Google Hire has been scheduled for discontinuation. In September 2020, the applicant tracking system (ATS) will be removed from G-suite, affecting recruiters and business owners across North America and the U.K.

This news comes as a disappointment to those who rely on the ATS to source and hire new talent. As a company devoted to connecting people to jobs, we can empathize. A well-made recruiting platform can mean the difference between company-wide growth or total stagnation. Finding such a tool can be hard; having to give it up even harder.

Therefore, to make the transition easier, we’d like to offer a demo of SmartRecruiters with free data migration to all existing Google Hire customers. We’d love the opportunity to share with each and every one of you something we’re very passionate about—Hiring Success. 

We define Hiring Success as the ability to attract, select, and hire the best talent for any role, on demand and on budget—an outcome enabled by the SmartRecruiters technology. And to-date we’ve empowered over 4,000 companies in 100+ countries across the globe to achieve such outcomes. This is what Hiring Success has looked like for many of those companies: 

Don’t take our word for it, though. Here’s what one of our clients—Sandi Lurie, VP of Global Recruiting at Optimizely—has to say about SmartRecruiters and Hiring Success:

SmartRecruiters is not just a great ATS, they are an incredible partner in the journey to hiring exceptional talent. The platform itself promotes easy collaboration across hiring teams and the UI is intuitive.

Sandi Lurie
VP of Global Recruiting
Optimizely

Interested in writing the first chapter of your company’s Hiring Success story? Then schedule a demo today. And, as mentioned above, to make the transition as seamless as possible, we’ll offer full support with free data migration. We look forward to hearing from you!

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.

Companies have no greater brand advocates than employees, whose role in sourcing top-quality talent should not be overlooked.

Compared to previous years, hires resulting from employee referrals is declining, thanks in part to the rise of custom, targeted campaigns and social media outreach to build talent pools. As a result, referrals are no longer the top method for sourcing high quality candidates. But that doesn’t mean organizations should abandon their referral strategies. Recent studies report that referral and recruiter-sourced applicants account for 27 percent of all company hires.

The appeal of employee referrals is multifaceted: they typically draw a higher volume of qualified candidates who—by the virtue of already being an employee—are more likely to be a better company fit and often cost less than a non-referral candidate. Crowdsourcing your candidates through referrals is not only an effective method for finding great talent, it can align with a larger TA strategy emphasizing company branding and employee engagement.

1. Referrals Improve Quality of Candidates and Hires

In a competitive market, hiring top candidates quickly is the difference between success or failure. By leveraging your entire employee network to source both active and passive candidates, your candidate pool is already much wider and more diverse without additional effort. Fast-tracking vetted candidates cuts down on the need for several steps in the recruitment process, including job description writing, ad posting, resume collection, and candidate screening.

In Tech, where specialized skills are in high demand, referrals and custom campaigns are better at attracting the right talent than job boards or other traditional recruitment methods. When sourcing for specific roles, many employees only refer candidates they think are qualified for the role, as their recommendation reflects on their judgment. Recruiters are more likely to see an increased number of quality applicants that not only cost less than non-referral candidates, but are faster to hire and onboard.

2. Company Branding is the Focus of Recruiter Marketing

Today, recruiters and hiring managers are doubling down on their efforts to maintain a marketing-focused strategy in their talent acquisition, with brand values being pushed to the frontlines of these efforts. When marketing company brand to candidates, companies have no greater advocates than their own employees. Social media posts and other positive promotion can be effective tools to this end.

Websites like Glassdoor offer current and past employees a platform to express their opinions about companies, and this transparency directly affects candidate decisions. A 2016 study found that 75 percent of job seekers consider the employer’s brand and reputation before even applying for a position, so it’s important for companies to engage with their employees and, in turn, prospective candidates.

3. Referrals Impact Employee Engagement

Organizations often create incentives for referrals through employee referral programs (ERPs) that encourage current employees to think about and emphasize the positives that make the organization one worth working for, and to spread the news throughout their network. Employees have stakes in the company’s success, so if they are engaged and active in building out the team with top performers, they will feel more valued and appreciated. Additionally, recognizing the actions of your employees, rewarding quality efforts, and creating friendly competition to achieve a team goal will also boost employee appreciation, which helps raise motivation.

