When was the last time you put yourself in the shoes of a candidate looking for a job on your careers site? 

Losing sight of the candidate’s perspective can often be the case for recruitment teams who are understandably busy. But when you start to take a look at your candidate journey through the eyes of a job seeker, you’ll be amazed at the number of opportunities there are to improve your overall candidate experience. 

This is why it’s so important to get an external view on your candidate journey review. In the meantime, you can take a look at these 7 questions to challenge your candidate journey review. 

1. How easy is it for talent to discover open roles at your company

When candidates are searching for a job the experience on a careers website should feel personal, intuitive and easy. The more steps between the candidate entering your careers website and getting to the open role they want to apply for the less likely they are to fully commit to applying. 

The content of a job description can be a deal-breaker for a potential candidate so it’s important that the job title and the job description match, that the role information is transparent and the expectations are correct.

2. Where are you missing out on attracting talent?

List the different channels you use in your talent attraction strategy. You probably have a careers website and company profiles on popular job boards such as Indeed and LinkedIn. These are traditional channels, and there’s no doubt that they still generate applications. But what if you could increase your applications exponentially? 

Social messaging platforms offer a massive opportunity for recruiters to engage with talent. Facebook Messenger engages with 1.3 billion monthly users and WhatsApp has over 1 billion daily users. 

Sales and marketing lead generation have been utilising social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook for years. Which makes sense considering social media is where customers spend a lot of their free time, brands are understanding the importance of relating to their customers – so why not recruiters and candidates?

3. How does your company appear on online job sites?

According to Glassdoor’s 2020 Report, 51% of job seekers prefer finding job opportunities on online job sites. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Indeed, Xing or Glassdoor you work with; it’s important that your company’s reputation and tone of voice is consistent across all platforms. Why?

Changing jobs is a huge emotional decision for candidates. They are at a point where switching employers can mean a change in lifestyle, salary and career. Throughout their job search they need to get the impression they can trust a potential employer.

Employers can build trust by providing a consistent message across each platform, and working to improve their rating on employer review sites. After all, 84% of job seekers say a company’s reputation matters.

4. How are you engaging Passive vs. Active talent?

It’s important to know the different scenarios in which candidates find themselves on your careers website. Depending on which channel they arrived from can tell you what their intentions are or where they are in the recruitment funnel. 

A helpful way to analyse and aggregate behaviours is to categorise candidates into two groups, passive and active. Active candidates are those actively looking for a new role and passive candidates could land on your careers website by accident. Either way, both groups offer quality candidates. 

Take a look at your careers site traffic analytics and note which channels you’re getting traffic from. Active candidates are more likely to come from direct and organic channels, if they’re typing your company name and a careers related keyword into a search engine. 

They can also come from referral channels such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn if they’ve been looking at your job positions on those platforms, and now they want to get a better understanding of your company. 

Looking at your traffic analytics can give you a great insight into how you can grow the traffic channels that work best for your company. 

5. What tactics are you using to engage with passive talent?

Passive talent has many faces, it can be someone who’s accidentally ended up on your careers blog, or joined a webinar hosted by your company. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to attract and engage with passive talent which we can break down into two categories – paid and organic engagement. 

Paid engagement can include employer branding campaigns, paid job postings or promoted content targeted at your candidate personas. If you’re not getting the candidates you want walking through the door it’s worth trying out a few targeted campaigns on LinkedIn to engage with the candidates you want. 

Organic engagement is very valuable, it doesn’t involve budget but it can mean results take longer to see. That’s why it’s important to create some great content around the employees you already have. People’s stories offer candidates clarity and help build trust, this is great if passive talent doesn’t know your company brand. 

Another great way to engage with passive talent is to build a great community around your consumer brand. For example, if you are a sports company and have a growing social media fan base, you can create a community of brand fans and use this as an opportunity to let brand fans know you have positions open. 

