Whether you’re going through budget cuts or scaling up, you’re probably being asked to do more with less. To make money, your company needs people, and your ATS is essential to getting the right people in the right roles faster. 

The right applicant tracking system properly configured, can save money by increasing recruiter productivity, employee retention, compliance, and speed to hire. Let’s look at all the ways an enterprise-grade ATS can save your company money while making better hires.

1. Automate interview scheduling. Interview scheduling can take up a vast amount of time for recruiters and recruiting coordinators. With SmartRecruiters’ automated scheduling system, food delivery and grocery store business Wolt kept the same number of recruiting coordinators while scaling from 1000 to 6000 employees in just three years.
2. Automate candidate screening. Text messaging chatbots allow you to reach more candidates, screen them all quickly, and schedule interviews without even making a phone call. It can even be done on outdated phones: Anglo American, a mining company, processed 12,500 applications in less than an hour with a text messaging system built for non-internet-enabled phones.
3. Streamline hiring processes. Scorecard hiring brings transparency to the hiring process, allowing teams to make better hiring decisions with a consistent evaluation strategy that covers desired skills, behaviors, and competencies. Increasing retention by using a system that helps you make better hires saves your company money with reduced recruiting costs later on.
4. Improve reporting relevancy: How efficient are your processes? Where are you losing candidates? With role-level drillable dashboards and export to BI tools, you can pinpoint exactly where your hiring process is breaking down and take steps to mitigate roadblocks. Wolt kept its leaders up-to-date by integrating TA analytics into its business intelligence tool. Did we mention that smart volume hiring helped Wolt get acquired by DoorDash?
5. Streamline offers: Your ATS should allow you to make same-day offers that can be signed digitally. With easily configurable offer letters in SmartRecruiters, you won’t lose candidates before they get another offer — and you won’t waste resources looking for another person to fill the vacancy left by the one who got away.
6. Automate consent and candidate data retention. Non-compliance can be costly, so you must ensure that candidates consent to each type of interaction. Additionally, your system should be configured to automatically handle candidate data retention as required by law in your local jurisdiction to minimize the risk of non-compliance.
7. Empower internal mobility and referrals. An ATS with an internal jobs portal that simplifies employee job search and referrals improves your employee experience, increases retention, and boosts morale with referral bonuses. After just three months with SmartRecruiters Employee Portal, telecommunications company CityFibre filled 40% of its positions with referrals and internal hires. 
8. Advertise in the right places.  The old adage about advertising, “I know that half of my money is wasted, but I don’t know which half” is rendered obsolete with the automated ad spend adjustments in a modern ATS. With SmartJobs, you can manage all your job board contracts all in one view and optimize spending in real-time.  
9. Amplify your employer brand. Employer branding and a careers page may require some upfront investment, but this is the place where spending a little can save you a lot. Candidates can self-select and get inspired by your mission and growth opportunities. For Aspen Skiing Company, better job visibility on a central careers site resulted in a 24% reduction in recruitment marketing spend.
10. Streamline your recruiting tech stack. Fees add up and people waste time chasing reports from system to system. By bringing a CRM, recruiting, onboarding, internal mobility, and referrals all under one roof, you get analytics in one place and reduce the IT burden.
11. Integrate with time and money-saving tools. Perhaps your ATS can’t do everything, but it can make it easier for you by integrating with tools that bring you time and money savings. Background checks, reference checking, and AI-powered sourcing are just a few of the solutions in your recruiting tech stack that promote efficiency and time savings when integrated into your ATS.

As we’ve shown, an applicant tracking system impacts the amount of time recruiters, hiring managers, recruiting coordinators, legal, and IT staff spend on getting the right people in the door – and that time is money.

For a deep dive into how money in multiple ways across your talent acquisition function, download our Guide to Evaluating the Business Value of a Talent Acquisition Platform.

In addition to more details the 11 items listed here, you’ll get information on 5 business value drivers for talent acquisition and 2 checklists to help your organization prioritize its TA platform search. Get in touch with us today and see how we can help save your company time and money by creating a more efficient talent acquisition process. 

When I founded SmartRecruiters, the vision was simple: connect people to jobs at scale by making hiring easier. Hiring is a fragmented, opaque process undermined by outdated technology that turns off candidates and hiring managers. But it doesn’t have to be.

I imagined a world where finding great candidates is easy, it’s easy for people to show interest in jobs, it’s easy for hiring teams to collaborate, and vendors are just a click away. And then we developed SmartRecruiters.

And in the process, we built more than just recruiting software. We built a completely new function, and created a new category based not on what recruiting had always done, but instead by rethinking what recruiting could be.

11 million or so hires later, we’ve proven that Hiring Success works, and that we’ve helped redefine the talent acquisition function from a cost center into a profit driver for thousands of employers all around the world. 

Their success, of course, is our success. Which is why today, we announced the results of our Series E funding round, raising $110 million dollars led by Silver Lake Waterman, with existing investors Insight Partners and the Mayfield Fund participating. 

With the support of these partners, we are able to continue, and greatly accelerate, our growth in North America, Europe, APAC and beyond. We are accelerating our disruption of the talent technology market that Deloitte forecasts as representing $140 billion in global spending, a number that’s only expected to continue to grow in the months and years ahead.

When we started, I never imagined this company would be worth $1.5 billion and that it would reach unicorn status. It’s something I’m extremely proud of, but I’m even more proud of the work we’ve done in helping our customers, and our candidates, achieve Hiring Success. I’m thrilled to see true market validation of the product so many of us worked so hard to build.

