When a growing management consulting company needed an applicant tracking system to handle its global business, there was only one choice for the HR Tech that could meet and surpass their myriad needs.

Co-founded in 1999 by Matthieu Courtecuisse, the firm started out in Paris in the financial services industry before developing expertise in energy, telecommunications and media, transportation and logistics, and government. 

From day one, Sia Partners’ ambition has been to become a global consulting firm, working on cross-border engagements. Their first-ever assignment was with the World Bank, for a project in West Africa. In 2006 they opened their first international office, and have always pushed forward innovation. As the pioneer of Consulting 4.0, Sia welcomes the disruption of AI, invests in Data Science, and develops consulting bots. As a firm with a strong entrepreneurial spirit, Sia Partners launched its investment fund, Studio, in January, 2017. Their current portfolio includes Big Moustache, Livsty, and Cleep.

What parts of the world is Sia Partners the most active, and which industries are most prevalent in those regions?

The Group has an international presence with 20 offices in 15 countries, and employs people of over 40 nationalities. The two biggest markets are France—with offices in Paris and Lyon—and the US, with offices in New York, Houston, and Charlotte. Our international expansion has lead us to innovate our recruitment process, and we have developed several international programs to attack and retain new talent.

We created the first-ever international Gap Year Internship program in the management consulting industry, which gives students the opportunity to do their one-year internship in two locations. First, a six-month period in Paris, then New York, Hong Kong or Dubai for another six months. Our consultants also have the possibility of international mobility through our Associate Program, which allows consultants the possibility to work for three years in three different Sia Partners offices (one office rotation per year).

How long was it before the focus became truly global, and what did that do to your hiring process?

In a certain way, Sia Partners has always been a global-focused company. Since its internalization in 2006, we’ve recruited employees in each office through the VIE contract.

For VIE programs :

Collaboration between Paris (HQ) and offices for the sourcing and screening steps and, later, within the recruitment process to link each stakeholder

Impacts on the hiring process :

• An increased exchange of information between offices to build a global vision of recruitment
• Becoming global helped Sia Partners to develop international mobility thanks to new international programs. We moved from a local vision of recruitment where each office handled its own process to a collaborative approach.
• New opportunities for our consultants: Sia Partners developed a structured yet dynamic international mobility policy through innovative programs such as our Open Track, Associate Program, and International gap year for students.

What was the TAS/ATS you used before SmartRecruiters? Can you walk us through what your sourcing and hiring were like before?

We had no TAS/ATS before going live with SmartRecruiters—every step of the recruitment process was done manually.

1.      Job Posting: manually post the job opportunities on various job boards (around 20 job offers for France): LinkedIn, JobTeaser, CareerSite, and university websites.
2.      Screening/Sourcing: a generic email address gathered all the applications. When a candidate applied, he or she received a confirmation by email. Regarding the number of applications received, we were not able to respond to each applicant individually when the application was declined.
3.      Selected candidates’ profiles were shared by email to the Partners.
4.      Interview steps: once again, interviews were manually planned by email. There was no shared agenda to help recruiters through the process. As a consequence, a lot of time was spent checking each stakeholders’ availabilities by email, and the candidate experience was negatively impacted.
5.      Job offer internship: when the offer was accepted and the contract drawn up, all the information was transmitted by email. Recruiters, the HR team, and Partners used to discuss the details regarding the new employee and its arrival by email.

Joining the SmartRecruiters community was a huge and major step towards increasing our efficiency. We were able to gather all the information regarding our candidates and easily share them with our community and coworkers. The ability to post multiple open positions contributed to making Sia Partners’ presence on job boards continuous and more efficient. In fact, recruiters spend less time posting job opportunities and are able to focus on high value-added tasks.

What Smartrecruiters did to our hiring process :

• Help the recruitment team build a complete automation of the multiposting process
• Increase each recruiter’s autonomy and visibility on their scope
• Improve candidate experience in various aspects:
  • Thanks to the SmartRecruiters portal, candidates can apply for a job, refer friends, modify and even withdraw their profile.
  • Every candidate now receives a reply to their application—and the response can be customized
  • An increased responsiveness to candidates’ solicitations

• Data centralization, which helps Sia Partners to be compliant to new regulations (GDPR, for instance)
• Ability to create and track analytics
• Create a real community: all stakeholders are highly engaged along the recruitment process
• Reinforce the collaboration between offices: recruiters are able to share candidate profiles and information between offices

What was the process of implementing SmartRecruiters?

Sia Partners went live with SmartRecruiters in November 2016, in France and also in our 20 offices across 15 countries. We worked in collaboration with the SmartRecruiters team, who helped us construct a personalized and intuitive tool that was implemented seamlessly within three weeks. Every user (around 100) was trained during that same period in France and in every Sia Partners office around the world. Sia Partners’ team developed communication tools to gather everyone around the implementation process as fast as possible.

The major result, by far, is the time saved posting job offers, and having centralized all information on a unique platform. Thanks to Smartrecruiters, the recruitment process became smooth and engaging, not only for recruiters and managers but also candidates who are now able to fully take part in their own process. Since November 2016, more than 40,000 candidates have applied through SmartRecruiters. Last but not least, SmartRecruiters also increased collaboration between offices and made the global hiring success at Sia Partners a reality.

What is something unique to hiring for Sia Partners that SmartRecruiters has made easier?

