jobs, which offers opportunities to individuals with conviction histories. The company claims that its candidates boast higher-than-average employee retention rates and provides tax incentives for employers.

Another company inspiring social change is MoBerries partner CodeDoor, a network that transforms underdog candidates into sought-after professionals by offering high-level coding courses to underrepresented groups in the tech industry.   

We must endorse and support creative solutions from companies like CodeDoor and 70 Million Jobs to win the war for talent. With countless groups being excluded from jobs in tech due to implicit biases and outdated recruitment practices, these groups need a new status quo.

For many underserved groups, limited work options can lead to increased criminal activity and poverty. The top reasons that many teens join gangs include:

• Lack of jobs
• Poverty compounded by social isolation
• Early academic failure and lack of school attachment

Creating a more inclusive job market is one of the easiest ways to address these problems and provide minorities opportunities for future success. At MoBerries, we look for people who want to work, develop, and improve by asking questions like: Do people show up? Do they accomplish their assigned tasks? Do they work well with others?

Are Non-Biased Robots the Solution?

Of the myriad articles and tips on how to minimize or avoid biases in HR, most repeat the same types of advice; namely, accept the fact that you might have a cognitive bias and fight it. As Banaji suggests, humans struggle to turn a blind eye towards race, gender, or physical appearance, but if we want to create truly inclusive workplaces we need to look for new solutions. Here is where AI holds promise for the future.

A common criticism of AI in the hiring process is the likelihood that it reproduces human biases by detecting patterns of underrepresentation and copying them, keeping underserved groups in the minority. The MoBerries platform is unique in that it can evaluate bias trends on a macro (company) and micro (candidate) level. MoBerries leverages AI sourcing to connect active job seekers and employers, judging candidate suitability by multiple criteria—not only a resume or CV. MoBerries also evaluates the candidate’s fit according to the job description and role responsibilities, as well as the employer’s interactions and feedback with the candidate. These data are then benchmarked against other employers in the network to determine their validity.

The team at MoBerries is committed to our promise to help you break into and thrive in the job market regardless of your race, gender, age, or economic background. We are proud to do our part alongside other companies, thought-leaders, and executives who pledge to change the way we interact with—and hire—all types of talent.

Perception is reality. It is our responsibility to shape it.

Technology has made it easier than ever to source high-quality candidates, here’s what you need to do next to make your selection process doesn’t fall prey to inherent bias.

Recruiting strategies are ever-evolving. With the advents of email, social media, networking profiles, and even specialized recruiting websites, many of the challenges of finding great talent have been significantly rectified.

Specialists are no longer scratching their heads, wondering where to look for their next great recruit. Talent is abundantly present. But with the latest evolutions in the talent search come the responsibility and obligation for recruiters to ask if they’re searching fairly, doing everything in their power to create an inclusive workforce.

Recruiters are the gatekeepers of any organization, deciding whose voices are allowed to come in and shape the future of your mission. In order to ensure that mission is not lacking in a variety of perspectives and experience, consider the following tips on how to recruit with inclusion intentionally in mind.

Language in job descriptions

Did you know you can create a more inclusive workforce even before a candidate comes in to interview? Do this by considering the way language plays a role in which candidates apply.

Whether intentionally or not, certain job descriptions can turn away applicants with the implications of their verbiage. While it’s illegal to discriminate against candidates for factors such as their gender or age, some job descriptions will inadvertently steer candidates away because they sound too “young” or “male-centric.”

According to job listing site Indeed.com, the use of the word “ninja” in job descriptions increased 400 percent from January 2012 to October 2016. “Rockstar” is another buzzword in hiring these days. Recruiters may have thought they were cracking a code by using a gender neutral term to increase interest, but is that really the case?

For one, ninjas are rarely portrayed as women in popular media. Also, what age do you think the word “ninja” is going to attract? Typically, it’s a word applied in job listings for tech startups, or other organizations looking for young hires. Don’t say you want customer success rockstars, say you want candidates who are naturally skilled at communication. In general, avoid cliches.

Ad location for job listings

According to Inc, 79 percent of job seekers use social media in their search. But where are the other 21 percent?

If your recruiting process focuses on one channel or method, you’re missing a lot of talent elsewhere. To attract diverse applicants, use diverse methods. It’s possible your perfect candidate is still passing out resumes when you only accept applications online.

This isn’t to say you should revert to outdated processes. Rather, hiring teams should look to e-recruiting and make your company and roles accessible on a number of platforms. If you’re looking for candidates with 15+ years of experience, you shouldn’t post that ad solely on the same platforms where you’re asking for entry-level candidates.