But I’m even more excited that, after many months of uncertainty during a global pandemic, we were able to continue growing our business, extending our value to both customers and candidates alike. Not only did we refuse to lay off any employees, our results last year were the best we’ve seen yet, with our revenues and customer base nearly doubling during the COVID crisis. 

The pandemic changed how talent acquisition works forever – employers and workers across the globe dramatically shifted their expectations around what work means, and what makes work meaningful.

As a result, over 800 of the world’s best known brands and biggest employers have turned to SmartRecruiters to equip them with the right tools to adapt to the new normal, and today, Hiring Success is more important than ever.

And with today’s announcement, SmartRecruiters has the capital, along with our existing technology and proven expertise, to help companies achieve Hiring Success on a scale that’s never been done before. 

Most importantly, we’re staying true to our mission and helping the world get back to work. Hiring Success starts with engaging people at every stage through an efficient process focused on connecting candidates with jobs they want while giving employers the talent they need.

What is blocking a company from getting there? Hiring Success demands change. And if there’s one thing we’ve all learned over the past year, it’s that change is the only constant.

With this latest funding round, we are uniquely positioned to help drive that change. And this, to me, is the realization of the vision we had when we first launched SmartRecruiters – to give every company the tools they need to attract and hire the highest quality candidates as efficiently and effectively as possible, and to give every candidate a job they love.

We believe in Hiring Success because we know how much is riding on getting this right. When you connect people to jobs at scale and make hiring easier, good things happen for everyone involved. That’s why we’re committed to helping companies achieve Hiring Success outcomes – because ultimately, you are who you hire, and who you hire is how you win.

Over the past year, we, like nearly every company, were challenged to navigate a world of unprecedented change and uncertainty. Though it wasn’t always easy, we were also given the opportunity to redefine how we wanted to grow SmartRecruiters, the value we could unlock for our customers, what we envisioned for the future of talent acquisition technology, and what we needed to bring to our business to accomplish these goals.

In the face of adversity, we not only survived, but thrived – and achieved today’s milestone by staying true to the vision and values on which SmartRecruiters was built. Thank you to my fellow Smartians, our customers, partners, investors, candidates and everyone else who’s helped support and collaborate with us on our journey.

Every one of us are stakeholders in helping get the world back to work, and while we’ve come a long way in transforming our mission and vision into a reality, today’s announcement is really just the beginning.

Now, the real work begins. And I couldn’t be more excited.

Historically we’ve tracked and measured hundreds of metrics in our customers’ hiring activities inside the SmartRecruiters platform. This year, we have distilled that number down to 15 metrics that have the highest correlation with the health and performance of talent acquisition organizations as witnessed by our previous analysis. 

These metrics reflect our customers’ hiring performance in 5 important categories: Hiring Team Engagement, Recruiting Team Performance, Candidate Experience Management, and Company Internal Engagement.

Additionally, we have focused on metrics that are least impacted by variables such as company size, industry, type of roles typically hired, size of hiring teams, etc. 1) For each award, we use a combination of 3+ metrics that measure different aspects to support the selection. 2) We normalize the metrics with interfering variables to prevent favoring any particular type or company size.  

The winners will be selected from customers with the best performance across those metrics from Jan 1, 2019, to Dec 31, 2019. 

Most Compelling Candidate Experience Award

Candidates say the No.1 frustration during the overall job search is the lack of response from employers. The Candidate Experience Award applauds employers who take the time to continuously communicate status updates to their candidates at all stages in the hiring process. The award measures three factors: the response rate to all applicants, the response rate to interviewed and rejected candidates, and the speed of the first response. 

Most Productive Recruiting Team Award

A recruiting team’s success requires a combination of timely hires and systematic pipeline management. Successful recruiting teams make more hires on time and manage their candidate pipelines with intention. The Recruiting Team Award measures three important aspects of recruiters: their ability to fulfill the companies’ hiring needs, their efficiency, and their management of the candidate pipeline. 

Most Collaborative Hiring Team Award

Hiring the best talent takes a tremendous amount of teamwork. The Hiring Team Award recognizes a highly structured, efficient, and collaborative hiring team. The award measures three important factors: the level of involvement from hiring team members, the robustness of the hiring process, and the efficiency of individual interviewers.  

Most Active Company Award

Achieving hiring success takes more than the hard work from talent acquisition practitioners. The Company Award is measured by three important factors that gauge company-wide involvement with recruiting: how successfully employees are engaging with internal opportunities, the relative size of active user base, and the product usage level and user feedback in helping us build a better product.  

And without further ado the winners for 2019!

Most Compelling Candidate Experience

1. Equinox

Equinox prides itself on being the best of the best when it comes to high-quality fitness clubs. With such a top tier customer experience, Equinox needed a way to create the same experience of excellence when it came to candidate experience. Equinox uses a decentralized system for recruitment in which local branch managers conduct their own hiring based on their requirements. This approach utilizes around 20 full-time recruiters supported by over 300 local hiring managers who also often carry out many other Equinox activities on a day-to-day basis. SmartRecruiters decentralized systems to enable Equinox to increase speed and communication between hiring teams and candidates. 

2. Home Instead 
3. Devoteam
4. Wipro Digital 
5. RLH Corp 
6. Colliers International
7. Uncommon Schools
8. Dungarvin
9. International SOS
10. Allstate

Most Productive Recruiting Team

1. Public Storage

Public storage knows how important a productive recruiting team is to business success. With over 2,000 locations public storage needs to move quickly in order to meet the high growth demands of the company. Nathan Tan Head of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Analytics at Public Storage notes how velocity and cost metrics allow you to analyze whether the hiring processes in place are efficient and effective and adapt accordingly.

