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

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

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

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

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

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

Sandi Lurie
VP of Global Recruiting
Optimizely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you navigate these issues?

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

How is your team leveraging HR tech in this process?

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

…And what results have you seen thus far?

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

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

How has your organization’s candidate experience changed?

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

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

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

Any reflections on recruiting in the education industry?

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

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

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

Finding the right talent for your organization has become almost as difficult as saving private Ryan, luckily we know some TA Generals.

Coined by McKinsey’s Steven Hankin in 1997, the term ‘war for talent’ has become synonymous with the market conditions that have led to fierce competition between companies to attract and retain talented employees. This phenomenon will only increase at a time when too few workers are available to replace the baby boomers now departing the workforce in advanced economies.

A whopping 82 percent of companies don’t believe they recruit highly talented people. For companies that do, only seven percent think they can keep them.

For tech companies like Devoteam, a French IT service company, they are the ones storming the beaches in search of top talent to bring into their organizations. Spread out over 18 countries across Europe, they have developed specific strategies to gain ground in the cutthroat world of Talent Acquisition (TA) where 73 percent of candidates are passive and top candidates only stay available on the market for 10 days.

One of the people spearheading these endeavors is Matthieu Rivière the TA director for Devoteam. He has seen first-hand the fight to recruit talented individuals for his international teams and the importance of having the right firepower like candidate engagement and experience.

We caught up with Matthieu Rivière at  Hiring Success 19, where this TA general shared with us some of his experiences in the trenches of TA and how he thinks his company can win the War for Talent.

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

What is it like on the frontlines of the War for Talent?

As a tech company, we understand that it is a war and that means competing for highly skilled technical people with all other types of companies. 

The struggle to attract people becomes even more difficult because we specialize in consulting, so most people would rather work in a startup or one of the well-known tech brands. Therefore our main challenges boil down to being able to engage with passive candidates, start conversations with them, and then create a preference in their minds to choose us as an employer. 

Then, on top of all that, our recruitment volume requires more than 2000 people a year and our average employee turnover is two to four years. In general, it is a very difficult environment to succeed in.

How does your team confront these challenges?

As a service company, providing the best customer experience is our main priority. This idea translates to recruitment in the form of candidate experience. And, at the end of the day, creating a top of the line candidate experience is good for us as well as it allows us to be more selective and acquire the best talent.

As far as the specifics of our recruiting function, each country is specialized in a particular type of candidate profile. Half of our IT specialists are in France so the team there will be made up solely of IT recruiters. In other locations, we have TA  teams focused on finding project managers or Java developers.

In general, everybody is involved – even the sales teams are committed to sourcing candidates and engaging them in the recruitment process – working closely with the recruitment team for sourcing and employer branding.

How do you expect to win the War for Talent?

The strategies to ‘win’ are becoming more and more based on marketing. We have to engage as many people as we can and convert them into candidates – much the same way you would convert a lead into a client. 

Candidate experience will continue to be paramount, and for that, we will continue to use a mix of digital and physical components. From our point of view, everyone who works here is an ambassador of our employee brand, and having everyone involved really makes a difference.

The tools we use and our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) are crucial to our success. Without the system capabilities such as candidate feedback on the hiring process, texting options, and easy integration to social media platforms like LinkedIn, I don’t know where we would be. 

We are lucky to have a tool with such a great user experience that anyone can pick up because, as I mentioned before, even the sales team may source some candidates or hire them for a job. This aspect and a truly flexible solution made it easy to implement the SmartRecruiters technology in each country despite the different offices or recruiting team structures. 

In the end, we are positioning ourselves to succeed with our candidate marketing techniques and having technology that’s adaptable to any situation.

See more from leaders like Matthieu in the next part of the blog series – 10 Things I learned at Hiring Success – where we find out what it is like maintaining a brick and mortar store against the waves of digitalization.

As offices prepare to welcome the first generation of true ‘digital natives’ there are more currents below the surface shaping the future of HR.