6. How well are you communicating with your candidates?

Whether it’s a status update on their application or they have a question about the job position, candidates want instant communication and maybe more importantly they want transparency.

It’s time to see your careers site from your candidate’s point of view. Choose a scenario in which a candidate is coming to communicate with your brand and ask: 

• How are you delivering that talent communication experience?
• How many methods of communication are you offering? 
• Is the UX too confusing? 
• Where do emails to your careers email address go? How often are they answered? 
• How are you prioritising communication channels?

One of the most common challenges recruiters face is trying to reply to everyone. One of the ways recruiters are overcoming this challenge is using a chatbot to handle repetitive questions and provide instant responses to candidates. 

When Airbus implemented their recruitment chatbot, it was so successful that they removed their careers email address from the website just 5 weeks after going live with the chatbot. 

7. Where are the easy fixes you can apply to make your candidate experience better? 

The great news is that there are some easy fixes you can make to improve your candidate experience. Once you’ve walked through the steps of the different candidate journeys you should be able to identify these easy fixes.

We’ve also listed some commonly found easy fixes that you could do today include: 

1. Check your job descriptions, evaluate if they are clear and informative
2. Do an overview of the emails you’re sending candidates. Make sure they are consistent in tone and offer clarity to the candidate. 
3. Check if your careers site is mobile friendly

Time how long it takes for your careers site pages to load as slow loading times can lead candidates to bounce. You can use this tool from Google to measure how well your site loads.

Recruitment processes are not always as simple as we’d like them to be. External factors such as requirements by law for specific benchmarks to be met or an internal resistance to change can frustrate recruiters who value building a successful candidate experience. Thankfully, there are ways to work around this. Such is the case for Florian Schrodt, Employer Branding leader at Verkehrsbetriebe Zurich (VBZ).

When joining the VBZ team in 2018, Florian’s goal was to remove the corporate perspective from their candidate experience and make it 100% candidate-focused. In order to keep 1 million commuters a day moving across Zurich; there is a business need to hire bus and tram pilots. But this was no easy task.

“It’s a really nice job because you are driving along the wonderful city all day long. But it can be tough because of the shifts. Especially because we are looking for job changers. Also, people do not have a typical education as a tram pilot on the market.  So we have to educate the tram pilots ourselves. And the test is not easy, because it’s a cognitive test. So this means we need to have around 1500 applications in order to hire 70 tram pilots a year.”  

Florian Schrodt

The 5% conversion rate from applicant to hire aligns with the strict application process for the tram pilot position which involves four stages: 

1. Application
2. F.E.D test (cognitive test)
3. Recruitment interview
4. Medical and psychological assessment

However, as Florian could not change the recruitment process, he set his goal on increasing the volume of quality applicants. These are applicants that understand the expectations of the role before applying, and to deter any applicants who would likely drop out of the recruitment process. 

“We wanted the people a better picture of their opportunity within the jobs. We tried to improve the information on an emotional level and we tried to improve the touchpoints.”

The ideology of implementing a candidate contextual experience, meant that everything outside of the recruitment process had to benefit prospective candidates. One of the most notable steps in achieving this for Florian was redesigning the VBZ.jobs careers website. Which gained momentum through successful recruitment campaigns. 

However even though the volume of website visitors coming to the website was increasing, the level of engagement did not increase enough. This is when the idea of using a chatbot to engage and satisfy candidates with instant communication came to the forefront. 

“What we experienced at VBZ is that for job changers, like tram pilots, they have many questions, and many similar questions, asked again and again and again.” 

Responding to everyone’s questions, and doing a great job of it, contributes significantly to a great candidate experience. But it’s a huge task that occupies a large portion of the recruiters time. As a solution, implementing a chatbot with a FAQ Automation feature on the VBZ.jobs website gave Florian’s team 4 ways to improve their strict recruitment process.

1. VBZ speaks with talent 24/7

Before implementing a recruitment chatbot there were only two ways a candidate could ask a question to a recruiter; through email or phone. Both channels offered a low response rate or in some cases some candidates’ inquiries were not responded to, as this was time-consuming for the busy VBZ recruitment team.