2. The Nature’s Bounty   
3. WAREMA
4. Evolution Gaming 
5. Uplift Education
6. Arkadin  
7. BlueScope
8. Uncommon Schools
9. Leidos
10. Abercrombie and Fitch Co.

Most Collaborative Hiring Team

1. Astreya

Astreya understands the importance of hiring the right people and to get that done requires communication and collaboration across hiring teams. Priding itself on providing both its clients and employees with unwavering happiness, Astreya relies heavily on hiring collaboration in order to assure a robust and fast-moving hiring process. 

2. Marc Jacobs 
3. BlueScope
4. Education Development Center 
5. Numberly 
6. City of Philadelphia 
7. Play Octopus
8. Jack Link’s Protein Snacks
9. Broadridge
10. Merkle Inc.

Most Active Company

1. Visa 

 With over 19,000 employees in 2019, it’s no surprise that Visa deals with a massive volume of candidates. SmartRecruiters ATS allows them increased engagement and collaboration across the board. With a high rate of user adoption at Visa, hiring teams have been able to achieve fast turnaround rates that increases the offer acceptance rate.

2. Biogen 
3. IKEA 
4. BlueScope
5. Square
6. FireEye
7. Mitie
8. American Iron and Metal
9. The Warehouse Group
10. Expeditors

The Methodology for Hiring Success 20 Awards is as follows. 

Methodology Used to Determine the Winners:

1) Most Collaborative Hiring Team Award

Metric 1 |Percentage of Jobs With at Least 1 Assigned Interviewer

Why: This metric reflects how structured the interview process is.

Metric 2 | Average Time to Complete a Review 

Why: This metric reflects hiring managers’ efficiency at completing their tasks to move the hiring process along.  

Metric 3 | Average Number of Distinct Users Involved per Interviewed Application 

Why: This metric reflects the hiring team’s level of involvement and the robustness of the hiring process. 

Metric 4| Percentage of Interviews With Ratings Submitted 

Why: This metric reflects hiring team’s participation at completing their tasks to move the hiring process along.  

2) Most Productive Recruiting Team Award

Metric 1 | Percentage of Candidates Moved out of New Stage 

Why: This metric reflects how well recruiters manage the candidate pipeline. 

Metric 2 | Completion Rate 

Why: This metric reflects the recruiters’ ability to fulfill the companies’ hiring needs. 

Metric 3 | Percentage of Positions Filled on Time

Why: This metric reflects both recruiters’ ability to hire and their efficiency (hiring on time). 

3) Most Compelling Candidate Experience Award

Metric 1 | Percentage of Applicants Who Receive a Response

Why: This metric reflects the experience of all applicants in terms of the company’s responsiveness. 

Metric 2 | Percentage of Rejected Candidates Who Receive Rejection Messages 

Why: This metric reflects the experience of candidates that do not move forward to be hired, but have at least one personal interaction with the company.  

Metric 3 | Average Time to Reply to a Candidate 

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of wait time. 

Metric 4 | Percentage of Candidates That Are Still in an Active Stage

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of closure and notification. 

Metric 5 | Percentage of Abandoned Candidates 

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of followup and closure. 

4) Most Active Company Award

Metric 1| Percentage of Hires That Are Internal Candidates OR Referral 

Why: This metric reflects how actively and successfully employees are engaging with internal opportunities. 

Metric 2 | % of User Base That Are MAU 

Why: This metric reflects how active the user base is on SmartRecruiters platform.

Metric 3 | UserVoice Upvotes and Requests

Why: This metric reflects the employees’ product usage level and their support of getting us to build a better product.

Congratulations to the winners! Be sure to tune in next year for the 2021 Hiring Success Awards!

Hiring Success is almost here! February 11th-12th, TA leaders from around the globe will congregate at the Marquis Marriott in San Francisco to shape the future of talent acquisition. Where will you be?

With sessions ranging from social justice to inclusive leadership, social media recruiting, gender equality, cutting edge AI deployment and more, it’s hard to imagine a more inspiring conference than Hiring Success. Over 1,200 attendees will share in the insights of veteran recruiting and talent acquisition leaders from companies like Amazon, Visa, IBM, LinkedIn, Bosch, and more.

Below you’ll find seven profiles of speakers presenting at this year’s conference. A preview of coming attractions! 

Dr Steven Jones: JONES, Traveling Monk

Nationally known as one of “America’s Top Experts on Diversity” (Diversity, Inc., 2005), Dr. Jones’ philosophy is to lead with listening to support clients in finding a strategy and solution that works for them. 

Dr. Jones holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, a Master’s in Multicultural Counseling, and a Ph.D. in Industrial/ Organizational Psychology. He is the author of Journey to Excellence, a transformational book helping people define and achieve excellence in their lives.

In the global arena, while he was studying business practices in Chang Mai, Thailand, Dr. Jones became the first person of African descent to be ordained as a Buddhist Monk at a 700 year old monastery called Wat Umong.

Jones will be leading a session on Inclusive Leadership.

Carlos Fernandez: Houston Methodist, Manager of Talent Acquisition

Carlos Fernandez currently oversees talent acquisition strategy, employer branding, and sourcing outreach for a system of eight hotels and a workforce of 23,000+ employees.

