Virtual reality, instrumental jam sessions, live chat-bot battles, and everything else you would – and wouldn’t – expect from an HR conference.

Hiring Success 18 EU is here! 250 Talent Acquisition leaders from around the globe – including yourself, perhaps – have landed in Berlin for 48-hours of thought-provoking interactive sessions and live demos on three main tracks, #Innovation, #Inclusion, and #HiringSuccess, that will delve into the most important topical issues in recruiting today.

With over 30 sessions to choose from in only two days, we thought it wouldn’t hurt to recommend a few!

Have you hired a refugee?

#Inclusion

Is your company interested in starting a program to hire refugees? The first step is empathy and understanding. Hear from actual displaced persons about what it means to leave behind the life you know and rebuild everything from the ground up. The second half of the session invites informational Scientists from Humboldt University to participate in a panel discussion to deep dive into the programs available to refugees now, and how your company could start building its own.

Unlock potential with augmented and virtual reality

#Innovation

Explore the burgeoning fields of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, first through art, then though recruiting. Josephine Ackerman COO & Deputy Global Head Art, Culture & Sports at Deutsche Bank gives a live demonstration of how her company uses AR and VR to bring artworks to life in contemporary art exhibitions they support. These new technologies allow an artist’s intention and historical context to come to the forefront of the museum experience without dense wall text. Using only a smartphone, a static image or text can turn into a rotating font of information. Learn how Deutsche Bank and others have begun to apply the same principles to job advertising, onboarding, and training.

Battle of the Bots

#Innovation

Watch the leading chat bots battle it out in a live face-off. Leading recruiting chatbots will have a face-off in a live battle. Ask these virtual helpers questions to test the limits of their natural-language processing, get to know their unique personalities, and see how gracefully they fail. Your vote determines the winner at the end!

Accelerate revenue with TA

#HiringSuccess

Stop looking at TA as a cost center. Learn how the recruiting team at Microsoft were able to accelerate revenue for Azure Cloud during their digital transformation with heir Director of TA for EMEA, Elke Jorens. This workshop shows how infusing data from market and funnel-analysis contributes to the bottom line, so you can apply that same expert methodology to a project of your choice.

Synchronicity

#Inclusion

Whether you are a practicing musician or haven’t picked up an instrument since the recorder, this session is for you. Join the MIT grad and leadership expert, M Baha in an interactive jam session that uses the principles of music to promote the tenets of diversity and inclusion in a business setting.

Inspire your Remote Workforce

#Inclusion

While the draw of global talent is great, managing remote teams is still largely unexplored territory. Which is why we brought in Beat Buhlmann, one of the few people in the world who have a doctorate related to managing virtual teams, and the current GM for Evernote.  

Buhlmann lays out the benefits of employing a remote workforce and then shows how to address the challenges these offsite teams pose,  from both a culture and a tech standpoint. Walk away with the tools to sell your board on remotes hires, and the know-how of how to engage them throughout their tenure.

Internal Career Pathing

#HiringSuccess

Companies unanimously recognize the value of employees who have experience in more than one department, yet these high performers remain an anomaly rather than a matter of course. The abstract promise of great return on investment (ROI) in hiring, never seems to be enough to push internal mobility initiatives to the top of the to-do list. So we bring you the director of people for Native Instruments, Laura Moreno Salinas, and the Director and Program Lead Accelerate One HR at Coca-Cola European Partners, Sanam Moayedi-Stummer to demonstrate the success of their internal career pathing programs and help you get started on your own.

Recruiting Startup Awards

#Innovation

Step into the future of TA technology with our Recruiting Startup of the Year Competition, where the newest and most daring startups in HR pitch it out on our main stage. The winner will receive €9,000 in sponsorship and an article about them written by a leading TA influencer. The contest began July 1st, when these fledgling startups leveraged the strength of their social network to be voted into the top five, who will now convince the expert panel at Hiring Success 18 they have what it takes.

It’s the hottest HR topic not directly related to tech. But to achieve true diversity and inclusion at work we must overcome pesky traits like unconscious bias, and to assure that reality, there is Natalie Mellin.

Natalie Mellin has gained experience from innovative tech companies like Spotify and King, and has played a central role in creating workplace awareness around diversity and inclusion over the last decade. She is one of the pioneers who helped reshape the conversation, and behavioral science inspires everything she does. With cross-functional research, she creates practical tools like process nudges and strategies to help both individuals and organizations make an impact.