Now a candidate coming to the careers website can engage with VBZ instantly through TramBot. Over 74% of all questions are answered by the chatbot, while the rest are passed on to the recruitment team. Candidates can also engage with the chatbot 24/7 and get instant responses which helps Florian achieve his candidate-centric mission. 

2. Recruiters could focus on building relationships with candidates further along the pipeline

As TramBot handles 74% of incoming questions, recruiters are able to utilise their time doing more valuable tasks. Instead of spending hours replying to repetitive questions, they can focus on building better relationships with candidates further along the pipeline. 

3. The recruitment team could gain insights into what candidates wanted to know and improve their overall communication strategy

“It’s amazing how good you get to know the target groups because of their input and the possibilities to improve the answers in real time. Especially through the Corona crisis it was a great plus.”

Young graduates who are in their early-twenties used to be the focus target group for recruiting, before TramBot. In the first few months of the chatbot going live the VBZ recruitment team saw that amongst the most popular questions coming from candidates (salary and shift questions), questions around age were reoccurring.

It became clear that potential candidates were actually job changers, people who were looking for an interim job whilst they study or retrain. As a result, Florian and his team adjusted their marketing campaigns to capture this new target group. Their recruitment marketing team created stories directly from their staff and also advertised the chatbot on their trams, so commuters could engage on the go. 

In the future Florian and his team are continuing to improve their candidate touchpoints, including the chatbot. 

“The bot is a single point of contact for ALL initial questions relating to the profession of trampilot. We have established a contextual information management team that answers questions that the bot cannot answer as quickly and individually as possible. In addition, we are strategically expanding the bot so that we can offer contextually appropriate entries into the bot throughout the entire process.”

When narrowing down a pool of top job candidates, communication, engagement, and documentation are essential. Instrumental in that process is the combination of conversational recruiting and knowledge management

Both recruiters and job-seekers alike will tell you: the recruiting process can be full of pain points that can derail a relationship before it even really begins. Too often, these problems boil down to miscommunication—which can cause myriad other problems, such as gaps in knowledge, redundant processes, and mismatched targeting.

The key to ensuring clear communication takes place?

Conversational recruiting—backed by a solid approach to knowledge management.

What is Conversational Recruiting?

Conversational recruiting is the process of conversing with potential job candidates in an effort to attract and engage them—and begin qualifying them for the position in question.

(Those familiar with the concept of conversational marketing can see parallels between how both approaches can generate leads and engage with their intended targets.)

In contrast to the traditional approach to recruiting, conversational recruiting involves minimal “formal” engagements, such as form-filling and other more mechanical processes. 

Instead, conversational recruiting focuses on communicating with candidates in a more authentic, personable manner. This, in turn, allows recruiters to develop stronger relationships with high-quality candidates well before the “official” interviewing process begins.

“Chatbots are a great tool to improve the candidate experience and recruiter efficiency. That being said, they are still only a small piece of the overall talent screening process. When a chatbot is combined with the right screening and matching technology, we not only see improvements in efficiency but in accuracy and fairness as well.”  – Somen Mondal, CEO of Ideal

Research shows that feeling understood is a powerful driver of social behavior. An important aspect of being able to understand another is picking up on the nuances in conversations, such as a shift in tone or direction.” 

One of the main reasons conversational recruiting has become a growing trend is because technology has enabled recruiters to absolutely thrive in this area. 

By today’s standards, recruiters can communicate with potential candidates in a variety of ways, such as:

• On-site and social media chat.
• Social media content, posts, and comments.
• Email, text message and push notifications.
• Audio and video chat.