Focusing on talent vs experience

Resources suggest that in order to be more inclusive, hiring managers and recruiters should focus less on exact experience and more on what the candidate could, and would need to accomplish. Give them opportunities to paint their talents as it pertains to the job.

Entrepreneur provides a helpful guide on Why, and How, to Hire for Potential Over Experience. This article encourages you to use the interview as an opportunity to speak beyond the resume, asking industry-related questions, as well as querying personal experience.

Canned questions

One way to reduce unconscious bias in your hiring and recruiting process is to have a list of canned questions you ask across the board. At their core, interviews are a conversation, and no two will be the same. As you meet different candidates, their experience may spur the conversation in another direction. This is okay! The idea with canned questions isn’t to kill the natural flow of an interview. It’s to send you into interviews with similar expectations of what each candidate needs to live up to. There’s no reason to make one jump through hoops, while another has a smooth-sailing, easy-going conversation.

Use specialized agencies or networks

Maybe you’re trying all of these tips, and are still having a hard time diversifying your candidates and prioritizing inclusion. Your current network is often so good at providing top quality candidates it’s easy to overlook the need to expand beyond that inner circle.

But the benefits of a diversified workplace are numerous: not only for your company, but also for everyone who works there.

According to an article published by Bentley University, “Research has shown that having a diverse workforce increases a company’s profits. Diverse companies also have more success in attracting talented employees, keeping their workforce engaged, and driving innovation.”

That’s not all. The article goes on to provide exact statistics as to how diversity affects workplace success.

“Companies with the most gender-diverse executive teams are 21 percent more likely to experience above-average profitability than companies with the least gender-diverse executive teams, according to a 2018 report from McKinsey & Company. When it comes to ethnic and cultural diversity, companies with the most diverse executive teams are 33 percent more likely to outperform companies with the least diverse executive teams, the report found. ”

If your network is producing one type of candidate, leverage other resources. There are agencies that exist to help you expand beyond the same pool of candidates you’ve been swimming in for years. Make working with agencies for people with disabilities, or people of disenfranchised ethnicities, a key part in your recruiting processes.  

Good luck!

Recruiters have the privilege of meeting all kinds of people and learning about their backgrounds and varied histories. It’s a privilege to be able to hear about the lives of others and to be a part of offering them the opportunity to grow at your organization. But even more so, it’s a privilege to your organization to be able to learn from others.

Follow these tips for recruiting inclusively and your workplace is bound to be better for it.

Tech has increasingly become a young person’s hustle, but excluding older workers could be hurting tech companies’ futures.

In Silicon Valley, the median age of employees at titans such as Facebook and Google is under 30 years old. FB founder Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla opine that “young people are just smarter”, and “people over 45 die in terms of new ideas”. It’s no wonder the demand for “digital natives” is leaving older workers at a disadvantage. While it would be hard to fault such logic, we still have to ask: is big tech’s discrimination against an aging workforce hurting its future self?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2030, workers aged 55 and older will constitute nearly 30 percent of the American workforce. This will impact cross-sector industries on a global scale—from e-commerce to financial and business services, even manufacturing. “The whole globe is aging,” says Joyce DeMonnin, Communications & Media Relations Director at AARP. “People have longer lifespans and fewer children, but another consideration is that older people are also your customers.”

And as such, it’s time for tech companies to check their ageist bias, from their job ads to their hiring practices. To speak more about identifying and eliminating ageism in the workplace, we invited Joyce DeMonnin from AARP Oregon; Emilia D’Anzica, founder of Customer Growth Advisors; and Scott Hernandez, Global Head of Recruiting at StubHub; to our Hiring Success Conference in San Francisco. You can watch their full presentation in the video embedded above, or read on for a summary of each presenter’s talk.

Joyce DeMonnin, Communications & Media Relations Director at AARP Oregon

Working in education and policy with AARP, Joyce raises awareness of how older workers are often undervalued as employees. Organizations may wonder if older workers are staying relevant or current, but DeMonnin says businesses need to “understand and judge someone on their passion, purpose, and what they can bring to their organization,” and not just see them as out-of-touch or ready for the glue factory.

“Older workers have a lot of knowledge, skill, ability, and talent,” she argues. “They also have lots of connections, they’re great mentors, and stay passionate about being engaged.”

What’s more, businesses that fail to eliminate ageist biases may face legal ramifications under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which protects applicants and employees 40 years or older from discrimination during the hiring process, promotions, and job terminations. As DeMonnin points out, even the language used in job descriptions can be enough to violate the ADEA, making writing analysis tools like Textio invaluable when creating job ads with truly neutral language.