With her vast experience from working both in-house and as well as consultancy, she is known as an influencer, dynamic speaker and we are honored to welcome her to Hiring Success 18 Europe in Berlin, September 19-21.

What does hiring success mean to you?

We need to change our hiring structures and processes to make better hires, which in the end, creates better and more sustainable business success. For me, this means identifying where you have the most bias in your process, redesign the steps to mitigate this, and cultivate diversity and inclusion.

How have attitudes towards diversity and inclusion changed over the last while?

Despite years of diversity training and anti-discrimination policies, one could argue we’ve not come very far. In fact, the World Economic Forum reports that the gender gap is widening in their 2017 report. McKinsey’s also reports in their 2017 Women in the Workplace study, that women represent only 18 percent of all c-suite roles. That number compares to 12 percent for men of color and only 3 percent for women of color. This is despite the fact that McKinsey’s 2018 report, ‘Delivering through Diversity’ reinforced the link between diversity and positive company financial performance.

Our brain gets hit by 11 million signals at any given moment in time. But we can only consciously process 40 of those. This means a tremendous amount of signals get processed using prior knowledge and patterns. This is unconscious bias. We need to focus on nudging our unconscious minds to mitigate more of the racist, sexist, and such behavior, and I believe we can do that through behavioral economics. Another way of saying it, my view has changed in the terms that I no longer believe we can train away our bias. We need to design it away.

What do you tell companies the biggest advantage of diversion and inclusivity are?

Besides the fact that it’s the right thing to do, it makes business sense.

1. Driving business success and profits – a McKinsey report on public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 33 percent more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 21 percent more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
2. Drive innovation – Leaders who give diverse voices equal airtime are nearly twice as likely as others to unleash value-driving insights, and employees in a ‘speak up’ culture are 3.5 times as likely to contribute their full innovative potential. HBR
3. Understanding our consumers and essentially making us smarter – In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: non-homogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different than you challenges your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking, which sharpens performance.

What kind of resistance do you get from organizations, and what do you do to get on board?

Nowadays it’s mostly about ‘how’. Something I completely understand, but we have years and years of research showing that diversity is correlated with both profitability and added value. Even so, for some companies or some executives, even the most compelling data seems to require additional rounds of convincing. Probably shouldn’t surprise me either. after all, research has proven facts and data don’t actually change people’s minds. But I found this quote the other day and thought it was quite good.

‘The house burned in front of them but they wanted the data to prove it. That is the audacity and ridiculousness of making the business case: convincing one of the obvious. If the smoke doesn’t alarm you, the fire certainly should.’ – Bernard Coleman III

What are behavioral economics?

I will again borrow the words of a much wiser person; “…the best way to think about behavioral economics is in contrast to standard economics. In standard economics, we think — we assume — that people are perfectly rational, which means that they always behave in the best way for them. They can compute everything, they can calculate everything and they can make, always, consistently, the right decisions. In contrast, behavioral economics doesn’t assume much about people. Instead of starting from the idea that people are perfectly rational, we say we just don’t know, but let’s check it out. So, what we do is we put people in different situations to check how they actually make decisions. And what we find in those experiments is that people often don’t behave as you would expect from a perfectly rational perspective. So, in essence, it’s an empirical and non-idealistic way to start looking at human behavior. And because we find that people behave differently than expected, often irrationally, it also leads often to different conclusions about how companies should be created, what the government should do, and, of course, what individuals should be doing.”  – Dan Ariely

Was there a eureka moment that made you want to address diversity and inclusion full-time? How did that happen?

Well, my mom tells me that I was questioning gender equality as a young kid. Then I took gender studies at university. This was an eye-opener in many ways. I found out about intersectionality, that we are more than one thing and that the power structure today will hand me a completely different experience as a white, middle-class woman compared to a woman of color from a lower socio-economic background. After being inspired by behavioral economics, I got angrier that we weren’t making enough progress in the space of diversity & inclusion in companies. And I thought everyone was tackling it wrong. I couldn’t understand why no one was using cross-functional research to make progress faster.  So I started to get involved. First, it was a project, then it was 10-20 percent of my job, until it took over all of the time I spent at work.

What is one thing even well-intentioned organizations get wrong about diversity and inclusion?

