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.

The second day of the SmartRecruiters first-ever European conference rolled out another full schedule of sessions, assembled a massive “crowd-sourced” band, and crowned another Recruiting Startup of the Year.

Day two began by looking towards the future of SmartRecruiters’ TA suite, in the opening keynote from Rebecca Carr, SmartRecruiters’ VP of Product. “Competition is fierce—we’re living in a talent economy,” she said, speaking to the packed conference hall in a converted warehouse in East Berlin. “It’s important that we deliver to you tools that are going to give you the capabilities to find and nurture talent well before the point of application.”

With many of the upcoming product updates taking years to develop, it’s clear that anticipating and predicting the needs of users is driving future innovation. Along with a design overhaul and new functionality that improves the first-time candidate experience at every stage of the hiring process, SmartRecruiters also revealed its plans to embed more intelligent features into the product, including the robust SmartJobs, which allows hiring teams to take the guesswork out of job advertising, placing your ads in front of the best candidates for the right price.

“SmartRecruiters doesn’t want to be a replica of the old system you used to use,” said Carr. “We want to be thinking farther ahead in terms of what we can be building and developing. We foresaw problems that you may encounter given how the talent economy is changing around us.”

Navigating change often requires the wisdom and insights of those who have already lived it, especially when it comes to achieving hyper-growth for you organization, chief among which is the ability to embrace failure. “In hyper-growth there is no room for perfectionism,” said Noor van Boven, Chief People Officer at online bank, N26. “You need to be able to make decisions quickly. If you are a true perfectionist you will fail.”

And hyper growth isn’t just a concern for company executives, as “being a leader in hyper growth means everyone can have an impact,” said Jeri Doris, Chief People Officer at Delivery Hero. “You’re building a brand, a product, and a company. That’s not just for leaders, but for recruiters—you are part of that company story.”

One of the most creative and surprising moments at Hiring Success Berlin was the participatory jam session, “Synchronicity”, led by Mehmet Baha, founder and senior consultant at Solution Folder. “We’re going to explore diversity and inclusion through music,” said Baha, who is also a percussionist, as he distributed shakers, drums, and other implements to a bewildered crowd. Baha then led the newly formed Hire18 band through a series of musical exercises, drawing parallels to how each has real-world implications in the workplace.

“Active listening is a crucial part of an inclusive work culture,” said Baha, instructing people to close their eyes and hear how each instrument’s unique sound worked together to create a unified composition.

To close out the conference, SmartRecruiters brought five companies on stage to compete for the title of Recruiting Startup of the Year. With only a few minutes to pitch their company to a panel of expert judges, the startup competition is now a central tenet of every Hiring Success conference. Find out which of the five finalists won over the judges and earned the shiny trophy tomorrow on the Hiring Success Journal.

But before we close the book on the first edition of Hiring Success EU we have to celebrate with an authentically Berlin party experience. Conference attendees who still have the energy will move up the banks of the river Spree to Säälchen, on the grounds of the renowned nightclub Kater Blau, where Berlin’s top techno and house DJs will share the stage with a ten-piece pop brass band, spectacular acrobatic performances, and a surprise guest performance.

Check out our day one conference wrap-up to read more about the sessions and speakers you might have missed.

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

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.

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.”

Hiring Success 18 Europe bedrocks itself on the three topics your TA team should be most thinking about: innovation, inclusion, and hiring success.

No longer powered by fax blasts into the great unknowable aether, Talent Acquisition has become an industry at the crossroads of inclusion, technology, and business strategy. A place of organizational importance unimaginable to the backroom resume-shufflers of yesteryear is now our reality. We asked for a seat at the table, we got it, and now we have to bring it.

Business leaders now have begun to view the people-function of their companies as a strategic asset, as they should. The challenge then becomes to keep abreast of the ever-shortening cycles of innovation, and that’s what Hiring Success 18 Europe, September 19th-20th in Berlin, is all about. Two days of non-stop workshops, demos, interactive presentations, and collaboration for practitioners to engage with the latest in best-practice for tech, diversity, and on-the-ground recruiting.

We’ve broken it down into three most challenging topics facing TA today, check out our full agenda here!

Innovation: big data, bots, blockchain, and AI.

In our exploding age of hyper-data, learn how recruitment advertising is poised to take over traditional job posting in “The Future of Job Advertising.” Watch chatbots battle it out live to answer your questions and prove their language-processing chops in “Battle of the Bots.” Will blockchain create a new gig economy, and how can this crypto-tech be the answer for data security compliance? Find out in “Blockchain in Recruiting.” Talk AI, or demo rather, with interactive presentations that illustrate just how far we’ve already come in “The March of Artificial Intelligence.”

Also: augmented reality, assessment, and analytics!

Inclusion: leverage social media, refugee candidates, and remote work.

Sure, you have candidates, but how do you turn this random group into a community? Find out how in “The Art of Community Building.” Tap into marginalized talent markets with “Have Your Hired a Refugee.?” If you are short on candidates, maybe your bias is blinding you: in “Ageism at Work” recruiters learn to root out irrelevant judgments so they can hire the best people. Go remote without losing engagement with these tips in “Inspire Your Remote Workforce.”

Also: why unlikely applicants make great hires and gender parity!