To avoid spamming your employees with all open positions, nurture a pool of specific referrers who have connections for the type of role that needs to be filled. This personal and targeted approach will significantly boost your response rates, as well as the quality of referrals. Targeting the company’s top-performing employees is a good first step.

4. Highlighting the Power of Inter-Org Relationships

Depending on your organization and industry, relationships can be a major factor in the company’s daily operations, and can play a role in how your employee referral program works. Often, the quality of the personal connection to the candidate is the top motivator for an employee referral, and can directly influence factors such as job satisfaction. Incidentally, referral employees tend to experience higher job satisfaction than non-referred. Referring employees often reciprocate these positive motivators, leading to a greater personal investment in the company and longer tenure, thanks in part to the implicit commitment to the referring friend.

With the right sourcing tools, businesses can build more strategic relationships within personalized talent communities, allowing hiring teams to organize and manage high-quality talent before the demand hits. Modern recruiting software or ATSs are designed to communicate directly with targeted talent communities and send branded messaging that drives impact and conversion.

Employee Referrals are Just One Part of the Strategy

With unemployment in the US dipping below 4 percent in April 2018—a first since the dot-com boom of 2000—recruiting top talent in today’s job market is becoming more difficult than ever. Individuals can afford to be picky, which puts pressure on cost-conscious organizations fighting over talent in a competitive seller’s market, particularly in tech. Thanks to direct sourcing practices, companies are reaching the right talent more directly, but the value of employee referrals should not be discounted as part of a larger TA strategy.

Though recruiters are changing how they source top talent, employee referrals still rank among the top candidate sourcing methods. As we have seen, referrals have a significant impact on your current employees’ engagement, your company brand, and the important relationships that drive business. Understanding these factors when leveraging your employee network for referrals or implementing an employee referral program ensures that your employees will champion the success of the entire company—regardless of their job description—and reach out to share what makes their company worth applying for. In an era where company culture and brand values are one of the top selling points for applicants, nurturing positive relationships with employees and boosting their engagement should be at the top of your company priorities.

Don’t become the “boiled frog” of Talent Acquisition by sticking with an ATS that is slowing down your company’s hiring process. Here are the warning signs and what to look for instead.

A malady known as “boiled frog syndrome” frequently plagues the HR community. Like the frog who sits placidly in a pot of slowly heating water until it is eventually boiled alive, HR tends to ignore the warning signs that their ATS has begun to hinder—instead of help—the hiring process. At a certain point, it’s time to stop creating workarounds and find something that works.

Why does it matter? Because at the end of the day hiring success is business success. The competitive edge of future businesses will be their ability to attract, select and hire the right talent on demand and on a budget. Modern businesses all leverage powerful and innovative software to optimize their workflow, with recruiters, hiring managers, and staffing firms among the earliest adopters within many organizations, especially when facing demands to source and hire great talent. Of the recruiting software applications designed to enhance recruiting workflow, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) offer many HR teams the flexibility and features necessary to make smarter hiring decisions that are scalable.

How Does an ATS Work?

Applicant Tracking Systems are a type of software that facilitates and optimizes the hiring process. HR teams create and post job openings within the ATS and push them out to the company career page or an external job board. The ATS then monitors the applications that are submitted, screens candidate resumes and CVs, and scores them based on criteria that demonstrate a candidate’s qualifications and fit for the role. After compiling candidate profiles into an ATS, the software monitors the status of all job applications and candidates along every step of the hiring process—from application submission to the job offer.

Not all ATSs Are Created Equal

While the basic idea remains constant across systems, the quality of execution varies greatly. And though changing systems can be onerous, if you are experiencing any of the following, it’s time to find a new ATS before your boiled frog syndrome affects your company’s bottom line.

1. Unable to Automate Annoying Administrative Tasks

Hiring managers and recruiters spend an average of eight hours per week on manual, repetitive tasks that could easily be automated. In addition to the obvious productivity cost, these tasks are a common source of ire for many recruiters. Automating administrative tasks like generating pre-screening questions, drafting interview requests, leaving candidate feedback, and source tracking applications with an ATS can save recruiters and hiring managers precious time and resources to spend on interviewing and sourcing candidates.