Fernandez has over 10 years experience within talent acquisition, project management, learning development, and change management, and has led several technology implementations and processes to enhance the candidate experience. He led the redesign of Houston Methodist’s career site and social media recruitment efforts, increasing overall application volume by 40% since 2016.

Fernandez will be co-leading a roundtable discussion on Candidate Experience.

Gerry Crispin: Principal, CareerXroads

Gerry Crispin founded CareerXroads in 1996 to encourage the transformation of hiring into the 21st century. Today, with his business partner, Chris Hoyt, CareerXroads is in its second decade as a member driven community of Talent leadership teams from 130 major firms who are devoted to learning from and helping one another improve and succeed.

Among other achievements, he has co-authored eight books on the evolution of staffing, and has written hundreds of articles and white papers on similar topics. His career spans fifty years and includes Consulting, Recruitment Advertising, HR leadership positions with Fortune 100 employers, Executive Search and Career Services at the University where he graduated with his BE and in Engineering and IO/Psychology degrees.

Crispin will be leading the following session: What Keeps You Up At Night?

Jonathan Mears: VISA, Head, Global Executive Talent Acquisition

As a global HR and talent executive, Jonathan Mears is known for driving innovation in developing markets. He is currently responsible for Visa’s Global Executive Talent acquisition and delivery across all markets, leading Executive Talent teams to deliver internal and external talent, and Visa’s HR Leadership team.

Mears previously led large cross geographic and functional teams for IBM in 14 countries supporting LATAM, North America, Europe, MEA and Asia Pacific. His areas of expertise include leadership of high performance teams, employment branding and strategic sourcing, contract negotiation, business development, retention, redeployment, and more. 

Mears will be co-leading a roundtable on Interviewing Skills.

Lawrel Aufmuth: Advantage Solutions, Vice President, Talent Acquisition

Lawrel Aufmuth is Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Advantage Solutions. She is an innovator and HR professional with extensive experience in the private and public sector with growth organizations.

Lawrel is well known for delivering measurable results through creative, “out of the box’ solutions that build best in class measurable human capital strategies. Lawrel Aufmuth knows TA in and out, and is an expert in using Artificial Intelligence (RPA & ML & NLP) to bring organizations to new heights. 

Aufmuth will be leading the following session: Turning Recruiting Into a Profit Center.

Sarah Yang: Former Talent Brand & Diversity Lead at Getaround

Sarah Yang is the former Talent Brand & Diversity Lead at Getaround. She crafts and nurtures compelling stories on why Getaround is a wonderful place to work and has over fifteen years of experience in creating videos, blogs, and social media that are critically acclaimed. Yang is the recipient of the prestigious MarCom Platinum Award, which she won for the global recruiting video she co-produced for Workday. 

In addition to being a TA leader, she is a professional drummer, filmmaker, poet, comedian, and improv actor, and a magnetic and animated speaker on creativity (the #1 soft skill according to LinkedIn), diversity, and storytelling to global audiences (i.e. Grace Hopper, Cisco, Workday, Oracle, CoderDojo, Lesbians Who Tech, and Women Who Code).

She will be leading the following session: Convincing Your HMs to Value Diversity Hiring.

Hung Lee: Recruiting Brainfood, Curator

Hung Lee is the founder and CEO of WorkShape.io – the revolutionary recruiting platform for Software engineers and Editor of leading industry newsletter Recruiting Brainfood. He is an industry professional with over 15 years experience as an agency recruiter, recruitment manager, Internal Head of Talent, recruitment trainer and strategic advisor for rapid growth businesses.

This is the second installment of Common Perceptions in Talent Acquisition That Must Change. Part I addresses the false notion that Talent Acquisition (TA) is an unnecessary source of overhead costs for businesses. The following is another commonly held, but inaccurate belief in the industry.

Hiring (Well) Means “Letting Go”

Relinquishing control and trusting that those around you will do the right thing is not always easy. There are tons of HR executives and TA professionals out there who think that the only people who can execute a TA strategy are recruiters and recruitment leaders.  As business needs are constantly changing and evolving, the concept of forecasting accurate hiring numbers (forget layering in the complexity of attrition) is as nebulous as the flying purple squirrel candidates.

Targets, priorities, and profiles change, and both inbound and outbound sourcing methods take time and energy – which leads to inevitable resource constraints. While it would be nice to say that all of this can be solved with a good CRM strategy, the reality is: there will always be certain roles that we are filling ‘”just in time.”

This means that a completely centralized recruiting function needs to be built for worst case scenario hiring numbers – they need to be prepared for the inevitable “urgent hiring push” that in some businesses is cyclical and in others seems to be completely random. The most amazing thing that TA leaders need to realize is that they have an entire workforce of recruiters – inside their own companies. 

As an industry, we’ve spent too much time making the recruiting process complex and bringing all control and ownership into the department, that we are missing out on using our best asset to our advantage: our people. TA leaders who decentralize their hiring processes (i.e., give both power AND responsibility back to the hiring team – managers, brand ambassadors, executives, department coordinators) have access to a huge pool of resources who are both experienced in interviewing and invested in making a great hire.

Giving access to these resources does come at a price: your ability to control every tiny part of the hiring process. If you want these people to be REALLY invested in hiring, they need to have some semblance of control.  This may mean letting them post their own jobs (gasp!) moving their candidates through the recruitment process, or even making a hiring decision without input from a recruiter.

There are of course certain parts of the process that need controls (you still need a sound approval chain for postings and for offers) and most hiring managers will still want the opinion of someone from your TA team before going to offer on a candidate.