With unemployment at a 49 year low in the US, salary budgets are projected to increase by an average of 3.2 percent, up from 3.1 percent last year. Employers are feeling the growing labor shortage, which saw 6.9 million unfilled jobs last year, a number that is predicted to grow in 2019, with the most affected industries being education/health services and professional/business services.

All this as the first majority Gen Z university class dons their caps and gowns this Spring, and prepares to enter the workforce. According to recent LinkedIn research, the fastest growing fields of entry for these grads are web designer (for women) and Software tester (for men). However, it isn’t just fresh face employees making their mark on the workforce, some 10 thousand baby boomers turn 65 every day, and as a result, half of the 11.4 million jobs projected to be created over the next seven years will be filled by people over the age of 55.  

As the face of the labor market changes, so does the infrastructure that supports it. In the last five years, HR technology has seen a proliferation of startups, big consolidations, and a race for innovation. At the same time, new legislation, like the General Data Protection Regulations in Europe, brings data security to the forefront; and workers movements like #metoo, educator strikes, and Uber protests raise questions about what the future of work should look like.

In the midst of all this recruiters and HR are working harder than ever. A recent Monster survey found 62 percent of recruiters say their jobs are more difficult than the previous year, and 67 percent say the difficulty exceeds that of five years ago. So, let’s break down these changes step by step to understand the trends taking root in the latter half of 2019.

1. The Beginning of Gen Z Takeover

Every employer has now taken into the fold, the once enigmatic, millennial cohort. In fact, the generation born between 1981 and 1996, is the biggest portion of the labor force today. Yet, time marches on, and employers must now welcome a new crop to the workforce… with their own special quirks.

Gen Z, the first generation of true ‘digital natives’ (those born between 1997 and 2016) are expected to represent at least 40 percent of all consumers by the year 2020, potentially influencing $166 – $333 billion of annual family spending.

Some of the defining characteristics of Gen Z include: entrepreneurial, less money-driven, and honesty seeking. Read the full list here!

2. Remote Work Is the New Norm

More and more employees are enjoying remote work with increased productivity. As a matter of fact, an almost two year Stanford study revealed a remarkable boost in productivity among telecommuters in a test group that is equivalent to full day work.

The report found that remote employees tend to put in a full day of work and even more since they don’t have to struggle with a daily commute only to leave earlier for personal errands or be late for work.

Furthermore, employee attrition was reduced by about half, saving the test group around $1,900 per employee in yearly retention costs. Not only that, but operating costs were also reduced by at least $1,400 per worker since they were not using company facilities like water and power and taking up office space.

3. Digital and Consumer-Grade HR

Employees, as well as employers, will continue to demand user-friendly workplace tech. This will push HR solutions to be fully cloud-based, mobile-enabled, open to APIs and meticulously designed with the end user in mind. Furthermore, HR tech and data will be accessed and shared with the ability to integrate across various platforms while connecting internal business silos.

Now there are technologies for every step of the employee lifecycle from candidate relationship management, to onboarding, to time/attendance tracking keeping HR and Talent Acquisition engaged with their workers from start to finish.

Says Bob Melk, Chief Commercial Officer, Monster: “For recruiting to be effective in 2018 and beyond, it must go beyond traditional methods. [There’s a] need for an integrated recruitment strategy spanning the entire candidate lifecycle. A multi-solution approach – combining marketing, digital, and analytics – is critical in moving recruitment stress to recruitment success.”

4. Employers Get Competitive About Benefits

This competitive hiring landscape can be particularly challenging for startups and small business without the name recognition of larger companies.

These fledgling businesses will need to get creative with the benefits they offer, such as lifestyle spending accounts, flexible work arrangements, student loan support, and health/wellness programs. Elastic and Salesforce not only offer generous vacation packages, they also pay their employees to volunteer for the causes they are passionate about. Netflix, on the other hand, extends paid parental leave to salaried employees so parents of any gender can take a year off with full pay following the birth or adoption of a child.