Optimization is a main attraction of an ATS, but if your existing software is not capable of replicating your current recruiting workflow or cannot handle the demands placed on it then it’s time to switch.

2. Creates Bottlenecks, Increasing Time to Hire

Recruiters are familiar with the frustrations of bottlenecks in the hiring process, whether it’s a flood of applicants clogging your candidate pipeline or applications waiting in limbo for review by hiring managers. Hiring at a steady cadence is good for your company and its brand, as it decreases overall time to hire, minimizes cost to hire, and creates a better candidate experience (not to mention makes for happier recruiters and hiring managers).

Your ATS should be able to usher candidates through each stage of the hiring process quickly and smoothly, allowing your entire hiring team to make smarter decisions along the way. This means that a quality ATS should offer reports telling you how long a candidate spent at each stage of the hiring process, detailed feedback from hiring managers, and data-driven evaluations of job applicants. If simple candidate decisions are taking too long to execute, then your ATS is not performing one of its key functions.

3. Outdated Keyword-Matching Technology Makes You Miss Candidates with the Actual Skills

Modern ATS systems rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to sort through a huge volume of candidate resumes and CVs by scanning them for specific keywords. This process is simple and effective but can be problematic, especially as the process relies on candidates using exact keywords in their application. As a result, eligible and skilled candidates may be excluded from the hiring process if their resumes don’t contain the right keywords.

In response, the next wave of applicant tracking systems leverage smarter AI tools and natural language processing (NLP) to score candidates and their resumes based on the job requirements and descriptions rather than keywords. These innovations are also important in eliminating recruiter bias from the hiring process.

4. Tracking Falls Short, Leaving You Unable to Replicate Hiring Successes

Finding out where your best candidates come from can help focus your future recruiting efforts, but if your ATS is unable to track various candidate sources—job boards, social media, or recruiting agencies—then you may be spending resources on channels that offer a poor return on your investment.

A good ATS should clearly track candidate sources and give insight into how to build personalized talent communities, enabling hiring teams to manage high-quality talent ahead of demand. Knowing the best channels for candidate sourcing allows recruiters to target passive and active candidates both inside and outside the company network.

5. Prevents You From Scaling Your Hiring Practices

Company growth is good, but what if your ATS can’t keep up? HR should be driving business expansion, not holding it back. To pace the demands of an expanding enterprise—from a startup to a multinational firm—an effective ATS can handle sourcing from multiple channels, support an engaging company career page, and drive more candidate traffic to your recruiting pipeline—all without inflating your hiring budget.

Know When to Make the Call

Legacy recruiting software and applicant tracking systems often fall short when faced with the demands of the modern hiring process. In an era where accessibility to jobs is greater than ever before, the best recruiting software anticipates the needs of modern businesses and candidates who use them. Find out more about how SmartRecruiters revolutionizes applicant tracking system functionality. Already have a legacy system in place? SmartRecruiters also makes it easy to replace an existing ATS.

For this independent music distributor, staying relevant in a continually disrupted industry means taking a non-traditional approach to client needs and staffing.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, physical formats like CDs dominated the music industry, comprising over 99 percent of all worldwide revenue. The Big Six labels—Warner, EMI, Sony, BMG, Universal, and PolyGram—controlled nearly all music distribution rights and reaped all profits. By the mid-2000s, however, it was a different world. iPods replaced Discmans, iTunes replaced record stores, and digital services began to take hold as the new industry standard.

When Napster blew up the Big Six oligopoly in 2001, it took the bottom out of record-store revenues and opened the market for the kind of on-demand streaming we enjoy today. While the new consumer norm is to create networks on streaming platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube, industry profits have not recovered. Despite three years of consecutive growth, music industry revenues in 2017 were just 68 percent of what they were in 1999. As a whole, the industry raked in $17 billion last year, up 8 percent from the previous year, but those figures fall short compared to the $25 billion of 1999.

This mix-and-match, playlist-based behavior reflects the free-flowing nature of today’s digital economy – complete with the struggle to profit from subscription models and subsist on paltry ad sales. So how can an independent, digital music distributor navigate such an inhospitable industry and still turn a profit?