Many companies believe it’s too hard a problem to solve, or they focus too much on how to ‘speak’ to our conscious minds when trying to create change. I hope that more companies will learn from behavioral economics and embed D&I philosophy into the business strategy. It works best when a CEO truly thinks about D&I as a strategy for business success.

What about starting your own firm, how did that come about, and what can you do differently on your own that you could have with your previous employers?

It grew primarily organically. I started getting requests a few years ago, but sadly didn’t always have the ability to help while working in-house full time. This spring I decided that I needed a new challenge, and in the near future, I want to develop a free tool to help companies who may not have the funds to drive change. It’s a very exciting time. I get requests right and left. This is key as we will never succeed here as one, we need to create community and drive change on a bigger scale. That’s what I hope to do with my company.

Celebrate Hiring Success in the industrial glamour of Säälchen part of the famed nightclub Kater Blau with DJs, drinks, a visit from the circus, and a surprise musical performance.

To close out the first annual European Hiring Success Conference, SmartRecruiters invites you to network and unwind in Säälchen, part of the renowned Kater Blau nightclub. This exquisite space combines the ornate touches of art deco and the industrial allure of new Berlin with parquet floors, exposed brick, and a killer sound system. Embrace the vintage ambiance with a Vesper, while enjoying the du jour DJs of Berlin’s techno and house scenes, like Spoul, Wolf and Modest Crow.

In the same spirit of  #HIRE18 San Francisco’s Smarty Party, which took guests on a tour of California’s storied bay aboard the Hornblower – complete with a pass under the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset – guests at SmartX Closing Celebration will experience a night of authentic Berlin vibes as they dance to the beat of Europe’s definitive party destination.

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Mingle with speakers, attendees, and the who’s who of Berlin’s burgeoning tech scene. Be astounded by a spectacular acrobatic performance that defies the limits of the human body. Then be ready to boogie with a set from Marching Band, a ten-piece, brass group that reimagines pop favorites in swinging jazz style.

But be sure to save some energy for the surprise musical performance that will end this party with a bang. Doors open at 21:00 with R&B essentials from DJ Hessam, and don’t close until 5:00 in the morning. See you there!

*Conference attendees are automatically on the list, but if you are hoping to attend without a conference ticket register here while there’s still room!

This recruiter wants you to know: he’s not an external headhunter, and he’s not afraid of being “tech-augmented”, either.

As if HR Tech wasn’t moving fast enough, hiring for an industry that’s changing equally quickly is no small task. Ahead of his imparting wisdom in these shaky media times at Hiring Success 18 Europe, we sat down with Sergej Zimpel, senior recruiter at ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE, founder of Purple Squirrel Society for HR, and editor-in-chief of the blog for hardcore recruiters, Dinosaurs Will Die, to pick his brain.

What does hiring success mean to you?

As a recruiter, you are somewhat in the middle between hiring managers and candidates. For me, success means both sides are happy with the outcome.

Why recruiting?

I did a couple of internships as a student, and my first job in HR involved recruiting. I liked it so much that I became a recruiter in my job after that.

In hiring for your specific industry, what is the most unique, or most specific, skill you need a candidate to have?

The digital industry is very dynamic, so candidates have to be very tech-savvy, open to change,  and curious about new stuff.

What has changed most about your job since you came on board, for better and for worse?

I got even more responsibility, which is definitely a good thing! 

How many people do you hire in a year?

About 50-70.

Do you feel what you do is given the value and credibility it deserves?

I think we have to work for a good standing with our hiring managers and managing directors. I think I can say that most managing directors I work for understood the crucial role of recruiting.

What is one thing people tend to misunderstand about what you do?

Some people think I’m an external headhunter. And some people think recruiters have to be really tough and mean in interviews.

What is one thing you’re proud of having accomplished in your current role?

My network! It feels good when I can fill a role two weeks after the briefing because I have the right candidates in my network.

You are obviously not a Luddite when it comes to tech. What can you do now, thanks to tech, that you couldn’t before?

I think tech helps us with a lot of boring admin stuff – and I hope it will help us with even more automatization of administrative tasks in the future (interview coordination, I am looking at you!). Another field where tech helps us is of course direct search. I can’t imagine how I would find a Senior Javascript Developer without Linkedin and Github.

What are you most looking forward to as tech plays a bigger role in recruiting?

I like the concept of a “(tech) augmented recruiter” – I think/hope that tech will be able to support us with admin tasks and longlists, then we can focus even more on networking in the future.

AI, good or bad?