5. Delivering Against Diversity And Inclusion Initiatives Continues

With the unemployment rate expected to continue its decline, employers need to expand the talent pool. That means building pipelines for underrepresented and untraditional candidates.

Daniel Zhao, a senior data scientist at Glassdoor, notes changes in the tech sector saying to CBS News “We’ve heard a lot of anecdotal evidence that employers are starting to reduce qualifications or look for nontraditional workers. They might reduce qualifications from a master’s to a bachelor’s degree, or they might start an apprenticeship.”

As we move into 2020 there will be more changes to come! Let us know what you think is on the horizon @smartrecruiters #HiringSuccess.

Talent Acquisition leaders flock to Amsterdam for the second annual European event, here’s why!

Hiring Success EU returns, this time in Amsterdam. Over 350 attendees will join SmartRecruiters to define the future of recruiting September 10-11, 2019 canal-side at the Compagnietheater.

During two days of interactive sessions and networking, conference-goers will explore topical issues in recruiting with 80 expert speakers from top tier brands like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Twitter. With three stages and 30 sessions, attendees are sure to find the content they need to achieve hiring success.

“Hiring Success is a superb event series. It’s so good, it’s become a movement,” says Hung Lee, CEO at WorkShape.io and Curator of Recruiting Brainfood. “Think: hiring best practice, cool product updates, a clear theme of diversity and inclusion, and a great community of Talent Acquisition folks. I don’t exaggerate – it’s a life-affirming event.”

But don’t just take Hung’s word for it, here are 8 of the best reasons why HSEU is the must-attend recruiting event this year.

Check out the full agenda here and make sure to take advantage of early bird pricing until June 14th!

1. Exceptional Speakers

The Hiring Success Conference is all about the amazing speakers who inspire and inform. Last year, Hiring Success EU – Berlin was lucky enough to welcome leading practitioners like James Purvis (Head of HR, CERN), Sanam Moayedi-Stummer (HR Director & Program Lead, Coca-Cola European Partners, and Elke Jorens (Director of Talent Acquisition, EMEA Microsoft).

2. Network with industry leaders.

With TA leaders, analysts, hiring practitioners, and industry thought leaders in attendance, conference-goers have the opportunity to make meaningful connections. Networking is an important dimension to any in-person event, which is why every Hiring Success Conference features a Smarty Party where everyone can relax, discuss learnings, and meet new people. Last year, attendees enjoyed a night at one of Berlin’s top night clubs, complete with a marching band and ariel acrobats.

3. Three topical tracks to guide your learning adventure.

The Hiring Success Conference is built around three proven tracks to meet practitioners at their point of need:

Innovation. Understand the latest recruiting tech and see how these digital tools will actually affect you and your practice.

Diversity & Inclusion. Stories of success and inspiration from hiring practitioners that will help you create the business case for a diverse workforce and inclusive work culture.

Hiring Success. The case studies and hiring hacks from practitioners who have #BeenThere and know your pain points.

4. Explore the latest diversity and inclusion initiatives.

A new topic experts will discuss this year is ‘candidates with resume gaps’. Whether the sabbatical was to travel the world, care for a loved one, raise children, return to school, or heal from an illness, applicants shouldn’t be dismissed as ‘irrelevant’ upon their return to the workforce. In this interactive session, recruiters will learn strategies for successful workforce reintegration.

5. Dive into the best practices of tomorrow.

The Hiring Success Conference is a great chance to get out of the company silo and learn from other practitioners; this is especially the case with analytics. When starting a people analytics program, it’s hard to benchmark data without anything for comparison. Ever wonder how effective posting jobs vs events vs referrals vs database sourcing is at attracting top talent? All these questions will be answered in a participatory session, and everyone will walk away with a sourcing-spend plan.