In a world where even the definition of “record label” is up for debate, Ingrooves Music Group walks the line between distribution company and marketing agency, liaising between artists/labels and third-party retailers like Spotify or Apple Music. The company also tracks the analytics, managing rights and royalties for its clients.

During the early years of conflict between analog and digital formats, Ingrooves Music Group was founded when entrepreneur Robb McDaniels saw a business opportunity in the nascent digital music scene of 2002: Music was quickly becoming accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and new bands, DJs, and other artists needed help promoting and distributing their music across the web. As part of his mission to create the “digital record label of the future”, McDaniels sought to bridge the gap between music artists and music retailers, offering a platform for more accessible music distribution and artist representation: An artist or label sends Ingrooves a song or album, which is then converted into the proper format and pushed out to iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, and 600 other digital retailers. When someone buys or streams the music, the artist’s royalties are passed along to ­Ingrooves, which pools them and then reimburses the artist. Ingrooves profits by taking a percentage (10%–30%) of an album’s wholesale cost (A typical album ­on iTunes retails for $10 and wholesales for $7).

In the midst of this race for digital domination, people remain a key element of the music industry, and Ingrooves understands that at the end of the day, it’s not algorithms, but people, that truly matter. “That’s just the core of HR, and our job is to take care of our clients,” says David Kroes, who had been heading Ingrooves’ hiring drives for technical and creative teams since January, 2016, captaining recruiters, hiring managers, and employees through the modern music industry.

With offices in Los Angeles, New York, London, Berlin, Oslo, and Victoria, BC, Ingrooves currently generates around $150 million in annual revenue and holds a two percent market share of recorded music in the US. To stay on top of competition within the industry, Ingrooves is pressured to manage a highly successful global team. A poor hire could cost the company, and in an industry feverishly scraping away at profits, that is one mistake Ingrooves cannot afford.

Hundreds of candidates flood Kroes’ inbox on a regular basis looking to break into the music scene. Unfortunately, the reality of pacing such an uncertain industry is that many employees become obsolete and burn out much faster than in other organizations. “The music industry is a lot like surfing” says Kroes. “People keep coming back even though it’s not the most forgiving environment, but their love for the industry is what keeps people loyal.”

The Ingrooves business model is a far cry from that of the brick-and-mortar retailers like Tower Records—the last of which shuttered in December 2006, more or less the final breath of the American record industry as we knew it—but as Ingrooves emerged, its practices were already forward-thinking, earning mainstream recognition as one of the first independent distribution companies to partner with iTunes. The music industry, however, is a fickle beast. In a few short years, on-demand streaming would incite another format revolution that, to this day, shows no signs of slowing.

Figures released by IFPI’s Global Music Trends 2018 report show that streaming accounts for 38 percent of total recorded music revenue, making it the industry’s single largest profit driver for the first time ever, with 176 million users of paid streaming services contributing to a 41 percent growth over last year.

With real money to be made from this new format ($5.6 billion in 2017) companies like Spotify, Apple, Google, and Amazon all currently offer dedicated, paid streaming platforms. Additionally, video streaming services like YouTube comprise more than half of on-demand stream time, attracting 1.3 billion total users in 2017, according to the IFPI report. How does Kroes plan on keeping Ingrooves ahead of upcoming changes within the industry while supporting the workforce powering a global music distribution and marketing company?

“At Ingrooves, we went through a situation where we were a teenager for a long time,” he says. “We were a startup and we never really outgrew the startup mode. After I joined the team we really started to realize our opportunity to become an adult.”

Pushing the company into the next phase wasn’t about changing out the old guard for fresh blood, it was about building a “culture of adults” that are adaptable and able to think on their feet. “The culture at Ingrooves is still evolving, and new talent is bringing it in,” says Kroes. “You always want to bring in new perspectives and balance that with experience. To me, experience is the best teacher.”

Kroes came onboard in the midst of company-wide restructuring that required a challenging personnel shift and revamp of its company brand. With a strong grasp on the analytics and reporting side of licensing, publishing, and distribution, Ingrooves doubled down on its high-impact marketing, PR, and promotion, working closer with artists and other industry organizations, to “help them understand and anticipate their needs” before they even knew what to ask for, a paradigm that Kroes carried over into his recruiting practices. Kroes leveraged his decade-plus of experience working in TA, as well as a strong background in philosophy, to reshape the organization’s approach to hiring.