BUT, instead of them having to have your approval or wait for your team to push a button, you become an advisor that they look to for advice, assistance, and support (or sometimes a differing opinion). Ultimately, the hire is theirs to onboard and manage, so why not let them feel that the hiring process is theirs to own too?

Next week we will dive into the last topic of our three part series, which is how delivering true digital transformation within TA is not a lipstick on a pig exercise.

Recruiting is usually defined as the act of attracting and selecting candidates for employment within an organization. Thanks to SmartRecruiters’ Reverse Recruiting initiative, that definition is taking on new dimensions.

On the careers section of our website, we state the following: “At SmartRecruiters, we are on a mission to connect people to jobs at scale.” To do so, we built a cutting-edge recruiting platform and devised an innovative hiring methodology. As a result, we’ve made it easier for candidates to apply for jobs and for companies to hire the talent they need to succeed. 

However, we realized that in order to truly enact our mission statement at scale, we’d have to come up with a more inclusive strategy. One that could help job seekers who have traditionally been successful, as well as those who have encountered setbacks.

The truth is, there are only so many jobs to go around. And for every applicant that’s successfully hired, countless others are turned away; their hopes of finding work thwarted by some variation of the following boilerplate rejection notice:

“Thank you for taking the time to meet with our team about the position. It was a pleasure to learn more about your skills and accomplishments. Unfortunately, our team did not select you for further consideration. We wish you all the best with your professional endeavors.”

For some candidates, these messages are menacing, albeit minor setbacks on the path to employment. For others, they’re representative of the entire job search: an experience marked by endless disappointment. Over time, these candidates are at risk of becoming what the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) refers to as discouraged workers. 

Discouraged workers are defined as those who want and are able to work, but have stopped looking because they “believed that no jobs were available for them or there were none for which they would qualify.” As of July 2019, there were an estimated 368,000.

Obviously, having to turn away job applicants is a reality of business. The laws of supply and demand dictate it. That doesn’t mean, however, that companies are incapable of helping candidates that have been overlooked. Point in case: SmartRecruiters.

Reverse Recruiting: Connecting Even More People to Jobs at Scale

In February of 2019, SmartRecruiters’ CEO Jerome Ternynck introduced Reverse Recruiting, the company’s largest Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) endeavor to date. The initiative was put into place to offer assistance to candidates, like discouraged workers, who have had difficulty finding work. Among them are immigrants, veterans, formerly incarcerated individuals, parents and caregivers returning to work and seniors. 

Pilot sessions were held in the spring of 2019 in San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Spokane and Krakow, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. To keep the momentum going, the first ever International Reverse Recruiting day will be held on October 18th, 2019. SmartRecruiters offices across the world, in partnership with local nonprofits and corporate sponsors, will host events to assist job seekers by conducting mock interviews, reviewing resumes, and providing networking opportunities.

For instance, SmartRecruiters headquarters in San Francisco is hosting a Meetup event in tandem with Disability Solutions, “a national, non-profit consulting practice working with corporate leaders to leverage the engagement of talented job seekers with disabilities.”

We would encourage individuals or companies interested in hosting a Reverse Recruiting event of their own to make a pledge.

Why Reverse Recruiting Matters 

The negative consequences of long-term unemployment extend far beyond finances. According to a report from Gallup, depression disproportionately affects those who have been jobless for six or more months. Key findings from the study include: 

• Unemployed Americans are more than twice as likely as those with full-time jobs to say they currently have or are being treated for depression — 12.4% vs. 5.6%, respectively.
• The likelihood of unemployed Americans to agree that they will find a job within the next four weeks falls sharply the longer they are unemployed — from about seven in 10 among those unemployed for five weeks or less to fewer than three in 10 among those who have been jobless for a year or more. 
• A 2011 study by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University found that half of the participants experienced shame and embarrassment that led them to isolate themselves from friends and associates. Among the long-term unemployed, 31.1% reported spending two hours or less with family or friends the previous day, versus 21.5% among short-term unemployed adults.
• Previous research from Gallup research indicates that  U.S. employees who have been diagnosed with depression miss about 68 million more days per year than those who have not, costing employers an estimated $23 billion annually.

These sobering figures underscore the importance of SmartRecruiters mission to connect people to jobs at scale. Access to employment isn’t a luxury or a reward, but a necessity for the well-being of society as a whole. As the late Senator Paul Wellstone often said, “We all do better when we all do better.”

If you haven’t yet signed up for International Reverse Recruiting Day on October 18th, please do so here. 

A brief recap of the closing day of SmartRecruiters’ 2019 European conference for talent acquisition professionals.

The enthusiasm and momentum from day one at Hiring Success carried over to Wednesday morning virtually uninterrupted. Shortly after 8 a.m., the Compagnietheater was once again brimming with conference-goers. The crowd chattered excitedly, their optimism buoyed by the scent of freshly-brewed coffee in the air and the resonating sound of the theme from Mission Impossible, provided by a trio of string musicians in the foyer. It was an auspicious beginning to the day, indeed.

The chorus of voices in the lobby turned to whispers, then gave way to silence as the attendees filed into the venue halls for the morning sessions. The lectures held throughout the day proved to be equally engaging as Tuesday’s, ending the conference on a high note. Here’s a glimpse at some memorable moments from the final day of Hiring Success EU 2019. 

Best of Breed Innovation

SmartRecruiters’ Head of Product Management, Natalia Baryshnikova, commenced Wednesday’s activities by presenting on the ways that technology enables Hiring Success—particularly compelling candidate and user experiences. 