In addition to enabling true one-to-one conversations to occur between recruiters and candidates, technology also allows recruiters to create simulated engagements with potential hires. For example, on-site or social media chatbots can help you collect preliminary information on a potential candidate from your very first engagement:

Or, you might set up templated emails to be sent out to candidates that take a specific action (such as submitting their contact information via your chatbot). Here, you could engage in a more personalized conversation with the individual candidate, allowing their replies to become more open-ended in nature.

Regardless of where or how a given conversation takes place, the goal of conversational recruiting is for each engagement to keep the relationship growing and moving toward an interview. 

Again, technology comes into play here, as it allows recruiters to:

• Engage with recruits on the platforms they’re most likely to use throughout their job search.
• Pick up conversations right where they left off, regardless of the channel.
• Deliver the right information to the right recruits, and begin preparing them for the interview process.

Now, technology can enable all of this to happen; but it can’t make it so.

In order to take advantage of the technology involved in conversational recruiting, you need to have a solid knowledge management system in place. In the next section, we’ll explain just why that is.

How Does Knowledge Management Fit Into Conversational Recruiting?

Knowledge management refers to the organization-wide process of collecting, organizing, interpreting, communicating, and using information.

A few examples:

• An outgoing employee creates a file documenting their tasks and duties for their replacement to refer to as needed.
• Managerial staff develop policies and procedures for their teams to follow, and use various tools to deliver these documents to their employees.
• Information regarding engagements with prospective employees, customers, and other entities is documented, stored, and communicated to stakeholders as necessary.

From a bird’s-eye view, it’s pretty easy to see how knowledge management relates to conversational recruiting: Without this flow of information occurring throughout an organization, engagements with potential candidates can go absolutely nowhere.

More than just enabling these conversations to take place, proper knowledge management allows these conversations to thrive. As we said earlier, a pleasant and productive lead-up to onboarding a new hire will ultimately lead to more productivity across the board.

That said, let’s take a closer look at how effective knowledge management can improve your conversational recruiting efforts.

Knowledge Management Centralizes and Prepares Data for Delivery

Most instances of conversational recruiting happen in or near real-time.

When engaging with an on-site chatbot, for example, recruits will typically expect an immediate response to any question they may have. For this to happen, the “recruiter”—in this case, a digital tool—must have immediate access to the information being requested. It’s essential, then, that your organization’s collective knowledge be stored in a centralized repository solution such as a knowledge base or wiki. 

In addition to creating the structures for such communication to occur, knowledge management also ensures that the right information exists in the first place. With regard to conversational recruiting, this means:

• Knowing what documentation to create for recruiters to pull from.
• Organizing documents and files to allow for easy recall and communication of the right information.
• Continuously maintaining and updating data to ensure accuracy at all times.

SmartRecruiters’ applicant tracking system, for example, allows recruiters to document engagements and other touch points as they begin to bring new hires onboard.

Without solid knowledge management, it’s nearly impossible to provide your candidates with the information they need when considering working with your company. 

But, with proper knowledge management processes in place, you’ll always be able to deliver the exact information your top recruits are looking for. In turn, they’ll be even more likely to remain engaged with your organization.

Knowledge Management Ensures Proper Data Collection

As much as conversational recruiting is about delivering info to your recruits, it’s also about collecting info from them, as well.

As your team or tools engage with a recruit, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn more about them. For example, over the course of multiple interactions, your recruit might end up discussing their:

• Skills, qualifications, and certifications.
• Professional and personal goals and preferences.
• Individual circumstances that may impact their performance.

With proper knowledge management processes in place, all incoming candidate data can be funneled directly into the same centralized location. This ensures that you’ll never miss out on a vital piece of data that might prove valuable when attracting a given recruit. 

Knowledge management also aims to ensure that outdated candidate information is continually replaced with current data as it comes in. That way, your team and tools will always be able to pick up with candidates right where they left off.

Looking at the whole of an organization’s initiatives, knowledge management involves collecting and internalizing performance data, as well. This can help you optimize your approach to conversational recruiting moving forward—and enable you to better attract and engage the right candidates for your company.