“Media companies, whether TV, movies, or music, are very much people businesses,” he notes. “A lot of talent is not cookie-cutter.” In order to hire both technical and creative roles in tandem, Kroes needed a non-traditional approach, which, he says was made possible with tools like the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite. “A good recruiter should be looking for ways to find talent that maybe other people haven’t, and SmartRecruiters allows you to experiment with a smart approach that pushes the limits of what the tool is designed to do,” says Kroes. “It gives you more insight into the state of things.”

While predicting what’s next to come in the music industry is far from science, Kroes is confident that Ingrooves Music Group will continue to adapt as the industry embraces on-demand streaming. Issues such as diminishing profit margins will be a challenge, but Ingrooves is ready to face the challenges like the now grown-up company that it is, one which, with Kroes at the helm, can finally have its HR Head say that the company, firmly, “knows the path forward.”

In the first-ever SmartRecruiters Hackathon, customers tested the limits of the platform API and their own creativity in just 24 hours.

When the right tools for the job don’t exist you need to invent them. This sentiment captures the spirit behind SmartRecruiters’ first-ever Hackathon challenge, issued at the Hiring Success conference last March.

The feature-rich SmartRecruiters open Marketplace API offers development teams a platform to build applications for direct integration into the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite. To test the flexibility of the SmartRecruiters API, the Hiring Success Hackathon gave four customer teams a SmartRecruiters advisor and 24 hours to design, build, and implement new platform features that would offer value to users, and demonstrate innovation and creativity. With a $5,000 grand prize on the line the four teams quickly set upon their task.

At the end of the competition, the four teams presented their finished products in front of judges Bill Boorman, Steve Fogarty, and Ethan Medeiros, all of whom were beyond impressed with the final results.

“The one thing we were unanimous about was that we genuinely could have made any one of these products a winner,” said Bill Boorman. “That made it difficult to judge because they were all on the money.” Steve Fogarty continued, commenting that “every one of those products we found useful.”

“I was impressed with all of the teams,” said Ethan Medeiros. “Every one of them came up with an idea and a build-out in just 24 hours.” Boorman went on to praise the teams for their efforts, claiming, “I think the standard of product after 24 hours was better than I’ve seen at a Hackathon before. What you usually see is more buggy, and you have to imagine what the products will eventually look like.”

After a brief deliberation, the judges declared team Visa the winner for its internal candidate mobility add-on. With more companies focusing on promoting candidates from within their organization, the Hackathon judges recognized Visa’s solution to the rising demand for in-house talent. “The product that I’m being asked about most often is something for internal candidates,” said Steven Fogarty. “Right now they can search for a job and apply and that’s it. This next generation of talent coming through the door cares about transparency, their data, and what feedback people are giving them.”

*****

Team Avery Dennison
Avery Dennison, the global manufacturer and distributor of self-adhesive labels, apparel branding tags, and label materials, focused on creating a tool to optimize their recruiter tasks, as high-volume hiring is a key function of their business. The average time for a job posting is about 1.5 hours and can cost $37.50–$457.50 depending on the method. For companies like Avery Dennison that need to fill thousands of positions, recruiters and hiring managers spend too much valuable time manually publishing and updating their open job postings.

Rather than navigate a littered desktop of notifications and hastily scrawled Post-it notes, Avery Dennison built a Google Chrome plugin that allows recruiters to specify a date range for open positions as they input the job description and details. “As recruiters publish jobs, they don’t need to set a reminder,” says Mike Penny, TA Manager at Avery Dennison. “It eliminates some of that potential for error in forgetting to unpublish or pull the req down.”

To further automate the process, when a job posting expires, the feature deploys an email to recruiters and hiring managers with the total number of applicants and the top-match candidates according to the SmartRecruiters AI Recruiting Assistant.

Team Square

Square, the financial services company producing software and hardware payment products for mobile and tablet, looked to also reduce the number of non-value-added recruiter tasks by optimizing their interview scheduling protocols.