Hiring Success: leadership strategy, employer brand, and zainy campaigns.

Get on the same page as leadership in “Aligning the Board with Your TA strategy” and anything is possible. Your company is great to work at, so make sure the candidate knows it too in, “How to Pitch Your Company.” Or get inspired by the innovative recruiting campaigns in “Creative Recruiting Combinations,” spoiler – someone uses Tinder.

Also: hyper-growth, scaling through IPO, recruiter brand, and internal mobility!

Are you ready for the future of recruiting? Get to know some of our featured speakers here!

Typically thrust upon HR departments with instructions to meet quotas and boost statistics, the untold truth about diversity hires is that many don’t stick around, and it’s for lack of true inclusion.

If there’s any truth to hiring managers favoring candidates culturally similar to themselves, how then, is the white male-dominated tech industry expected to more accurately reflect the spectral nature of our population? According to Bärí Williams, VP of Legal, Policy & Business Affairs at All Turtles and former Head of North American business operations for StubHub, it begins by asking the simple question: “How can we do better?”

In 1960s America, models for business diversity stemmed from affirmative action and equal employment opportunity compliances, which all too often looked more like tokenism. In a relatively more enlightened 2018, businesses are taking on the challenge to undo this mindset. LinkedIn’s 2018 Global Recruiting Trends study shows a greater focus on making diversity stick than previous years, with 78% of companies prioritizing diversity to improve work culture, and 62% to boost financial performance.

As the next wave of business leaders emerge, Williams, an Oakland native with a career centered around the Bay Area, believes we are moving closer to more inclusive company cultures, because society is, despite certain trends to the contrary, moving towards inclusivity. “It’s interesting watching how differently my eight-year-old sees the world,” she says. “The only president he’s ever known is a black man, and then one candidate running after him is a woman.”

However much American politics appeared to be progressing, the results of the last presidential election are a stark reminder of how complacency can quickly unravel years of progress, and for Williams, avoiding complacency is paramount. “It’s great that diversity doesn’t feel like an anomaly to my son, and it shouldn’t, but you also have to work hard to ensure that it’s not.”

While working at Facebook, before StubHub, Williams noticed how all of the company’s business partners — consultants, service providers, hardware, and infrastructure suppliers — reflected the majority company makeup. So she set out to diversify Facebook’s business operations.

She launched the social media giant’s supplier diversity program, building relationships with minority-owned businesses that facilitated the company’s business operations. This ranged from producing branded Facebook swag like hoodies, stickers and pens, to catering, staffing and photography services for company events. As a result, Facebook made itself more accessible to these communities, while providing new economic opportunities and demonstrating a commitment to improving their quality of life.

For Williams, building an inclusive culture that’s “woven into the fabric of the company” is key to achieving true diversity and inclusion. This means not only hiring racially and gender diverse talent, but finding “non-traditional ways to reach your benchmarks for diversity,” through untapped channels, in order to identify non-obvious candidates.

And while the Global Recruiting Trends report shows that more tech companies are already approaching the question of “How can we do better?”, 38% of companies surveyed struggle to find diverse candidates to interview.

For Williams, the reason is clear: many tech companies do not contain diverse populations, creating a vacuum for companies desperate to source diverse candidates, and with a lack of diverse candidates in surrounding communities, it’s no wonder why tech companies struggle to source, hire, and retain non-white male talent.

A solution is for companies to explore other channels. “Maybe it’s more remote work, or flex schedules,” says Williams, “or allowing people to commute back and forth between certain cities. Diverse populations don’t want to live in cities that feel inhospitable, don’t have amenities they want, or don’t give them a sense of community.”

And the problem isn’t simply sourcing diverse candidates. Fourteen percent of companies surveyed by LinkedIn struggle to get diverse candidates through the interview process, and 8% struggle with getting diverse candidates to accept offers.

But there has been progress. Recruiting software startup Lever manages an even 50:50 male to female workforce, excludes photos from applications and uses inclusive job descriptions, and promotes support groups for women and LGBTQ employees. SmartRecruiters launched the industry’s first AI-powered recruiting assistant, solving the problem of identifying great talent, on any ATS, without selection bias. Internet radio company Pandora offers bias and assumption training to promote a positive workplace environment, eliminated “cultural fit” from job applications, and host happy-hour fundraisers for black history month and female leadership to align the events with company values.

Williams urges hiring managers and recruiters to judge non-traditional candidates through a different lens. “Value that candidate’s unique experiences and perspectives,” she says. “Judge them holistically and allow them to authentically be themselves.” According to Williams, these practices make employees feel valued and give them a sense of belonging.

“Everyone has had an instance in life where they have been excluded from something,” says Williams, explaining how inclusion is an easier concept for people to grasp than diversity. Channeling that feeling of isolation or exclusion can motivate someone to ask, “What can I do to make this person’s life a little easier today, or, what can I do to bring in a second or a third person?”

Promoting diversity and inclusion should not an objective for HR departments but a company-wide goal, where all employees must echo the question ‘How can we do better?’

“More than being mentors, it’s about being sponsors,” says Williams. “Mentors will give you guidance once you’re in the room, but sponsors will advocate for you when you’re not.

“Diversity gets people in the door,” she says, “inclusion keeps them there.”