Knowledge Management Helps Identify Best-Fit Candidates and Optimal Engagement Strategies

Speaking of engaging with best-fit candidates…

As we said, you have a variety of options at your disposal in terms of conversational recruiting. Each option, of course, includes its own set of options and variables. And, of course, not every candidate responds the same way to each of these options.

Knowledge management, then, is necessary for identifying:

• The best-fit candidate(s) for a given position.
• The optimal way to reach out to these individuals.
• How to proceed with a given candidate in order to help the relationship grow.

By assessing all relevant information known about the candidate, the position, and anything else of note, your recruiting team can develop a clear-cut strategy for bringing your next new hire onboard.

A recent case study by chatbot development company ubisend displays exactly how a chatbot helped a business qualify candidates and save precious time. 

The business, a large construction company, struggled with applicants making their way too far down the process before realizing they lacked important qualifications. With over 350 positions open at any given point, the time wasted was significant.

To combat this, the business implemented a recruitment chatbot. The recruitment chatbot would be the first line of contact between applicants and the business. Its sole purpose would be to gather the necessary information from applicants to vet their qualifications. With this information, the chatbot would be able to:

1. Act as a gatekeeper to applicants who do not fit the requirements.
2. Prioritize candidates that do fit the requirements.
3. Save everyone (including candidates) time.

The recruitment chatbot approach resulted in a 73% reduction in unqualified job applications across the business.

Conclusion

The takeaway from this post is twofold:

• Conversational recruiting is an incredibly effective way to engage with and qualify job candidates during the leadup to the more formal interview stage of the process.
• The effectiveness of your conversational recruiting efforts depends on your knowledge management capabilities.

While knowledge management can be implemented in all areas of your business, our focus today is on using knowledge management to create a streamlined experience for your potential recruits—as well as your recruitment team. 

Interested in adopting conversational recruiting into your talent acquisition strategy? There’s no better place to begin than pairing SmartRecruiters’ ATS with an Intelligent Chatbot.

To comment on this story or anything else you have read on our blog, visit our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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Technophobic no longer, recruiters are embracing the potential of AI to positively impact their workflow.

Fairly or not, the recruiting industry is often branded as tech-averse. However, recent survey findings concerning the future of technology in HR are helping shed this negative stereotype, ushering in an era where TA becomes the poster child for early adoption.

According to Korn Ferry’s latest survey, 63 percent of TA professionals report AI having changed the way their organizations recruit. Not only that, but 87 percent say they’re excited about increasing their AI interaction in the future.

While these integrations are exciting sometimes it’s difficult to get past buzzwords to decipher the real concepts behind them.To gain a better understanding of the possibilities of tech when it comes to recruiting, we did the unpacking for you. Here are four main types of AI and automation technologies and how they’re being implemented in recruiting.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine or computer program to simulate human capacities such as learning, problem-solving, planning, and perception.

AI for recruiting is the application of artificial intelligence in recruitment designed to automate or streamline some part of the workflow, especially repetitive, high-volume tasks.

Let’s get specific.

In recruiting, there are three subdomains of AI techniques being applied:

• Machine learning is a type of algorithm that has the ability to teach itself by analyzing data and automatically improving its solutions through experience. Machine learning is being used to automate sourcing and resume screening as well as analyze candidate fit during digitized interviews.

An example of an innovative organization using AI for their screening is Indigo, a leading retailer that receives more than 2200 applications every week. Using AI to automate manual resume screening, Indigo has been able to reduce their cost per hire by 71 percent, triple their qualified candidates, and improve recruiter efficiency by 3.7x.

• Natural language processing is the ability of a computer program to understand spoken or written human language. One major way natural language processing is being used in recruitment is through chatbots that provide answers to FAQs and feedback to candidates in real time.
  
• Sentiment analysis is the ability of a computer program to determine the subjective opinion, emotional state, or intended emotional effect of spoken or written word. Sentiment analysis is being used to improve job descriptions by suggesting alternative adjectives, for example.