Square processes multiple candidate interviews every week, and manually coordinating six different schedules for the members of their hiring committees is inefficient. “That time cost from the recruiting coordinating side is extremely intensive,” says Stephanie Snyder, Recruiting Manager at Square, who estimates the company spends an estimated 240 hours per week on scheduling tasks.

Aiming to cut that time in half, the Square team built an application that assembles an interview panel of your choosing and schedules an interview time slot. Currently, panel organizers at Square toggled Google Calendar and SmartRecruiters to view team availability and schedule interviews, but the Square team predicts that a future version of their application would include a visual calendar UI that integrates these two functions in one dashboard to improve scheduling efficiency.

Once a panel is created, members can also access and revise notes about a candidate throughout the hiring process, a feature that eliminates the need to manually pull candidate data after the interview.

Team VISA

Visa, the financial juggernaut with over 12,400 employees in five major hubs worldwide, sought to answer the question: How can we retain our best talent after hiring? Visa’s answer was to build internal mobility add-on that makes it easier for employees to apply for new opportunities within the company.

Visa’s team of developers structured its strategy around three essential criteria that internal candidates seek:

1. More details, transparency, and information on the front end of the recruiting process.
2. Updates about the status of applications already submitted.
3. Where they are in the application process.

To encourage more internal candidate applications, the Visa team of developers designed their tool to be a seamless and transparent process, beginning with the login page, which quickly ushers internal candidates to the dashboard with a single-click sign in. To smooth the transition from Visa’s internal portal to the SmartRecruiters ATS, the team branded their dashboard, which automatically prioritizes newer internal postings on top of the feed.

When a new position is available, candidates can view the names of the recruiters and hiring managers for that position, and apply with just one click, as their user profile automatically fills in all relevant user data on the application. Candidates can view all jobs to which they have applied from the main dashboard.

Team SmartRecruiters

Riding the wave of excitement following SmartRecruiters’ spring release announcement, SmartRecruiters’ own team of developers couldn’t resist building their own new feature for the Hackathon. The SR team built an integration between Facebook Jobs and SmartRecruiters that allows companies to advertise their open positions in the Facebook Jobs page and give candidates the ability to view, share, and apply for jobs through their social profiles.

“This is all live, people can apply for these positions right now,” said Jem Sweeney, Product Manager at SmartRecruiters, demonstrating how the integration encourages candidates to share open positions among their network and answer screening questions all within Facebook’s platform. “You get a massive boost in your ability to get jobs in front of people and get referrals, as people can recommend jobs and apply immediately.” To attract applicants within certain industries or demographics, companies can also leverage Facebook’s native advertising and targeting algorithms to reach candidates without any additional effort or resources.

Gameloft‘s profile is filled with some pretty astronomical numbers, which isn’t that surprising when you consider it is the world’s largest publisher of mobile and video games. With 3 million daily downloads, 140 million monthly users and 2016 sales of $256 million, Gameloft clearly doesn’t do things on a small scale.

However, that’s not the end of Gameloft’s impressive haul of integers, as all this progress was made thanks to 6,000 employers in 48 offices in 30 countries. That means there’s barely a time zone without a Gameloft office.

Recruiting Locally, Globally

Since Gameloft has spread into diverse and myriad countries, it needed a way to ensure standardized recruitment processes across all its offices, while simultaneously allowing for flexibility on the local scale.

Unfortunately, the applicant tracking system that may have served Gameloft in the early years wasn’t up to the task of hiring both  globally AND locally. Furthermore, a drawn out and convoluted recruitment process could have been deterring countless talented candidates. As Gameloft HR Manager Romain Delebecque explains:

“Whether hiring a software architect in Romania or a game designer in Vietnam, we need to make sure that the application process is smooth and represents a company that the best developers in the world want to work for — in any office worldwide.”

That’s why, in 2016, Gameloft found a new solution: SmartRecruiters.