Before unpacking her ideas, Baryshnikova took the opportunity to share an anecdote about the Dutch Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, an apropos reference given the conference’s location. In his prime, Van Gogh produced four paintings per week. His productivity, she noted, was marked by regularity and consistency.

What does that have to do with SmartRecruiters or Baryshnikova? Regular and consistent productivity are instrumental in her approach to product development. Baryshnikova’s team strives to release around five product updates every week. This allows for a product that’s agile and can quickly adapt to the needs of both customers and candidates, thus providing compelling experiences.

To illustrate her point, Baryshnikova, with the help of colleagues Kelly Fang and Rafal Szczepanski, demoed two upcoming product feature updates: 

• The addition of multi-language, automated and integrated SMS communication with candidates
• The ability for users to forward CVs from their email accounts directly to their SmartRecruiters accounts

These innovations may not be Van Gogh masterpieces, but they’re essential in the ongoing process of creating an ATS that doesn’t just help people with their hiring needs, but to achieve Hiring Success.

Become an Inclusive Leader

What does an Aikido master, who also happens to be the first ordained meditation master of African-American descent, and is now an advisor to Fortune 50 CEOs have to share? Albeit a rhetorical question, Dr. Steven Jones walked the audience through a captivating session on inclusive leadership, with simple and live exercises that showed how different perspectives, when managed well, yield stronger results.

We learned that the human brain isn’t wired to see things as they are; we see things as we are. Similarity signifies safety, and as such we naturally gravitate towards perceptions and concepts that we’ve grown accustomed to. Jones encourages us to constantly remind ourselves to see things from others’ perspectives.

“Diversity is about counting heads, inclusion is about making heads count.”

Dr. Steven Jones

So on the conference themes of Innovation and Inclusion, approaching work (and relationships in general) with a truly open and inclusive mindset builds trust. This ultimately drives productivity and performance. As Jones thoughtfully put it, “Diversity is about counting heads, inclusion is about making heads count.”

Reflecting on Freedom 

The final keynote speech for Hiring Success EU 2019 was delivered by Khalil Osiris, a speaker, educator, and activist. Osiris, a one time member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, found himself locked into America’s criminal justice system at the age of 17 and wasn’t paroled until his 40s. 

While in prison, Osiris corresponded through letters with one of Nelson Mandela’s daughters. He found liberation through these missives, as well as intense self-reflection. After leaving prison, he began to volunteer for a civil rights organization where he mentored children of incarcerated parents. Soon thereafter he co-authored a book on the psychological experience of inmates, which became a college course, as well as a DVD series. 

Osiris continues to work as an advocate for those from backgrounds similar to his, and works with them to find inner peace and mental freedom before becoming physically incarcerated. His story is an admirable example of the perseverance of the human spirit and the importance of devoting one’s self to purposeful work—whether in the office or the world at large.   

The above mentioned sessions only represent the tip of the iceberg that was Hiring Success EU 2019. We would like to thank all of the amazing speakers at this year’s event, the entire SmartRecruiters team, the staff at Compagnietheater, and all of our sponsors: 

Highlights from day one at SmartRecruiters’ annual EU conference on all things recruitment.

In the heart of Amsterdam, along the Kloveniersburgwal canal, lies the Compagnietheater— a former Lutheran church that now serves as an event location. The Baroque-era venue still lends itself to mass congregation, albeit it under different circumstances, and it’s here that talent acquisition executives, thought leaders, technologists, and investors from 31 countries have gathered to discuss the state of the recruitment industry, as well as the shape of things to come. 

Over four hundred attendees from across the world have come to the Dutch capital to network, participate in workshops, view product demos, and attend lectures from a diverse cross-section of industry experts. The venue is outfitted by accessibility experts to accommodate guests of any visible and invisible disability, including translators and a sign language-encouraged coffee bar! A key ingredient of Hiring Success conferences, the sessions touch on a variety of workplace-related topics that are significant for talent acquisition professionals. Topics range from the latest technology & process innovations to diversity & inclusion, and—of course—Hiring Success.

It would be impossible to account for the total Hiring Success EU experience in a blog post. That’s a pleasure reserved for attendees. However, here are a few highlights from day one. And to those who couldn’t join us this year, we hope to greet you in person in 2020.

Hiring Is Success — Kickoff with Jerome Ternynck, Founder & CEO of SmartRecruiters

The CEO of SmartRecruiters, Jerome Ternynck—affectionately known as the chief Smartian—set the Hiring Success festivities into motion on a personal note. 

“Some people believe their calling is to cure illness, for others it’s to find a way to get to the moon—for me, I’ve always believed that my calling is to help connect people to jobs at scale,” he announced to an audience of over four hundred talent acquisition practitioners and professionals. And, as anyone with recruiting experience knows, that’s no small feat.

The modern labor market is multi-faceted and more complex than ever. Among other things, globalization, remote work, the rise of the gig economy, and an increased demand for highly-skilled workers have made it increasingly difficult for recruiters and the companies that they work for to source the talent they need to succeed. This is a daunting reality not only for Ternynck, but the majority of executives. 

According to Ternynck, 77 percent of CEOs see hiring for key skills as the biggest threat to their businesses, and 82 percent of Fortune 500 companies don’t believe they’re in a position to recruit highly talented candidates. Given that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people, it’s not hard to see why this sentiment is so common among executives.