Recruitment chatbot

A chatbot is defined as ‘a computer program designed to stimulate conversation with human users.’

Randstad found that 82 percent of job seekers believe the ideal recruiting interaction is a mix between innovative technology and personal, human connection. According to Allegis, with 66 percent of candidates comfortable interacting with a chatbot, the market seems ready for mainstream adoption.

In recruiting, chatbots are being used to ask candidates qualifying questions, answer FAQs, and even schedule an interview with a human recruiter. A major advantage of using a chatbot in recruiting is its ability to answer thousands of candidates’ questions simultaneously in real time. Information collected by the chatbot is then fed into an ATS or sent directly to a human recruiter for follow up.

Robotic Process Automation

Hand in hand with AI is automation, or more specifically, robotic process automation (RPA).

The Institute of Robotic Process Automation defines robotic process automation as the application of technology that allows employees to use computer software or a machine to capture and interpret existing applications for processing transactions, analyzing data, triggering automatic responses, and communicating with other systems.

RPA is being applied in recruiting in two main ways:

• Candidate outreach such as automated emails or texts to maintain speedy and consistent contact. This outreach can be scheduled as a DRIP campaign for passive candidates, for example.
  
• Interview scheduling is being automated by software that offer time slots when a recruiter is free that candidates can then select without a back-and-forth email, text, or telephone exchange.

Blockchain technology

While blockchain is still in the beta stages, it’s gaining more and more attention this year.

A blockchain is a system of record keeping using an open, distributed digital ledger that records transactions between two parties. Each transaction in the ledger is verified and then recorded permanently across a peer-to-peer network of users. One advantage of blockchain technology is its speed of use — everyone has access to the most up-to-date information regardless of how many people are using it.

For recruiting, the main application of blockchain technology so far is candidate background checks; for example, on their educational or work history. For blockchain technology to work as a tamper-proof record of candidate history, it’s crucial that a credible and reliable source verifies the data in each block. For educational institutions, this is pretty straightforward, but it becomes more ambiguous when it comes to work history.

Even with all this technology making the recruiting process smarter, it remains to be seen how these elements will ultimately affect the business of managing human capital.

Ji-A Min is the Head Data Scientist at Ideal, AI recruiting software that automates time-consuming tasks such as sourcing, screening, and messaging. She has a Master’s in Industrial­-Organizational Psychology and her interests include data-based recruitment, HR tech, and diversity. Find out more about Ideal in the SmartRecruiters marketplace here.

If you want to stay ahead in the hiring game, there are some tech advances you need to be aware of, or even more, to master.

There’s a large skills gap in today’s job market, and hiring professionals are finding it difficult to find the right candidates in this highly competitive market. This has given rise to hiring managers leaning more on social recruiting, artificial intelligence products, and overall HR technology upgrades. Here are four ways HR Tech will take your talent acquisition process to the next level.

1. Implementing Artificial Intelligence/Chatbots

Using artificial intelligence or chatbots in your recruiting process can drastically reduce tedium. Reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews and internal coordination are all necessary, but with a chatbot, all these tasks can be automated, leaving HR and recruitment professionals to focus on more complex activities such as employer branding, improving outreach, and other related tasks.

2. Posting on Multiple Job Boards

Recruiting professionals are relying on job boards to source quality talent. According to Zety, about 52% of applications arrive via from job boards. Most applicant tracking systems (ATS) offer job board integrations. Posting to several job boards at once is a great way to get more exposure, and with an ATS, your hiring team can save hundreds of work hours otherwise lost to filtering through a pool of applicants.

3. Pre-screening Candidates

AI for recruiting is designed to reduce or remove time-consuming activities like manually screening resumes. 52% of Talent Acquisition leaders say the hardest part of recruitment is screening candidates from a large applicant pool. AI screening software adds functionality to the ATS by using hiring data like performance and turnover to make hiring recommendations for new applicants. The recommendations are made by applying learned information about existing employees’ skills to automatically grade new candidates.