6. Stay abreast of innovation in recruiting tech.

The Hiring Success Hackathon makes its European debut at the Amsterdam conference. Teams will have 24 hours to produce an original add-on to the SmartRecruiters platform and attendees will vote to decide the winner.

At Hiring Success19 – San Francisco Optimizely swept gold with an app that solved for task completion lag time, but who knows what imaginative hack will impress in Amsterdam?

7. Location, location, location.

Jerome Ternynck, CEO and Founder of SmartRecrutiers put it best when he said: “Amsterdam speaks to the future of recruiting. This lively city is on the avant-garde of tech adoption, where global talent flocks, and people-centric innovation abounds.”

8. See Winston dance again!

Who can resist Winston’s killer dance moves?  SmartRecruiters’ very own Smartian is (without doubt or prejudice) one of the greatest mascots of all time.

via GIPHY

Sometimes a strategic view doesn’t mean high-level, it means seeing what’s happening on the ground…

Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify, joins SmartRecruiters for the fourth annual Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco where he will be leading the session “Inside the Mind of Today’s Chief People Officer”. Full agenda here!

As a tech recruiter in the late 90s, Lars had a “front row seat” to the manic growth, and painful demise, of the first internet economy. Despite this trial by fire introduction to Talent Acquisition (TA), Lars continued in the industry, taking his talents in-house.

In the proceeding decade, he went on to run global recruiting for household names like Ticketmaster and NPR. Now, as the principal of Amplify, this people strategy chameleon helps companies build progressive talent functions for 21st century HR.

After so many years in TA, Lars’ view of the industry might be described as ‘high-level’. Yet, we prefer the descriptor ‘in-touch’ as much of his success has been his special attention to the ground-level of practitioners’ day-to-day.

For Lars, a big part of staying in-touch means continuous and open communication with the people in the field. That’s where HR Open Source (HROS.co) comes in, a not-for-profit he founded in 2015 along with fellow recruiting enthusiast Ambrosia Vertesi, VP of People at Duo Security. This global community aims to democratize access to modern HR practices through connecting practitioners who collaborate and share learnings to prepare themselves, and their organizations, for the future of work.

Speaking of the future of work, HROS.co recently put out a report on the near-future of TA, surveying over 500 HR/TA practitioners to understand what is happening on their teams now, and in the next three years!

Today, we speak Lars to learn about some of the surprising results, including how people-teams are investing in tech, and why TA is still wary of automation.

Why create another future of work report?

There’s so much content about the future of work, anywhere there’s another blog/podcast/report! The thing is, most of this content is developed by analysts, consultants, and pundits – entities that are a couple of layers removed from the actual work. We wanted to create a report that captured the perspective of practitioners on the ground: How do they view the future? What things are impacting them right now?

HR Open Source Future of Work Report found HR has concerns about job automation, and believe their organizations will be impacted in the next three years, what do you make of this finding?

The automation piece was certainly interesting. Our community tends to be on the innovative side of the practitioner spectrum and closely attuned to the technology impacting their work.

I don’t think automation will replace the majority of recruiting positions, but certainly, some roles will be impacted. Sourcing for instance: with everyone having such a large digital footprint it’s easier to find people, but harder to get their attention. Going into the future, sourcing will be more and more about personalized outreach sequences and tailored messaging.

Going into the future, recruiters will have to focus more on the human side of recruiting TA. Tech tools will automate tasks that don’t require empathy and human engineering. For the foreseeable future, humans are still the best equipped to understand what motivates candidates, and how to design the message to get them on board.

CRM is the top investment for the coming year, why is candidate experience coming to the forefront?

The reality is that most TA functions use their ATS as more of a transactional engine, than a talent database. Organizations have this dormant candidate database, of thousands – maybe more – who have already raised their hand and said, ‘yes, I’m interested in your company!’ Yet, recruiters approach every job as a ‘one off’ when they don’t have the means to leverage this talent pool.