Good! Recruiters should be the first movers with these technologies.

What started as a misadventure to grandma’s house turned into the car-sharing app that’s taken over the EU. Frédéric Mazzella tells us how he did it.

Have you ever looked beside you on the highway and noticed another lone driver and thought, “What a waste?” That’s what happened to Frédéric Mazzella while riding with his sister, and it happened again and again, as car after car whizzed by with no passengers, and those countless unfilled seats began to haunt him.

So this three-time Masters holder and researcher for NASA put his mind behind the issue of how to put those untapped vacancies to work. The result? BlaBlaCar, the ride-sharing app that goes beyond city jaunts to take, otherwise carless urbanites, to the farthest reaches of the sprawling countryside, and the EU is smitten. The company has expanded to 22 markets and 60 million people in its 12-year lifespan with no sign of slowing down – unless it’s to pick up another passenger.

We sit down – stationarily – with Founder and President Mazella to discuss how he got to where is today, and what advice he has for growing companies.

(Catch Freddy at Hiring Success 18 September 19-20th in Berlin!)

The idea for your company came with a bit of a eureka moment, didn’t it?

The idea dates back to Christmas 2003, when I wanted to get home to my family in the French countryside. I had no car and the trains were full. As a last resort, my sister made a detour to pick me up. When driving down on the highway, I noticed that the roads were full of mostly empty cars. That was my eureka moment: I realized that there were millions of available seats, except they weren’t in trains, they were in cars. If only we could match drivers with passengers heading the same way! From that moment onwards I have been on a mission to build a people-powered transport solution, where drivers can offer their empty seats and passengers share the cost of the ride.

How many people does your company employ now? How long did it take to reach this size and what are your future growth plans?

We are 350 globally today, serving 22 markets. We used to double the hiring figures each year, and we are still hiring, but as of now, we’re concentrating both on key market growth and tech talents.

How have your hiring needs changed over the years?

Talent acquisition is key to our growth, especially in the scale-up phase where we needed to hire the best people, and fast, to reach a sustainable growth and expand our business. We are now hiring for more senior profiles, whether in terms of management or on key specialties (market, technology, etc…)

What were the first positions you needed to fill? Which ones were the easiest/most difficult?

As we were building our marketplace, we needed tech/developers, but also marketing and communications talents. Today, tech talents remain the most difficult ones to hire as they are scarce, and we see a global talent war.

How important should hiring be to a CEO?

In the early years, convincing complementary talents to join the adventure and help you turn the vision into reality is key. A huge amount of my energy went into finding the right co-Founders, and bringing great talent onboard. Second, as your company grows, you also want to retain a strong culture to go in the right direction, and keep everyone motivated with a strong sense of purpose.

What would be your advice to your younger self-starting the company?

Find strong business partners with skills complementary to yours, as you can’t be great at everything. Hire people better than you in their area of expertise, and when hiring, never compromise on culture for skill.

He’s worked at one of the most respected institutions of brainiacs in the world for three decades. As the head of a hiring team responsible for onboarding some of the most brilliant scientists on earth, James Purvis isn’t your average backroom resume sorter. Leading up to his session at Hiring Success 18, we manage to turn the interview tables and get a few questions going his way.

What are you looking forward to at Hiring Success?

Talent Acquisition is often the spearhead of HR innovation, so I’m particularly looking for the latest innovative ideas, thoughts and technology evolution. It’s not just about the emerging products, but the HR processes and networking with the people attending.

Given the growing tech support for recruiting, are conferences still important?

HR conference options are myriad, so it’s important to choosing the right ones. The calibre of the products, thought leaders, but also other participants, sharing their ideas and challenges is key. The HR conferences I have attended have always given a great ROI.

What are you hoping to take away from the conference?

We have some specific challenges at CERN, where I have yet to find off-the-shelf solutions. I’m looking forward to meeting other people with similar challenges, and learn how they have addressed them as well as getting a glimpse into the technology evolution.

CERN must be a very interesting place to work. What are some things you enjoy there that don’t exist anywhere else?

What I love is the incredible passion and energy – people united around a common process: to push forward the frontiers of humankind’s knowledge. People of all nationalities and backgrounds, united by a common purpose – the excitement is tangible. You can arrive in the morning, grab a coffee and you could end up bumping into the Director General or a Nobel Prize winner.