Global Data All In One Place

SmartRecruiters’ Talent Acquisition Platform provided the ideal response to the needs of an expanding, global company. Here are just some of the ways how:

• SmartRecruiters is localized in 16 user languages and 35 candidate facing ones, allowing Gameloft’s diverse recruiters and candidates to communicate clearly in their native languages.
• Clear and concise reporting, applicant tracking and data-backed metrics provides both recruiters with unprecedented visibility. No more lengthy email chains asking for updates or information, it’s all available on one dashboard. As Delebecque says, for a global recruiter “it’s all about the data.”
• SmartRecruiters allows for additional tools and infrastructure to be easily integrated into the platform. This promotes local flexibility and means recruiters spend more time assessing candidates and less time navigating clunky software.
• The ease of use of SmartRecruiters for both users and candidates, including one click applications, means Gameloft can cultivate a positive candidate experience that best matches the innovativeness of their company.

To hear more from Romain Delebecque, read SmartRecruiters’ full Gameloft case study:  Hire the world’s best talent in 30 countries? Game on!

Over the past 30 years, DFC Global Corp has become one of the world’s leading providers of accessible consumer finance services, taking the lead in serving unbanked, underbanked and small business owners across the world.

With around 1,000 branches in seven countries and a staff of 6,500 members, DFC recruiters require a tool which can assist and support the quantity of candidates they expect, especially when you consider the company favors a high-volume model headed up by only six recruiters working in close cooperation with local managers.

Tangled In The Spreadsheet Quagmire

To deal with this task, the North American division of DFC established the North American Talent Acquisition Center of Excellence in 2014 – a group designed to find the best candidates and ensure DFC maintained its high level of staffing.

Up until the creation of this group, DFC had been relying purely on rudimentary email and excel spreadsheets, creating a vast and unnavigable administrative mess which Jason Fisher, the Director of North American Talent Acquisition, likened to ‘the dark ages’.

As well as being antiquated in approach, this method was also incredibly time consuming and inefficient. Recruiters would be spending many more hours than necessary in their hunts and were still not finding the best candidates at the end of it all.

Faced with this, Jason and his team created a set of specifications any new adopted system would have to satisfy. Firstly, it should be easy to pick up and use, secondly it should be flexible in terms of integrations, and finally it should provide additional analytics, metrics and data so the recruitment efforts could be properly scrutinized and analyzed.

A Platform That Meets All Specifications

With SmartRecruiters, DFC found a solution which perfectly matched their requirements. Here’s how:

• SmartRecruiters’ integrated assessments means recruiters only had to deal with applications that passed a certain criteria. This meant they spent less time sifting through resumes attached to emails, and more time working with the most promising candidates.
• The flexibility of SmartRecruiters’ APIs means it can be easily integrated with DFC’s existing or desired tools, such as Cornerstone Insights.
• SmartRecruiters comes pre-packaged with a suite of analytical tools providing recruiters with a wide range of metrics. This can allow them to conduct testing on their sourcing and processes, potentially allowing for savings in terms of time and recruitment costs.
• The ability to quickly and easily collaborate within the SmartRecruiters platform ultimately allows for higher quality hires and an end to lengthy email chains.

As a result of working with SmartRecruiters, DFC saw major positive changes in its recruitment process, in particular regarding efficiency . They now save 900 work hours per week compared to their time in the ‘dark ages’, while the metrics and additional tools have reduced administrative costs to the equivalent of 200 hours per week.

Additionally, the number of qualified candidates DFC receives rose by 30%.

Thanks to this success with the North American division, SmartRecruiters has been rolled out in all DFC branches in the UK.

To find out more about how SmartRecruiters revolutionized DFC’s recruitment, check out the dedicated case study: DFC Leaves The Dark Ages.

You could perhaps be forgiven for thinking ancient literature and technology are not natural bedfellows. Well, SmartRecruiters sales-whiz and ancient cultures expert, Alkestis ‘Al’ Spinou is a walking contradiction of that idea.

Alkestis, who joined SmartRecruiters in 2017, is currently Head of Sales Development for DACH – that’s Germany, Austria and Switzerland to the un-acronym-savvy out there – and works with various customers from different national and business cultures. This means, as a sales person, it’s imperative she gets to know her clients closely, making sure she is finely attuned to their requirements and delivering the best solution possible.

With Alkestis taking so much time and effort to get to know others, it only seems fair we take the time to return the favor and get to know her too with her very own SmartRecruiters interview.

So, where are you from originally?