With the means of a candidate relationship management (CRM) tool, recruiters are able to mirror the marketing function and replicate some of the more sophisticated branding exercises like audience segmentation and personalized nurture sequences.

Do you think tech in diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives will impact those programs’ efficacy?

Technology alone won’t solve a lack of diversity. Organizations need to have some non-tech foundational pieces in place, before these tech tools can be used to their full power. Pieces including interview design, closing the wage gap, internal mobility, continued learning, etc. – which come together under the umbrella of a general philosophical buy-in. Technology can then help you really accelerate those efforts, whether it’s software to scan job descriptions for gender bias, or bots to anonymize candidate details to prevent unconscious discrimination.

Was there anything in the report that surprised you personally?

One point, which I had experienced anecdotally to be true, that was interesting to see born out in the numbers, is that 70 percent of respondents previously worked outside of HR and recruiting. It’s a big shift from 10 years ago when HR was a very insular field, that people would enter and move through in a strictly linear fashion. This shift is important because it means the field of HR and recruiting is being infused with new skill sets and perspectives, and I view it as  extremely healthy for the function as a whole.

News of Google’s 50 million euro fine has rocked the business world, but as other multinationals panic, recruiters can rejoice in some of the unexpected benefits of the GDPR regulation.

On January 21st, 2019, The French Data Protection Authority announced from Paris it would be slapping Google with a 50 million euro fine or around 57 million dollars for not correctly disclosing to its users how their data would be collected and managed by its search engine and services such as Youtube, and google maps to present personalized advertisements.

As one regulator put it “Google’s practices obscured how its services can reveal important parts of their user’s private life since they are based on a huge amount of data, a wide variety of services and almost unlimited possible combinations.”

This comes as the fourth and the largest fine brought against a company breaching the new General Data Protection Regulation (enacted in May 2018) and sends a message to the rest of the business world that no corporation is too big to avoid penalties. Google is determining whether to appeal the fine, but faces an uphill battle as history has shown through multiple billion dollar fines that the European Union does not favor the tech giant.

We, at SmartRecruiters, have been following the development of these measures since they were announced, bringing attention to the fact that many people didn’t know if their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) was up-to-date. (Evaluate your ATS here!) We also covered the Cambridge Analytica scandal, detailing how the business community is reacting to the changes that need to be made in order to stay GDPR compliant.

Now that we are in 2019 and the world has not imploded over these new regulations, Smartrecruiters has some new information that demonstrates that GDPR has actually had some positive effects, specifically in the world of recruiting. I know, crazy to think that bureaucracy had any benefits… but hear us out, and check out this infographic below describing them.

Based on this infographic we can see that one of the natural consequences of making the hiring process and data collection of applicants more transparent, are more engaged candidates. People have overwhelmingly responded to the request to consent option (83 percent) in less than a day, with less than one percent have deleted their profiles.

When candidates feel that a company is respecting their information they are more likely to interact with the hiring process. Companies have gotten in on the action as well and 79 percent of SmartRecruiters customers have included a company or country-specific privacy policy. 63 percent have also internally trained their staff to properly process their personal data which is significantly more when compared to the rest of the world where only 10 percent of companies have enacted the same measures.

These efforts by and large benefit recruiters as they do not need to worry if their company’s management of candidate data breach GDPR compliance and they have Candidates more willing to engage with the hiring process.

SmartRecruiters’ efforts have made our customers some of the most prepared for GDPR compliance and because of that, they are not sitting in the same hot water as Google or Facebook at this moment. If you would like to know more about SmartRecruiters’ resources  Check out our SmartRecruiters’ GDPR Resource Kit or FAQ page for answers to all the most common recruiting questions concerning data privacy.

Meet the leaders who will make you sit up, lean in, and question everything you know.

Look forward to two days of learning and inspiration, throughout our 50 plus sessions including more than 100 speakers – these are just a few of the leaders joining us for Hiring Success 19 – Americas.  