You are in charge of handling some of the brightest minds in the world, are there special challenges to that? Does the high-level and specialization make things easier or more difficult for you? Does it take longer or shorter to hire someone at CERN than somewhere else?

The high-level specialization can certainly provide a challenge, and means the organization requires a talent acquisition strategy closely coupled to its workforce planning. Some of the engineering skills are already in high demand (and we are competing with all the well-known engineering and technology firms in the private sector). Other specialities simply don’t exist and require a longer-term, in-house talent building strategy. However, when it comes to recruiting, I believe we have a highly candidate-centric experience with huge positive feedback (even from those who aren’t successful). In terms of delays we have a target of under 100 days from ‘request’ to ‘in position’ and we are inline with that target (and that includes candidates having sometimes a three-month notice period).

How many new hires do you bring in a year?

In terms of staff positions, we recruited 200 last year, but when you add on graduates, students, interns and other personnel, we recruit and onboard almost 2000 people per annum.

What is something CERN HR does better than anyone else?

This sounds almost like the ubiquitous (but not recommended) interview question asking a candidate why they are better than the other candidates. I can’t answer relative to other HR departments, but I am extremely proud of the calibre of people and service that CERN’s HR department offers. We regularly receive positive feedback on our staff and processes. I’m particularly proud of the customer-focus and the understanding our HR staff have of their impact on the bigger picture at CERN. There is no ‘us and them’, no ‘HR vs the business’. We are all part of a common challenge working for the common objectives.

What would you like to change?

Improving the IT tools to offer a smartphone-style experience, a Siri or Alexa for HR services, through to predictive analytics and integrated talent management solutions – a vision of a more technology-enabled HR.

Will your job requirements be different in a few years?

As machines become more skilful and as AI evolves, the key difference in job requirements, in my opinion, will be that the IT & HR competencies will be taken for granted, and the key job requirements will be the jobs that require skills unique to people and that can neither be replicated or found in machines. We will need an increased emphasis on innovation, collaboration, teamwork, emotional intelligence – of course all combined with first-class technical and communication skills.  

How much more do you rely on tech now than you did when you started?

CERN has always been very avant-garde with technology, after all, much the technology on your smartphone, be it the web or the touchscreen, originated from CERN. As early as 1990 I could submit a vacation request from my desk and the workflow sent it to my supervisor for authorization. We could access HR data on the web in the mid-90s and purchase from an internal e-catalog prior to the existence of Amazon and e-Bay. Our first recruitment on the web went live in the early 2000s – at a time when our number-one concern was how to deal with candidates who didn’t have access to the internet. Now, technology has become an enabler – it allows us to do far more with less resources. It assists us in our daily lives and also forms an integral part of our branding. We have come to rely on it like relying on a utility such as electricity.

Is tech overtaking HR a good thing overall? Why or why not and how do you things changing in the future?

Tech isn’t overtaking HR – tech is enabling HR. Regarding the future, this is an ideal opportunity to end with a quote Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics, who said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

Featured Image Credit: Simon Bühler

In the last ten years, this online underdog has grown from a catch-all note-bin for scatterbrained journalists to a serious collaborative business tool. Evernote’s General Manager for Europe and the Middle East expounds.

Beat Buhlmann teaches at Harvard, holds the timely degree-designation of an E-Mba, and spends his days at Evernote thinking about digital transformation and online marketing. A far cry from a four-year apprenticeship as a small-town car mechanic. For more than 15 years, Beat has been dealing with virtual teams, in theory and practice, and has published two books along the way: “Need to Manage a Virtual Team? Theory and Practice in a Nutshell”, and “Become the CEO of Your Own Life”. Ahead of his speaking engagement at Hiring Success 18 Europe, we managed to catch this fast-moving polymath and get a pulse of what he’ll be discussing in Berlin this September

With your extensive IT background, what attracted you to Evernote?

For more than two decades, I have been fascinated by productivity, by how can I achieve my goals faster, more easily, spending less money, using less resources, or a combination of these things. Evernote was the ideal place to make my passion my job.

What have been the biggest challenges?

There was a time where Evernote did too many things, like selling office supplies, bags, and even Evernote socks (no joke). Since the new CEO, Chris O’Neill, took over, we refocused on our core business: making people more productive and helping them achieve their goals. Ten years of Evernote took not only talent, but persistence and grit – and these are the values we will keep with us as we move forward. Introducing Evernote Business in 2012 has been by far our biggest change – it was a great way for us to affirm that not only are we passionate about personal productivity, but our commitment to teams and the workplace.