Emilia D’Anzica, Founder at Customer Growth Advisors

Having spent over a decade working in tech, Emilia D’Anzica was shocked to find she was being replaced because company leadership wanted “fresh blood”. Her next task was to select and train her replacement before her unceremonious departure. Rather than give into anger and disappointment, Emilia found a job that enabled her to mentor and inspire other business leaders about biases in the workplace.

“Ageism is a social construct that we can all combat,” she says. “We can work towards changing how people look towards that experience.”

A more holistic approach might be what big tech needs to address the industry’s widening skills gap. “Why would you exclude a workforce that is educated, experienced, and can bring so much to the table,” Emilia asks, “especially as your consumers are getting older?”

Scott Hernandez, Global Head of Recruiting at StubHub

Hernandez sees ageism as a bias recruiters should actively keep in check, looking at experience as “a more holistic skillset.” At StubHub, Hernandez and his team construct the recruiting process around a set of company values—diversity being high on the list—and look to hire candidates the company views as a competitive advantage. “There is a strength in diversity,” says Hernandez. “More unique experience bring more unique ideas bring more unique perspectives and more unique output.”

Most forward-thinking companies would agree, and we’re already seeing a shift in recruiting practices that place more value on experience and skills that will amplify the performance of a team. For StubHub, reflecting the company’s expanded reach and commitment to diversity—including changes to company logos, brand colors, even the typography—is a top priority. When recruiting new talent, Hernandez claims Stubhub “doesn’t constrain itself to the jobs of yesterday, but the needs of tomorrow.”

Unlike other workplace biases that have active communities who rally in support of inclusion, ageism remains largely ignored. While most older workers say they have seen or experienced age discrimination, only 3 percent report having made a formal complaint.

Creating workplace cultures of inclusion didn’t happen overnight, and we’re far from done, which is why we’re revisiting “Ageism in the workplace” at our upcoming Hiring Success Conference in Berlin.

For Emilia D’Anzica, eliminating the ageism bias begins with the question: “Do you hold yourself to your values and your company mission without a bias? That is a question you have to constantly ask yourself, and conferences will refresh your mind and will educate you on the shifting workforce and how you can rewire your biases.”

Your competitors are looking to make the same great hires you are, so how do you make sure you have the upper hand in snagging candidates? The answer, increasingly, is Artificial Intelligence.

“Recruiting has really been transformed these past years,” said Hessam Lavi, Director of Product at SmartRecruiters. “We’ve seen a shift from HR and recruiting coming from an admin function, or merely a cost center, to much more of a strategic function. It’s become mission-critical, but, at the same time, increasingly expensive.”

Speaking in a webinar detailing how SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant, the industry’s first native AI-powered recruiting tool, Mr. Lavi stressed five ways he sees AI technology providing the backbone for recruiting in the future.

Task Automation: AI will take over high-touch activities like scheduling interviews and screening resumes, allowing recruiters to focus on high-value, strategic activities.

Automated Sourcing: AI will source new candidates online and re-discover talent in organizations’ own talent pools, helping recruiters leverage their own networks more efficiently.

Smart Advertising: Job advertising is a highly manual, unscalable process. AI enables advertisers to automate job advertising, making it performance-based and targeted. Through technology, your jobs will be advertised on the right job boards to the right candidates – at the right price.

Improving Diversity: Diverse teams perform better, no doubt about it. AI helps identify potentially biased language that would dissuade women or people from minorities to apply. Automated screening and scoring evaluates candidates only based on their skills, eliminating implicit bias from the hiring process.

Candidate Relationship Management: Candidates behave much more like consumers now – they value convenience. By outsourcing 1:many conversations to AI (through chatbots, for example), recruiters can focus on 1:1 conversations and drive better talent engagement and hiring success.

For this all to work seamlessly, cobbling a batch of BoBs onto a legacy ATS just won’t do. Real performance needs native level integration, and SmartAssistant is setting the standard for everything that will follow.

Click here for the full lowdown on what SmartAssistant can do for you.

To eradicate hiring discrimination, humans need to accept that sometimes, machines can not only identify things we can’t see, but things we might not want to admit.

Meet Anna. She is waiting, the way you do in 2017, in a digital queue, to find out if she landed her dream job. She’s worked hard for it. Harder than others. But she’s not going to get it. A man will.

This man will be hired by the head of finance, let’s call him Henry, who has a varied skillset, a calm demeanour, and is respected by his colleagues. Henry isn’t mean, he isn’t vindictive, but he won’t hire Anna. He will discriminate against her, and he won’t even know that’s what he’s done.

Do I blame him? I pity him. Do I feel sorry for Anna? I do. Not only for her, but also for, say, Muhammad, who won’t get his dream job either. Some other Henry in some other company won’t be able to see past his name.