What, then, is the solution for this discrepancy in workforce supply and demand? For Ternynck, the answer to that question is clear: applying the guiding principles of Hiring Success to talent acquisition. In a nutshell, that’s accomplished by doing the following: 

1. Take a holistic approach to the hiring experience by providing an engaging candidate experience, ensuring that hiring managers are engaged during the process, and having a team of highly productive recruiters.
2. Ditching outdated hiring metrics like Cost-per-Hire and Time-to-Fill for more useful analytics like Hiring Budget, Hiring Velocity, and Net Hiring Score.
3. Treat talent acquisition as if it were a function of sales and marketing. Candidates should be treated like customers. 

In closing, SmartRecruiters’ CEO implored guests to take a non-traditional approach to connecting candidates to jobs by giving back and participating in Reverse Recruiting. Now adopted by over 50 major companies including Tesla, Twitter, and Visa, Reverse Recruiting is a program in which organizations help overlooked and/or marginalized jobseekers find employment. 

Select sessions included:

The Open Hiring Revolution 

For many job seekers, there’s one unfortunate obstacle that stands between them and their ability to secure employment: bias. For some, like former convicts, this bias is systemic and concretely difficult to circumnavigate. For others, it’s more subtle and harder to identify. An example would be victims of ageism or disablism. No matter the source of the bias, it excludes from the workforce countless individuals across the globe that are well-qualified and well-intentioned. 

This is an unnecessary loss for all parties involved.

Fortunately, there are a few progressive-minded companies and foundations that have taken it upon themselves to directly challenge this injustice by championing a concept known as Open Hiring, the belief that people should be allowed to decide if they’re able to perform a job—not someone else’s bias. 

Ingeborg Zwolsman, Program Manager for the Start Foundation, made a persuasive case for the movement in her morning session “The Open Hiring Revolution.” The Start Foundation, an independent venture philanthropy fund based in Amsterdam, partners with local businesses that are willing to give jobs to candidates that are traditionally overlooked. The only prerequisite for employment is a willingness to work. There are no interviews, screening questions, or other such hurdles.

The Start Foundation takes their inspiration from Greyston Bakery, an American non-profit that pioneered the concept of Open Hiring to create over 3,500 jobs and pay out over $65 million in salaries to employees that previously struggled to find work. Greyston Bakery was thrust into the public eye after Ben & Jerry’s, impressed with their mission, decided to source the brownies for their ice cream from the non-profit.

Let’s Debate the Future of Work 

As SmartRecruiters’ CEO Jerome Ternynck mentioned in his opening statement, the labor market is now more complex than ever. Phenomena like automation and a spike in the gig economy have complicated our traditional notions of the workplace. How recruiters and employers adapt and prepare for similar changes in the future is a point of contention. 

To gather insight into the future of work, we invited Karen Rivoire (IKEA) and Kevin Wheeler  (The Future of Talent) to an Oxford Union-style debate hosted by Hung Lee, co-founder and CEO of Workshape.io. Rivoire and Wheeler both ran global TA and HR organizations, and have dealt firsthand with the aforementioned issues at scale. 

Prompts for the debate were fielded from the audience, three of which were shortlisted: 

1. Will the gig economy become the primary workforce of the future? 
2. Will recruiting be fully automated? 
3. Is workforce planning a complete waste of time?

The questions, voted upon by the audience, seemed to convey a collective sense of unease about the ever-changing nature of the labor market and the implications that has for the recruiting industry as a whole.

Rivoire seemed to share the audience’s apprehension and called for a tempered, cautious response to transformations in the workplace, particularly with concern to automation and artificial intelligence. Wheeler, on the other hand, unflinchingly argued in favor of adopting technologies like AI to counter human bias. Though they held contradictory opinions, both participants comported themselves judiciously and in a manner befitting of democratic, spirited debate.

Though the debate was cut short due to scheduling constraints, it underscored the complexity of issues that talent acquisition professionals encounter and, consequently, why it’s essential for employers to invest in highly skilled recruiters.

Attaining Hiring Success

If Ternynck justified why Hiring Success must be a top priority for today’s business leaders, then Rebecca Carr, SVP of Success at SmartRecruiters, painted a clear path for attendees on how they can attain it. Armed with a methodology consisting of business assessments, maturity model frameworks and pillars of investment areas, Carr outlined how talent acquisition leaders can evaluate, strategize, execute, and finally optimize current processes and skillsets to level up in performance across:

• Talent attraction & engagement
• Collaboration & selection
• Management & operating model

Using candidate sourcing as a sub-topic under the talent attraction & engagement pillar, Carr floated sample business assessment questions and live-polled the audience to calculate their maturity levels. It was a fitting way to wrap up day one, connecting the dots on how to invest in various areas of talent acquisition in order to drive business outcomes while connecting people to jobs at scale.

Check back tomorrow for a recap of day two at #hireEU 2019, and join the conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn Live.

Cramped hotel conference rooms and uncomfortable chairs are the banes of many recruiting conferences, but here’s how SmartRecruiters is flipping the script on the traditional industry events.

What was the last conference that truly excited you? What made it unique—the sessions, the networking, the food? Did it have a unique structure, or did it follow the traditional format of sit, listen, stand up, talk? More often than not, industry conferences fall into the latter category, where most event attendees inch towards the closest exit first chance they get. No one is a fan of stuffy conferences, and that’s why SmartRecruiters seeks to redefine the experience for talent acquisition professionals everywhere. 

Hiring Success EU isn’t designed to test your passive listening skills; in fact, participation is encouraged. Every session is designed to be interactive, giving audiences the opportunity to absorb insightful content in a refreshingly new way. In addition to the speaker-led sessions, there are countless workshops and round table discussions where TA and HR leaders can roll up their sleeves and learn as a group. 