“We’re bringing together business leaders to shape the future of recruiting,” says SmartRecruiters Founder & CEO, Jerome Ternynck. “Organizations now lean on talent acquisition to provide the competitive edge it takes to win. The Hiring Success conference arms practitioners with the latest in recruitment innovation, strategy, and best practices.”

February 26-27, over 1,000  TA leaders from global brands like LinkedIn, VISA, and Google join SmartRecruiters to define the future of recruiting. Three tracks – innovation, diversity & inclusion, and Hiring Success – allow attendees to customize their own learning adventure.

Meet seven of our fan favorites returning this year to share their stories of growth and perseverance.

Lou Adler

Lou’s life as a recruiter began in 1978 when he walked into a hot wheels manufacturing plant to hire a production manager and said… “Forget the job description, walk me through the plant, tell me everything that’s wrong, and I’ll find someone who can fix it.”

And to this day he lives by the same credo – hire someone who can actuallly do the job. He calls it performance-based-hiring and it’s the foundation for everything that has come since, from founding his own company, The Adler group to authoring two Amazon bestsellers.

Read our full interview with Lou Adler, and learn why this simple philosophy continues to disrupt the TA industry to this day.

Saumya Chopra

Have you ever tried to implement new tech and instead of making everyone’s lives better, the chaos of transition brought your team to a grinding halt? Saumya feels your pain. As People Technology Product Manager for Square, she’s been leading teams through system changes for seven years, successfully!  

Through all these implementations, integrations, and transitions she’s learned one thing: it’s not just about finding the right tech solution but getting everyone else on board.

Read more about Saumya Chopra, and how to make your end user the center of tech adoption.

Bill Boorman

Recruiting’s “man in the hat,” Bill Boorman is the harbinger of new tech and the creator of recruiting’s merriest meetup, #TRU un-conferences. He’s hosted 100 events in 65 countries and five continents over the last 12 months. As he zigzags the map, he’s learning about the latest in grassroots TA – and he’s ready to share!

Learn more about Bill and why he was dressed as Father Christmas the first time we met.

Robert Coombs

Over the last decade, Robert’s career has hit every note in the tune to success. The current COO for The Class by Taryn Toomey, has advised top government officials, held events at the White House, testified before the US Congress, spoken at TEDx, and had initiatives featured in The New York Times. So he thought finding a new job should be easy, he was wrong.

After a frustrating couple of months of being screened by bots, he decided to flip the hiring process on its head by building a bot to apply to jobs for him.

Learn the end result of this little experiment and what it means for TA.

Sandi Lurie

As Sr. Director of Global Recruiting for the digital experiment platform Optimizely with over 25 years of experience, Sandi isn’t afraid of a little trial and error. And she expects the same adventurous spirit from the recruiters she works with.

While she’s always trying new things, one constant is her firm belief in empathy as a recruiter’s most powerful tool, and the proof is in the pudding. Optimizely was voted 4th best place to work in Silicon Valley in 2018.

Understand how Sandi and her team have helped foster an environment of support and why it’s the best thing they could have done to boost candidate experience.

Hung Lee

The creator of recruiting brainfood (the talent acquisition newsletter eagerly awaited by over 9,000 people weekly) is always asking questions. How do I reach the right people? What is my mission? How can I do it better?

If you follow him on social media you’ll see Hung is constantly gathering feedback from his audience and actually incorporating it! Maybe that’s why he has been able to build an audience that’s not only large, it’s active!

Get inside this influencers process, and start engaging your crowd today!

Jo Lockwood

In 2016 Joanne embarked on her personal rebrand, which included selling her IT services company and transitioning to her true gender identity. In the wake of this decision, she discovered the hidden obstacles that many trans candidates face when they search for the right employment opportunity.

In response to her experience as an applicant, Joanne founded SEE Change Happen, a diversity and inclusion practice specializing in supporting Transgender inclusion in businesses and other organizations.

Learn more about the obstacles trans candidates face and how your organization can step up.