This happens every day in recruiting. We consciously or unconsciously engage in bias meant to protect us, while losing out on potential talent. More than inefficient, this is unacceptable. And that’s why in 2018, SmartRecruiters will release AI Recruiting Assistant, developed to eradicate even further this kind of bias. Yes, a machine is going to help you be a better person.

If you haven’t heard of us yet, SmartRecruiters is a software that companies – our customers – use to manage talent during the process of selection, attraction, and hiring. As we like to say around here, you are who you hire, you hire the best because hiring success is business success. With 30 million applications to date, we are on track to reach 136 million in the next three years in companies with over 2,500 employees.

Facing both sides of the business, we aim to close the gap between the 37% of people the McKinsey Global Institute says are unhappy in their jobs, and businesses frustrated at being unable to find the right talent. So far, we’ve helped employers match the best candidates to their needs in 80 countries and in 35 languages. Our biggest clients receive over 40,000 new applications a month. And the plan is to go even bigger. But it took a while to get here.

Back in October 2013, I co-founded a company called Jobspotting, that connected millions of people with millions of jobs. My colleagues were former Googlers with a combined experience of two decades in machine learning and deep learning, collaborative filtering, and big data. We were profitable and growing monthly, and we had matching technology that some users felt was “better than LinkedIn.” But we weren’t exactly solving unemployment yet.

Then I met Jerome Ternynck. An entrepreneur, a friend, and as the founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters, he was also in the business of connecting people to jobs. We met in Paris, and he told me how every night his daughter would ask, “Daddy, how many jobs have you created today?” And he’d tell her. And she’d tell him whether or not she thought he’d had a good day, and whatever was going on, he never forgot the business’ core: to connect people to jobs, and keep improving the processes of how that happens. Merging Jobspotting and SmartRecruiters was one milestone, and the launch of AI Recruiting Assistant is going to be another.

Recruiters usually screen CVs manually. It takes tons of time, and they have natural biases. They will discriminate. An algorithm, our AI Assistant, will not. Once implemented with our customers, the fusion of Jobspotting technology and SmartRecruiters’ platform will get to work, automatically screening incoming applications and scoring candidates against jobs, highlighting their work experiences, education level, skillset, and much more.

SmartRecruiters AI Recruiting Assistant will be available to our 3,000+ customers, including giants like IKEA, Bosch, Adidas, Visa and Marc Jacobs, affecting millions of candidates – and over a million new users a month. I can’t wait to see the first test and make the hiring process better, and more fair, for everyone.

I can’t change the likelihood of a 40-year-old white male hiring a 30-year-old white male, but AI Recruiting Assistant doesn’t care what your name or gender is, how old you are or what skin color you have. The only question is who the system will rank higher based on their own merit, Anna or Muhammed.

We all have natural biases, and we don’t always know when they’re affecting us. Things get trickier when you’re a recruiter, monitoring your own thought process to hire without discrimination. With the advent of AI Applicant Tracking, are we looking at a future where machines can help us with that?

First, some context. I recently attended a recruiting event, focused on diversity in hiring. Barring the usual dreaded group activities, forced corporate roleplay and all, I did learn something about bias in recruiting: it’s more common than we think.

But it’s not malicious. More often than not it’s perpetrated unconsciously by well-meaning folks who enthusiastically attend meetings about non-bias hiring, who believe and champion the idea that diversity within a company is important.

One recruiter faced the group and described an experiment he conducted, himself as the guinea pig. He would cover applicant details on a CV like name, age and gender with post-it notes, not thinking it would make a difference in his hiring process. His conclusion?

“I use a lot of post-it notes in my hiring process now.”

This man had attended diversity seminars and conferences on non-bias hiring before. He thought it was enough to be aware of the issue, but as it turns out, you have to do something proactive.

HIs sticky-note approach, rudimentary though it may be, is what’s at the heart of most HR technology addressing negative bias. It’s as simple as asking ourselves what data we need in order to make the best decision.

Ok not quite so simple. Because recruiting, at its core, is itself a process of bias. Selecting few from many based on candidates’ most useful qualities for a particular job. A positive bias.

The problem is when lists include qualities that aren’t about the probability of success, like age, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. Recruiters and hiring managers have to untangle their positive and negative biases, which is harder than it sounds. These are viewpoints they’ve been using their whole lives. And rather than address it, and take time, effort and introspection, it’s tempting to push blame down the line.