Greece. I grew up in Athens, but my parents are from two islands towards Italy: Zakynthos and Corfu.

How does Athens compare to Berlin for you?

I think Athens needs some years to become as multicultural as Berlin. I love the fact that I got to experience different cultures here.

How would you describe your job at SmartRecruiters?

Well, I create awareness around the issue of candidate experience. The opportunity to offer someone the best interview process and make them passionate about a position and a company before they are even hired. I also try to handle each company individually: see their problems, go through them and find a solution.

In terms of candidate experience, what do you find is the most important thing candidates mention a lot?

The fact that it is quick, modern and speaks to millenials. I’ve been through that myself, of course, because we use what we sell. Candidates especially like our one-click-application: no logging in, no filling in forms, no buzzkills.

I was going to ask you what is the easiest thing to sell about SmartRecruiters. Is this it, or do you find recruiters like another aspect?

For companies it is mostly the collaboration within the teams. It includes hiring managers in the process and allows them to work together with recruiters.

A perusal of your LinkedIn shows you studied Ancient Cultures and Languages. I always think history is a good grounding for any career, but how specifically does it help you with sales?

I studied papyrology and epigraphy – which is basically deciphering ancient scripts – and although it might not seem immediately applicable to sales, there are a lot of transferable skills. Firstly, it helps to develop strong research skills which you can apply, well, practically everywhere. Not to brag, but I am a very good researcher! Also it’s very important in academia to develop excellent communication skills, and be able to pass your message across: to someone with no experience in the subject all the way up to a professor who has been in the field for twenty years. This comes in handy when talking with different companies, all of which have divergent needs and people with different backgrounds representing them.

So, if you had to give someone the top three pieces of advice to becoming a great sales person, what would you say?

First, you have to personalize your approach to each potential customer. Second, you have to develop what we call in Germany ‘Seelenruhe’ which can be translated as inner peace, or peace of soul. You need to trust that things are going to work out. Lastly, do your research. There is nothing worse in sales than not knowing who you are talking with and what problems they might be trying to tackle.

To find out more about how SmartRecruiters personalizes solutions for its users, read our in-depth customer case studies.

Ok. So, how would you describe yourself outside of your work?

That’s hard. I love languages. I love museums. I love to travel. I love going to the movies. And on my day-to-day life I enjoy going out with friends, having a nice meal and, above all, playing board games. I’m that kind of person.

Oh really? What’s your favorite board game?

Right now, it’s 7 Wonders Duel. This version is obviously only for two players. Of course, with board games it’s always the more the merrier. But with Duel, I cannot stop playing. I’m addicted.

What kind of board games do you prefer? Do you like the American action-oriented ones, or the indepth German ones where you have to build a rail network or something?

I like both depending on time. I think for a casual game, something in between would be awesome.

Something that has a good level of difficulty but doesn’t take 3 hours to explain?

Exactly.

It seems like board games are really becoming more popular now and have kind of shaken off their geeky reputation.

I have been into board games from a young age. It didn’t help through high school, but who cares. Board games are cool.

You mentioned films as well. I always think films are a good indicator of the person. So what would you say is your favorite film?

It’s really difficult… One film that comes to mind, because I watched it three or four times, is As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson. I also enjoyed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I cried through La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful), a classic comedy-drama set during the war.

You like quite sad films then?

What I figured out about myself is this: if I were to pick a favorite day-to-day genre it would be sci-fi. But the film that I will definitely watch again is a feel-good-in-the-end type film. Not just romantic and pink and clouds all over but, one which shows signs of hope. Or just reminds you to be happy and grateful.

You mentioned music earlier? Are you someone who listens to music while working?

Yes. I don’t have a go-to. I sometimes listen to Greek radio. It’s got some really positive vibes, in my opinion. I have two or three stations back in Greece I listen to, so genre-wise it can be a little bit random.

So you can listen in Greek and work in English and German at the same time?

Yeah, it doesn’t make sense I know! Well, this job requires some serious multi-tasking, and the fact that I have the radio on and working on something else is really helpful.

Want to find out more about our incredible staff? Check out: Meet Valerie Bertrand: SmartRecruiters’ Rock-Loving Head of Legal