If you want to predict the end for your employees, look no further than the start. A bumpy on-ramp into your organization could very well be steering many of them to the nearest exit.

It should come as no surprise to HR managers, but the first 18 months of employment — when turnover can reach as high as 50 percent — are pivotal in the employee-employer relationship. But according to a Gallup study, a meager 12 percent of employees “strongly agree” that their organization provides a sufficient onboarding training process.

Far too many HR departments risk an abbreviated tenure with new hires by neglecting this early stage. Given the costs of losing a team member — at least six to nine months of his or her salary — preventing employee turnover should be a top priority for every company.

The Untapped Power of Onboarding Software

Thankfully, many HR departments have the necessary tools right at their fingertips. Many of these teams have already implemented a learning management system (LMS) for staff training, but they might not understand some of the ancillary LMS benefits. What was once a tool solely for internal use can now be leveraged long before an interview.

The advantages of a learning management system can begin as early as the recruitment phase. One HR executive recently told me about a successful hire funneled directly from the company’s online recruitment program, which vets candidates with mini certification courses and games designed to test skills. This talent acquisition software enabled the company to build a robust profile of candidate data before the interview process, which ensured it was choosing from the best of the best.

Finding and Onboarding Top Talent With LMS Software

Taking your onboarding program online can yield similar results for your firm. Here are five benefits of recruiting and onboarding new employees using your learning management system:

1)

You can track recruits on a centralized platform. Without a central database enabling a rapid review of an array of applicants, a recruiting manager might have little time to assess résumés or set up interviews. Using online training platform software to aggregate all the pertinent information about your recruits can save precious time.

Once you have the data readily available, you can use it to quickly identify which candidates should stay in the running. The software enables you to find individuals who have the right degree or key qualifications much faster than thumbing through an unyielding mountain of résumés.

2)

You can fill in gaps using detailed reports. Onboarding software brings a host of analytics to your recruitment process. With detailed reports, charts, and graphs of assessment data, you can collect critical information to find the right talent to fit your gaps.

Companies like Johnson & Johnson are adeptly using these features to match recruits with departments. By analyzing the traits of its top employees, the pharmaceutical giant identifies criteria for its assessments and is able to screen out applicants who might be unlikely to succeed. Likewise, you can develop your own criteria for what helps someone thrive in customer service or sales and then structure your employee onboarding software accordingly.

3)

You can uncover hidden talents. As many recruiters and hiring managers have learned, it’s not uncommon for candidates to discover that they’re better suited for a different position during the interview process. Why not let your employee onboarding software accelerate this realization? You can use the system to help prospective hires identify their core talents and then see open positions that match their expertise.

By moving this critical discovery phase forward, you can save your organization a good deal of time and money. Instead of going through the painful exercise of re-recruiting after shifting someone toward another department, you can funnel new hires into the right role from the start.

4)

You can get face time with candidates. Most employee onboarding software has built-in support for video conferencing. Companies such as Unilever have scrapped résumés altogether in favor of a mixture of game-based assessments and automated video interviews.

Once again, software can save you and your department the effort of going through an in-person interview only to discover that your promising candidate is a poor communicator or a bad fit for your organization. Get that important face-to-face contact before an official interview by using technology to connect.

5)

You can customize your onboarding by pinpointing areas of improvement. Because you’ve already established a profile for new hires in your onboarding system through the recruiting process, you can transition seamlessly into training. Given that nearly 90 percent of new hires say they don’t enter a new job with all the knowledge they need, they will require help to bridge the gaps in their skills.

Regardless of any shortcomings that might have come to light during interviews, induction training for new employees coupled with specific online courses can quickly bring them up to speed. You’re thus able to dive right into on-the-job training, which more than 75 percent of new employees have identified as the most important part of onboarding.

***

While the benefits of onboarding new employees are well-established, relatively few companies think to put their learning management systems to work during these early stages. With a flexible LMS that supports gamification, video conferencing, applicant tracking, and advanced reporting features, you can employ this software to smooth the on-ramp and pave the way to success for your new hires.