A common excuse from recruiters is that no women, POCs, etc, even apply to certain roles, so it’s not their fault if their choices are seen as less than ideally diverse. It’s true that training and outreach can help promote under-represented peoples in a particular trade, but it’s important to take steps at every stage in the candidate pipeline, because people need jobs now, and recruiters are the gatekeepers.

So beyond purposely withholding certain details like our friend at the event, recruiters and hiring managers can also reduce bias by creating a system of checks, which could include writing out a list of qualities a candidate should have for the job, and making sure that those are actually the qualities on which they are judged.

While this simple method of self-accountability can be quite effective, the list itself could be flawed and that’s where we need technology.

Up until now we’ve used algorithms that often adopt the bias of an institution, or the people doing the hiring, because the calculations are based on that institution’s single data source. What makes our technology different is the vast amount of data we collect from a variety of industries, which allows us to find appropriate candidates from unexpected places, candidates you never may have known existed, or have considered before.

The AI sources and selects top candidates to interview far faster than any human could, and with less bias. The idea of machines doing a job better than people is always off-putting at first, but think of what you could do with all that saved time: actual face time with candidates. Time to nurture connections. Build a network your company can draw from in the future.

SmartRecruiters AI aims to address the problem of human bias, and let the machine take care of that part of the process. And when the hiring manager is shown their shortlist, our product will then hold humans accountable. Our collaborative approach adds community checks and balances to the recruitment process, which means platform administrators will be able to see the work of their hiring team, which means if a particular manager hires a white male over a black female who scored higher, they will have to justify this to their coworkers, their superiors, and themselves.

Early in my career, I sat through a terrible diversity training session mandated by my employer at the time. It focused on stereotypes and unsubstantiated reasons why affirmative action was the right thing to do. Since then, I have worked for two more employers that were federal contractors and have heard the gamut of ways to work around the system. The most prevalent work around in my experience has been the quota proposition.

When federal contractors create an affirmative action plan it is comprised of two primary pieces of data. The first piece of data is the availability of females and minorities in the region of the business. This data tells you what percentage of each group you should be able to recruit given the availability of each. The second piece of data is more specific to the current workforce makeup at your company. That is, it tells you where you have an underutilization in either of the groups or both and it is also expressed in a percentage. It is never ideal to have an underutilization in either of your groups, but there may be significant reasons why there is (e.g. lack of minorities and females in that industry or profession). The goal of the federal contractor is to bring underutilization numbers to zero-where possible. However, significant decreases to the numbers are just as well.

The way that a recruiter aids the company in getting these numbers down is by making regular, concerted efforts to recruit a diverse candidate pool. This means researching diverse associations, job boards, reaching out to diverse contacts and networks to make sure your jobs are getting out to the masses. There is usually some representation of females and/or minorities in an applicant pool, but you want to increase the numbers. If you know anything about probability, you know that increased numbers of qualified minority candidates in your applicant pool make it more likely that you could hire a minority or female.

Let’s revisit my initial story about the quota proposition. My travels in the federal contractor space have taught me that this process of hiring diverse candidates is not a quota system. There is a sentiment that once you hire one female and one minority that your job is done. If you look at what the affirmative action plan is trying to accomplish you would never come to this conclusion. Unfortunately, there are businesses that submit to this sentiment. As I explained, the goal is to get all job classifications down to zero. That said when you are finally at zero your job as a recruiter or company does not stop there. The key is to continue your good faith efforts. Continue your outreach and involvement in diverse organizations. Don’t see this as a quota system. If your availability numbers suggest that there are more females and minorities than what you are currently hiring that means you need to do more to attract a diverse talent pool.

The word quota suggests a scenario like this: you must hire four minorities and five females for the year. Quotas work such that you would be free and clear of having to hire anymore females or minorities, once you meet that number. That is a sales move. Quotas are for retail numbers and sales; they are not to be mistaken for a concerted effort towards having a more diverse workforce. Diversity is about making good faith efforts and taking calculated actions to hire, attract, select and ultimately retain diverse candidates. Be clear, the diverse candidate does not get by on gender, race or ethnicity alone; they must be qualified for the positions they are applying for.

Diversity recruitment and hiring compliance does not have to be a difficult process. Make sure you know what is possible, where you can find qualified diverse candidates and then make sure you have a presence wherever they are. Diverse workforces are brilliant workforces that are infused with different perspectives that are representative of more than one group of people.  The question companies have to ask themselves is, “would you rather capitalize on the business of one group, or the business of many groups?”

Janine N. Truitt (@CzarinaofHR) is an HR Professional based in Long Island, NY. Learn more of her expertise in Recruitment, HR Technology, Talent Management, Employee Relations, and HR Policy/Compliance on her blog, The Aristocracy of HR.SmartRecruiters is the free social hiring platform.