4. Using AI to Remove Bias From Recruitment Process

AI is able to assess data points around successful employees and objectively determine the best hires in a talent pool. Recruiting AI can be programmed to ignore demographic information, such as gender, race, and age to increase the opportunity for diversity.

AI also exposes bias in your recruiting, giving you a clear view of potential problems and the ability to address them.

If you’re thinking about improving your talent acquisition process, start with a 30 day free trial of XOR, which will streamline your process, lower your cost-per-hire by 50% and decrease your time-to-fill by 33%.

Anna would be the worst HR director in the world. She said so herself. She wants to break your system, burn your CVs, and if you don’t like it you can talk to the chatbot because she’s not asking permission.

In an industry known for its meekness, Anna has made a name for herself by being anything but.

A 17-year recruiting veteran, she’s found her niche at hub:raum, a startup incubator for Deutsche Telekom, helping fledgeling companies experiment with HR Technology. And who wouldn’t want to be her guinea pig? Anna has a way of getting people excited. If she had a superpower she would be Momentum Woman ( pending). She doesn’t ask, she does.

And she has a name for time-wasting office bureaucracy: the beast. She doesn’t feed the beast. She fights the beast. One day she decided there would be no more CVs at hub:raum and that was that. No more CVs.

In her spare time, Anna runs a secret society. The “Secret HR Society”. An invite-only club where HR heads can talk shop and swap stories of horror and success.

That’s the other thing about Anna, she wants people to be heard. The little things that waste your time at work? The ones your friends are sick of hearing you complain about? These are the ones Anna wants to help you fix.

Where are you speaking to us from today?

I’m in London for a job boards conference. I haven’t seen anything yet, you know I go to all these beautiful places and never get to see anything. This time I decided to stay the whole weekend so I can really explore.

Job board conference sounds interesting, what will you be doing there?

I’m here to speak at the European Job Board Summit. It’s a charged atmosphere because these legacy systems are here to figure out how to survive. They are at the point of realizing that throwing money at job postings is not a longterm solution. HR needs to embrace new technologies in order to have a future. That’s where I come in, I tell this room full of old men about the technologies I’ve tested and the things I’ve learned and hopefully pull them into the 21st century.

Give us a teaser. What kinds of technology are you going to hit them with?

Chatbots! Everyone knows I love them and they really are a game changer. Over the past year, we tested a chatbot that runs through Facebook messenger with extremely positive results. The chatbot acts as a job board and initial application. A candidate can ask if there is an opening in a certain region. Let’s say there’s not, then when a position does become available the chatbot will initiate a conversation. If the candidate finds a job they are interested in they can ask questions like ‘can I bring my dog to work?’ or ‘do you provide lunch?’ Things that wouldn’t be in a job description but maybe you’d like to know. It’s such a time saver and candidates like it too.

What have you learned about chatbots in the past year?

I got a great deal of insight into candidate behavior. Salary. That’s the number one thing people type into chatbots. No ‘hi’, no ‘how are you’. When people know it’s a bot they cut the niceties and get to the point. It’s a safe space because it’s anonymous. Usually, the hiring manager controls the information flow but when you use a chatbot candidates have more agency which I think is good.

It’s Sunday night and your average passive candidate is chilling, watching Game of Thrones, just scrolling through job ads to see what’s out there. They scroll to an intriguing post but they have to know it’s going to be worth the trouble of applying. We’re talking compensation. Salary isn’t something we usually disclose on a job ad but it is something a chatbot could tell an interested party to turn them into a very interested party.

Best career advice you could give?

Ask for forgiveness, not permission. HR people should be more disobedient. If your company would truly fire you for being innovative then you know what I think of your company. Stop feeding the monster by giving into the bureaucracy and red tape. Be bold, be blunt, just do it and apologize later.