Given the nature of the product, are people still hesitant to go fully digital, or have you stopped having to convince potential users Evernote is safe and reliable?

There will always be skeptics saying that going digital is risky, and actually, there is no such thing as 100 percent safety. We face risk every day in our lives, whether we’re on a plane or sitting at home. A lot of people don’t fully understand what cloud means, and therefore say no to cloud technology in a business context. That’s why we wrote a cloud whitepaper to help people understand that cloud is still the safest place for their data.

You’ve also written two books. What was the impetus for that? How was that process for you?

Passion. Pure passion about two key topics: managing remote teams (book 1: link), and how to combine business and private life in a meaningful way (book 2: link).

How much of a competitor to Evernote is something like Slack?

They are two very different tools in one ecosystem. You can clip Slack conversations into Evernote or share previews of notes within Slack. Many of our users love these integrations, because their favorite tools compliment each other, and this makes them more productive.  

How much has machine learning and AI become integrated into Evernote? Where do you see that technology talking this product in the coming years?

Research and development contribute hugely to Evernote’s popularity and usefulness. Many Evernote users had their first “Wow!” moment when they realized they could upload handwritten notes and search for them later. We’ve got many exciting plans for the future that will incorporate new technology to augment productivity power.

Three standout applicants navigate prejudice, apathy, and computer algorithms to snag their dream jobs – highlighting how backwards the hiring process can be.

No degree? A criminal record? Good luck getting called in for an interview. Traditionally, applicants who don’t have the right pedigree have been excluded from the candidate pool, but many are saying it’s time for this attitude to change or your company could lose the war for talent.

What we know is that recruiters often evaluate candidates on criteria that is unrelated to their skills, like level of education or even where a person went to school. While given that certain companies require stricter hiring practices because of their industry, the majority of businesses are simply exercising archaic recruiting practices in their job ads and interviews. This means not only are these companies failing to notice the value and impact that these individuals can bring to their teams, but they are recruiting the wrong way.

“The old rules don’t apply anymore,” says founder and CEO of Red Branch Media, Maren Hogan, “particularly for progressive companies” who are already experiencing skill shortages in the tech sector. MasterCard now partners with LaunchCode to source qualified candidates who may not have the requisite university degree to fill all their empty programming seats.

Rather than get stuck in a “web of [your] own making,” where outdated practices reject exceptional talent for the wrong reasons, this media maven with over a decade of recruiting experience suggests recruiters should consider what she calls ‘personas’, personalized profiles that embody company values and positive motivators, in order to attract talent. “Personas change the game,” assures Hogan “because they are about a person rather than a ‘candidate’ or ‘applicant’.”

Hogan points to three examples of people whose individual paths to success were fraught with obstacles, and how their experiences demonstrate the value of the person behind the application, how to recruit holistically, and why you should sometimes hire the square peg.

Shelley Winner

Shelley Winner spent her youth living in the shadow of her father’s drug and alcohol addiction. He first got her drunk when Shelley was 11. At 13, she started smoking pot. By 34 she was using and trafficking methamphetamine, heroin, and prescription pills. After a short-lived stint smuggling drugs across state lines, she was arrested, and received a four-year sentence at FCI Dublin, a low-security prison for female inmates, 98 miles from her hometown of Carmichael, California. With her father having been in and out of jail for most of her life to that point, Shelley joined 70 percent of children with incarcerated parents who follow them into the prison system.

“What if…” asks Shelley, now 40, “…you were known for only one thing, and it was the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

After discovering that she was pregnant, Shelley turned her life around, transforming her street hustle into a positive force for change once she was released. However, Shelley’s success did not come easily, as she experienced reluctance to hire ex-prisoners firsthand when a job offer was rescinded once the company discovered she had served time. Candidates with conviction histories are often branded “untrustworthy”, or “unreliable”, even though it’s been proved that individuals with conviction records remain employed approximately 20 days longer than other employees in certain industries. Determined to succeed, Shelly decided to plead her case with the hiring manager over email, who eventually reconsidered.

Robert Coombs

In the last 10 years, Robert Coombs, 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. Despite these accomplishments, Robert was frustrated that the traditional method of sending out a carefully crafted resume and cover letter in response to a job ad rarely, if ever, delivered his application to a live human.