The recruiting community is unique for its focus on shared knowledge. We are constantly working together to share ideas, perspectives, and best practices on talent acquisition so that every organization can build better hiring processes that attract the best talent possible. SmartRecruiters feels this approach is necessary to create both a memorable experience and make a lasting impact on how people think about recruiting. 

Hiring Success EU kicks off September 10-11 in Amsterdam, and here is a sampling of what attendees can expect at this non-traditional conference:

1. Reverse Recruiting
Reverse Recruiting is our way of taking action to connect overlooked candidates to jobs at scale. At this year’s Hiring Success EU, 300 interviews will simultaneously take place between audience members and hopeful job seekers, including formerly incarcerated individuals, refugees, transgender people, people with disabilities, and more. These impromptu interviews offer them a chance to practice their interview skills, make connections with current TA professionals, and boost their self-confidence in finding gainful employment. This-meet-and-greet-format will create new bridges of friendship, mentorship, and jobs between our communities. Isn’t that what recruiting is all about?

2. The Hackathon
Twenty technologists invested countless hours over the last few months to create unique hacks and APIs built on the SmartRecruiters platform. Now, these innovators can demo their builds in real-time at the conference. Here’s the catch: Every attendee starts with 1000 “wow points” to invest in the teams they believe have the greatest impact on the future of recruiting technology. The top 3 teams that receive the most investment will be sent to the final round to battle it out for fortune—$10k in sponsorship at Hiring Success 20—and glory.

3. Session: Make your Organization a Microcosm of the World
One of the best-kept secrets in recruiting is the extra-ordinary output of neurodiverse people. Many of us are neuro-diverse—we just don’t know it.  Sara-Jane Harvey, aka Agony Autie, is a world-class activist for neurodiversity and returning Hiring Success speaker, having debuted at Hiring Success Americas earlier this year. Now, she’s back to expose truths about how making offices accessible for autistic people have far-reaching benefits for companies, employees, and the potential to transform the world economy.

4. Session: Reflecting Freedom
Self-imposed limitations are created when our choices and actions are dictated by automatic responses and unquestioning beliefs. Understand these limitations and find freedom from the prison of the mind. This session will take attendees through an inspiring journey of grit, and who better than to tell it than Khalil Osiris, who spent 20 years in prison. During his time in incarceration, he earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Boston University. Khalil is now an author, educator, social activist, and CEO of Reflecting Freedom, a social enterprise company. 

5. Session: Getting Smarter
What will your hiring mix look like in 10 years? Get this question right and you’ll see your stock soar. Get it wrong, and you’ll spend your time playing catch up. This session will bring a much-needed perspective from the navigation technology and consumer electronics company TomTom on how it discovered the ideal hiring mix. This session is presented by Thomas Waldman, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at TomTom, leveraging his 20 +years of experience in recruiting and sourcing to discuss how TomTom conducted its own internal discovery and transformation.  

6. Session: Becoming an Inclusive Leader
What does an aikido master and the first ordained African-American meditation master, who also advises Fortune 50 CEOs have to teach company leaders? Find out in this participatory session that is sure to strengthen everyone’s leadership skills. Dr. Steven Jones, who—among numerous accomplishments and accolades—is the CEO of JONES, a consulting firm specialized in diversity and organizational effectiveness, teaching the value of inclusive leadership.

Don’t miss the opportunity to be a part of this one-of-a-kind recruiting conference. Where else can you make a positive impact on someone’s life, flex your entrepreneurial muscle like a VC, or learn from a curated selection of activists, speakers, and TA leaders from around the globe? You will find it all here at Hiring Success EU. To find out more about what to expect, visit our website and secure your tickets before September 10th—see you there!

A venue trapped in time, surprise artistic performances, and limitless cheese options—these are only some of the wonders you can expect in Amsterdam.

Hidden behind the glitz and glamor of the Dutch capital’s inner city lies a narrow street that feels worlds apart from the shiny Rokin and Dam squares, despite running parallel to them. On a normal night, walking down this passage—called “The Nes”—requires jockeying for position between pedestrians and passing cyclists. You might feel as if you’ve been transported to the early 1900s with all the stone architecture, cozy houses, and theaters luring you closer with the promise of music and drink.

On this particular night, however, you will be surprised to find a red carpet juxtaposed with urban sprawl, inviting you to walk inside, past a giant wooden door. Passing through the looming edifice with the words “Tobacco Theater” etched overhead, you will find SmartRecrutiers’ flagship afterparty, the can’t-miss event of our Hiring Success conferences. This year’s celebration—made possible by Xref, our official party sponsors—is no exception.

Network with your peers, cocktails in hand, as you explore this centuries-old tobacco auction house that now plays host to one of Amsterdam’s biggest music events: the Red light Jazz Festival. Discover hidden corners throughout the building, engage with Hiring Success speakers, and bounce from one entertaining performance to the next. Of course, don’t forget to indulge yourself at the cheese stations and take in the sounds of the live band, bringing the atmosphere of Amsterdam’s street life into the theater for one special night thanks to our partners at Xref.  

You’d be hard-pressed to experience the ambiance of Amsterdam in a more historic space. So while you’re there, seize the opportunity to make new connections and digest the day’s learnings. The venue’s art-meets-business vibe, delicious food, and inspiring company are guaranteed to recharge you for another nonstop day of demos, panels, labs, awards, and interactive sessions.

Still haven’t secured your ticket for the industry’s coolest afterparty? Head over to the Hiring Success EU website and we’ll see you in Amsterdam!