HR wasn’t the sexiest profession when I started. People would be like ‘ aw you weren’t smart enough for marketing’. Technology has changed that perception little by little. We need to spearhead the tech advances that change the way we do our jobs instead of just execute them. Tech innovation is what keeps HR relevant so we need to be on the frontline.

Give us an example.

One day I just stopped using CVs. I didn’t ask anyone or write a memo, I just stopped. There’s no real connection between the probability of your success and what’s written on your CV. Is school what got you where you are today? Great! Or was messing around on the computer? Also fine. I don’t care I just want to know how you are going to find solutions in this role.

We tried anything but CVs – video interviews, test questions, chatbots, you name it. And it worked. We hired great people. Now I can go to our parent company Deutsche Telekom and show them the positive results from getting rid of CVs at hub:raum and maybe they can start to adopt the practice. Corporations take longer to adopt new practices but one day we could live in a world where you don’t ever have to read or compile another CV. That’s the dream.

Very interesting.

I just tried something innovative without permission, I learned something, and I didn’t get fired. Come to think of it, I probably wasn’t radical enough given how smoothly it went. Next time, I’m really going to break something.

You are a total HR head. Does that mean you’re a people person?

I don’t think HR people are generally ‘people people’ they’re more ‘people collectors’, and that’s what I do. If someone new comes to the coworking space I’m at I have to go over and say hi and learn about them and add them to my ‘pile of people’. then I keep them in my mind to connect with other people because that’s what I like to do.   

How’d you find yourself in HR?

Getting kicked out of kindergarten meant that I finished school a year early. I guess I liked to break things even back then. My idea was to go corporate in my gap year so I could save money to travel abroad. I landed a spot in HR. It was terrible, but I made great connections and got involved with startups which was crazy cool back then and still fascinates me today. I’m a geeky, techy person. I’m lucky I found my niche.

Artificial Intelligence. Real, or just a buzzword?

What I see a lot are companies trying to pass off machine learning as AI. I saw it at HR Tech World Amsterdam and I don’t like it. The thought of a less savvy HR rep buying into it makes me sad so I hope people stop trying to pretend their technology is something that it’s not.

What’s wrong with hiring today?

Often in hiring, we think of finding the perfect stranger when really you should focus the potential you’ve already aggregated. Think about growing the employees you already have or encouraging former interns to return. It’s so much easier to hire for a junior job so it makes sense to hire into junior positions and cultivate them into senior roles over time.

Spraying job ads everywhere is ineffective. Most job descriptions are just crap. They don’t actually describe the job and often times they contain a lot of unintentional bias.

Tell us about your event ‘Tru Berlin’?

Tru Events are the kind of thing you get addicted to. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t gone why they need to go. The only way I can describe it is to say you get all the inspiration from one day at a Tru Event to keep you going in your day-to-day job.

There’s no hierarchy. No, ‘you’re in the crowd and someone important is on stage with a Powerpoint’. No Powerpoint allowed. You go there and discuss your projects and share ideas in a way reminiscent of networking, but much more organic than your typical mixer.

It’s Berlin so there will be beer and pizza. We’ve already sold 50 of 70 tickets so far. The price is by donation and we were delighted to see the average donation to be around €10 which I think speaks to how much an event like this is needed.

*Tru Berlin takes place December 7th, 16-22:00 and tickets are on sale now*

Who is the most valuable person in your network?

Bill Boorman, founder of Tru Events, and total non-conformist. I would say half my work every year outside hub:raum comes from him. You look at this tattered guy and you wouldn’t know it but there’s a genius under there. Part of the reason I wanted to host Tru Berlin was to welcome him to the Berlin scene and you can definitely look forward to a Santa appearance… I have to remember to pick up that suit when I get back.

If you could have a robot take over one part of your job what would it be?

I’m happy because I already have a chatbot that handles all the stupid questions from candidates. If I could be spoiled I’d want a video-bot that could take basic footage, turn it into a job description and disseminate it to the world. That would be cool.