HR and recruiting are about to experience a perfect storm – in a good way – learn how the labor shortage, tech innovation, and big investment are about to disrupt everything!

A healthy environmental ecosystem is the product of careful balance. Often, these schemes seem immutable, but even the most ancient can be transformed by the simple tipping of the scales. The same can be said for the HR ecosystem. Mutually reinforced patterns of behavior scaled up over years can be totally disrupted in a new wave of economic pressures, and we are about to experience three: a labor shortage, new technology, and major investment.

In the same way that a foreign seed can wipe out a native plant species or a flood can give rise to a new population of moss, we will soon see how Recruiting will adapt to these changing environs. Not only that, but we will witness how the C-suite and leadership view of HR – as a function – changes.

To understand better the evolving industry we talk to Franz Gilbert, Vice President, Solution Provider Programs at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP.  An industry analyst with over 20 years of experience, Franz has seen how the market reacts when the pendulum swings. Here’s what he has to say about how the dust will settle… and whether ‘balance’ can be restored.

Can you give us your “state of the union” for HR Technology?

There are amazing things going on in the industry. It’s a great time to be in HR and HR technology specifically, and there are three simultaneous drivers behind this:

• Employees recognized as critical…
• Tech is ready…
• Investment is there…

One, from a business standpoint, the role of the employee is finally being recognized as critical to operations. Investors are seeing that better HR organizations tend to do better business. So now the people with the capitol want to vet companies from an employee management perspective, and – with the help of sustainable guidelines like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) – companies are now reporting on turnover, training hours per employee, retention, pay equity, and diversity.

The global labor scarcity has played into the elevation of the employee status. In the United States specifically, there are 7.1 million open jobs right now while only 5.9 million people remain unemployed. That’s a 20 percent gap from a demand perspective which makes retaining employees incredibly important.

Second, on the technology side, the advent of cloud computing, which has made HR tech easier to do. HR is basically a tremendous pile of data, and there’s now the possibility to process it for innovative solutions to hiring pain points like sourcing outside hires, surfacing internal talent, and campaigning to passive candidates.

Third, we’re now seeing real investment in HR Technology companies. There’s more private equity and venture capital money in the market than ever before. The normal runway used to be around $500k in a year, but in the last 90 days, we’ve seen $256 million put into rounds, according to the public data. So, in a three month period, we’re doing what companies historically did in a year and a half to two years.

This infusion of capital is attracting amazing talent to HR tech. We already had good talent, but now you’re seeing people come into the industry with backgrounds in artificial intelligence (AI) and psychology from institutions like MIT and Harvard. It’s a great time for the market, and we’re already starting to seeing an explosion of smart solutions.

With the proliferation of point solutions are all-in-one platforms history?

The pendulum is swinging back from point solutions, and I think employee experience is going to be the great unifier. The challenge for the next three years will be bringing together all these technologies into a navigable interface.  I predict a great deal of collaboration behind the scenes, in terms of APIs, will have to take place, and perhaps some user interfaces will come to the market that just provide a skin for other applications. Of course, there will be some straightforward consolidation and acquisitions as well.

What are your predictions for 2019 for the HR tech industry?

• AI

AI has been the buzzword for the last couple years, but just now it’s coming into play as part of the feature suite of HR. I’m excited to see what happens now that the shiny foil is off this tech and we’re really going to see it in action.

• Candidate and employee experience

Another great trend I’m seeing is a return to driving good HR that puts employee experience at the center. This focus on making work great for workers is going to force the next wave of innovation.

• Upskilling

Workforce planning and workforce analytics will also play a huge role in 2019. As the labor shortages continue to grow, companies are being forced to know their employees better – their skills, their competencies, their goals, etc. Taxonomies like titles and hierarchy will become less relevant. It will become a question of ‘what can you do?’.