After receiving countless auto rejections, Robert changed his strategy. His response to this auto screening: if you can’t beat ‘em bot ‘em. So, Robert created his own bot to customize his applications and send out resumes for him, nearly 3,000 in fact. “What surprised me was the shocking data that came out of the project,” says Robert, namely that “the old-fashioned job application process was broken.”

Nina Mufleh

Having headed up marketing and social media campaigns for Fortune 500 companies — and even the Queen of Jordan — Nina knew she had the skills necessary to make a splash at AirBnb, and even improve their business. However, after nearly a year of trying to snag her dream job, she hadn’t reached her goals. So, she leveraged her marketing skills to create a viral marketing campaign that took an in-depth look at AirBnB’s opportunities in the underexploited Middle Eastern market. Her campaign, nina4airbnb, proved to be massive success and attracted the attention of AirBnb executives.

Nina’s story addresses the issues that candidates face in today’s job marketplace, and how to stand out amongst the crowd. “I would advise candidates who are focused on one company – or even a handful of companies,” she says, “to invest some time in understanding what that company’s priorities are, what problems they’re trying to solve, and then tailor their messaging in a way that shows how they can be useful to solving those challenges.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

Team Square

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

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

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

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

Team VISA

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

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

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

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

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

Team SmartRecruiters

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

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

After paying their debts to society, thousands of Americans with criminal records struggle to land a job, in large part due to recruiter bias.

Shelley Winner’s dad first got her drunk when she was 11. At 13, she started smoking pot. By 34 she was using and trafficking methamphetamine, heroin, and prescription pills. After a short-lived stint smuggling drugs across state lines, she was arrested, and received a four-year sentence at FCI Dublin, a low-security prison for female inmates, 98 miles from her hometown of Carmichael, California. With her father having been in and out of jail for most of her life to that point, Shelley joined 70 percent of children with incarcerated parents who follow them into the prison system.

“What if…” asks Shelley, now 40, “…you were known for only one thing, and it was the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

The United States represents roughly 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but holds approximately 22 percent of the world’s prisoners, and has one of the highest incarceration rates per-capita worldwide, with 693 inmates for every 100,000 people. After becoming one of the 600,000 released from American prisons each year, Shelley experienced reluctance to hire ex-prisoners firsthand, at a multinational tech firm. A job offer was rescinded once the company discovered she had served time.

“That was a very hard moment,” says Shelley. “It would have made a lot of people just give up. But I didn’t.”

Arizona State University polled 50 employers about hypothetical job applicants, including men and women with criminal records, and found that 57 percent of men with a prison record would have been considered for a job interview, but only 30 percent of women with the same prison record would have received a call.

“We need to get rid of these stigmas,” says Shelley, “and give people a fair, second chance to get their lives back in order.”

Contrary to popular perception, not hiring ex-offenders is bad for business. Approximately one in three American adults have criminal records – that’s 70 million people – and excluding them from the workforce reduces Gross National Product between $78 and $87 billion annually. This is on par with the cost of the proposed merger between Time Warner and AT&T, two of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.

Employers can also reap substantial tax credits for hiring ex-offenders, as well as earn fidelity bonds that cover the first six months of employment for “hard to place” candidates. But even with such incentives, nearly 75 percent of formerly incarcerated people are still unemployed a year after their release. With few prospects to cover basic expenses, many ex-offenders return to illicit activities. Unable to make ends meet, 89 percent of ex-offenders are unemployed at the time of their re-arrest. The odds of Shelley starting a legitimate career while staying out of prison were slim, but she was determined to reform after discovering, two weeks after her arrest, that she was going to have a baby.

A judge removed Shelley from jail and placed her in a halfway house, allowing to carry her pregnancy to term before serving her time. There, Shelley enrolled in the faith-based recovery program, Adult & Teen Challenge USA, which, after successful completion, knocked a year off her original four-year sentence.

“It was the most pivotal moment of my life,” she says. “There was no way I was going to be a drug-addicted mom who was in and out of prison. I couldn’t put my child through what I went through.”

Two months after giving birth to a son, Shelley stepped into FCI Dublin, where she found another chance to transform her street hustle into a force for personal change. She gained entrepreneurial and leadership training through Defy Ventures, a nonprofit organization that works with prisons and correctional facilities in cities across the country, offering currently and formerly incarcerated “Entrepreneurs-in-Training” entry into the business world. For Shelley, “it was an amazing, life-changing program.”

The Defy Ventures program at FCI Dublin falls under the jurisdiction of Veronica Ensign, Bay Area executive director. “We focus on this one piece of the system so we can make a greater impact,” says Ensign. “And if we break these cycles we will have forever changed the system.”

Ensign worked with directly with Shelley while she served her sentence and the two speak together at conferences, both to share Shelley’s story, and bring attention to ex-offenders with similar backgrounds who haven’t been as successful reintegrating.

“The odds have been stacked against them before their incarceration,” Ensign says, “and then we make it even harder once they get out.”

Shelley worked with Defy Ventures’ coaching team for 18 months while in prison, culminating in a “Shark Tank”-style investor meeting with CEOs and venture capitalists, where she pitched her strategy for a computer-repair business.
Shelley lived up to her name and won the competition.

The next step was to find a mentor who could help her navigate the tech industry on the outside. Enter DeeDee Towery, CEO at ProActive Business Solutions and one of the Bay Area’s most influential female business figures. She acted as a guide during Shelley’s 10-month stint in a halfway home, spent seeking career opportunities in tech, a field that long held the interest of the self-described “computer geek.” Shelley then enrolled in Code Tenderloin, an intensive program of job readiness, interview techniques, and coding. It was Code Tenderloin that brought Shelley to a major tech company’s Mountain View office, where after a day of introductions, she was encouraged to apply for an open position.

“Code Tenderloin had me doing so many mock interviews,” she says. “I hated it at the time, but, when I went in for the real interview, I nailed it, and was hired right there on the spot.”

And that’s when Shelley’s conviction history raised concerns and her offer was rescinded. This setback crushed her morale, but she remained determined. “If there’s one thing Defy Ventures taught me,” she says, “it was to not give up when faced with fear, to keep pushing forward, and to silence self-limiting thoughts. It’s ok to be afraid, but instead of it being crippling, you embrace it.”

A 2017 survey sponsored by the National Association of Professional Background Screeners found that 86 percent of US employers surveyed conducted background screening checks after the job interview, but 97 percent conducted criminal background screening on candidates regardless of their status in the interview process. With easy access to online databases, employers feel justified in this, but Ensign argues that “most people running background checks are doing them illegally, and not in a comprehensive way.”

Accessing candidate information via social media or other online portals can lead to murky legal waters, where discrimination can affect hiring decisions. Nearly 30 states currently uphold fair chance hiring policies, some of which require private sector and government employers to “ban the box” indicating a candidate’s previous felony or misdemeanor convictions, as well as delay candidate background checks until later in the hiring process.

While Shelley made it all the way to the job offer stage, she easily could have been rejected at the outset, as California did not implement its Fair Chance Act until January 2018. Before then, California’s estimated seven million residents with conviction histories were systematically excluded from countless job opportunities because of this box.

Ensign emphasizes the importance of background checks that would eliminate certain people from the candidate pool — banks don’t want to hire embezzlers, trucking companies don’t want to hire drunk drivers, etc — but recruiters should “conduct their background checks in a way that considers the person holistically,” she says. “It’s important to do the empathy-building on the front-end of the application process.”

Even with crisp talking points and polished interview skills, no amount of charisma could erase the mark on Shelley’s record. But she decided to plead her case with the hiring manager over email. “I know you’re leery about hiring me,” she wrote. “But I assure you, you’re not going to regret it because I am gonna bust my ass.”

Shelley’s tenacity paid off, and the hiring manager reconsidered. Besides the financial mistake of excluding candidates with conviction histories, they are often branded “untrustworthy”, or “unreliable,” even though it’s been proved that individuals with conviction records maintain a much longer tenure, and are less likely to quit their jobs voluntarily than other workers, likely due to scarcity of opportunities. As for a “lack of social and professional skills”, Ensign stands by Defy Ventures candidates who complete the training program and leverage their skills for success.

“Competition is good,” she says, “and we know that our candidates can compete with others. If hiring managers are going to consider the millions of Americans with conviction histories as part of their TA strategy, they need to do some empathy-building work with their leadership and employees.”

Technology may be the current focus within the HR industry, but the human touch remains its essence. Shelley’s goal in telling her story is more than simply tugging at heartstrings, it’s about the need to give the ex-incarcerated a chance to prove themselves.

“Having empathy in the hiring process brings things down to a human level,” says Shelley. “We all need to look at each other as people instead of data.”