We significantly reduced our time spent on the overhaul recruitment value chain, which helped us to be focused on more added-value projects. As an intuitive tool, SmartRecruiters engaged everyone in the process and created a relevant recruitment track for candidates. Finally, it allowed us to share information and optimize processes that increased stakeholder reactivity.

Since our niche job board CollegeRecruiter.com went live way, way back in 1996, I’ve seen a tremendous increase in the number of entry-level positions that include a four-year college degree as a job requirement. Some professional jobs such as engineering and nursing positions require degrees as people who work in those fields need to licensed by a local, state, or federal government authority.

What concerns me aren’t the positions requiring some type of governmental licensure. What concerns me are positions for which no such requirement exists. Your typical telemarketing job, for example, requires no such licensure. Yet a review of telemarketing job postings reveals that many require a four-year degree. Is there really a need for a college degree for typical telemarketing positions? And, if not, then why are more employers requiring college degrees when seemingly none should be necessary? Could it be that some of those employers have motives which are less than pure and have stumbled across a way to exclude racial minorities from their candidate pool? Even if such idiotic motives aren’t present, could it be that in an effort to cut down their list of qualified applicants – and therefore reduce the amount of work they need to do in order to hire a new employee – some employers have created illegal hiring requirements?

It has been clear since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Griggs v. Duke Power Co. decision in 1971 that certain education requirements and intelligence tests used as conditions of employment acted to exclude racial minority job applicants, did not relate to job performance, and therefore were prohibited. In Griggs, the Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited the use of employment practices that have the effect of excluding racial minorities even if the employer did not intend to discriminate unless the employer can prove that the practice is related to job performance. The question that I’ve been asking, “Is requiring a four-year college degree for telemarketing and other such jobs illegal?”

Some may argue that candidates with college degrees are likely to perform better on the job than those without and, in may cases, that is true. If an employer can demonstrate through the use of data that their telemarketers with college degrees, for example, perform better than those without, then that the employer should be able to require future candidates to have a college degree. But what about those employers who have no data to support their use of college degrees as a hiring requirement?

Griggs puts the burden on the employer to prove that the requirement relates to job performance if that requirement acts to exclude racial minority job applicants. If an employer has no data proving that a college degree is related to job performance, the next question is whether the requirement acts to exclude racial minority job applicants.

Our college campuses are becoming more diverse, and most agree that’s a good thing. Since 1980, a far higher percentage of all racial groups are enrolled in colleges and universities. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the percentages of 18-24 year olds enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and universities by race are:

So employers who require a college degree for a position are making that position available to some 44 percent of caucasians but only 32 percent of African Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics / Latinos. A requirement of a college degree excludes racial minorities as a far higher percentage of caucasians, for example, get college degrees than do African Americas or Hispanics / Latinos.

I understand that many and probably virtually all employers who are requiring college degrees for positions either need to (i.e., hospitals who are hiring nurses) or have an honest belief that employees with college degrees perform better than do employees without college degrees. My concern is only with that latter group and I suspect that employees with college degrees do in fact perform better than employees without college degrees in many cases. But given that the law requires employers not just to believe that but to be able to prove it, I urge all employers to make sure they have the data to support their hiring practice of requiring a college degree. If they can’t get that data, then they should consider the possibility that their actions – properly motivated or not – are at best immoral and at worst illegal.

Steven Rothberg is the President and Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, the leading niche job board for college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry-level jobs and other career opportunities.

CollegeRecruiter.com and SmartRecruiters are co-hosting a Smartup learning and networking event on the secrets of college recruiting from 6 to 8:30pm on Monday, May 13^th at the offices of SmartRecruiters in downtown San Francisco. Register today for $10 or for $20 at the door.

Don’t forget to check out our list of best jobs for college students.

“First off, we have to get them to believe in themselves, it’s not just to give them soft skills, resume building, it’s also to get them to like themselves,” said Jamie Fountain of Larkin Street Youth Services.

When we think of the unemployment rate, job searching, and interviewing, I often think of the college graduate fighting a tough economy.  What we sometimes forget to think about is the thousands of unemployed youth across the country.  And many of the youth aren’t just up against a tough job market, but also carry the burdens of homelessness, low income, and lack of education.

I spoke with Jamie Fountain, Workforce Development Manager at Larkin Street Youth Services and Jodi Schwartz, Executive Director at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, both based in San Francisco.  Larkin Street and LYRIC have programs to help not only develop career skills, but also connect the youth to career opportunities.

Before connecting the youth to an internship or job, each program offers multi-step career training programs to help develop the skills of their youth.

Primarily LGBT, LYRIC focuses on developing their young people on the path to a career in social justice.   For LYRIC’s “In the City Internship,” they take a very hands-on approach to job training, allowing them to organize their own events, budgets, and many other job related tasks to gain traditional job experience.

“What we really find effective with our young people is that they’re constantly learning then applying, learning then applying; we call it thematic learning.”

The young people that attend LYRIC are given the opportunity to manage a project, including managing the budget, building teams and committees, and learning how to market and do outreach.  Because of the experience LYRIC youth gain through this program, they are better prepared and connected to opportunities in the social justice field.  After going through the programs, many participants transition to either fulltime staff of LYRIC, or are hired to similar organizations.

Larkin Street takes a multi-facetted approach to career development, offering multi-step programs with participants ranging in age from 12 to 24.  This includes Job Readiness Class, where they find out what they want to do, while developing soft skills in interviewing and job searching.

The Youth are then paired with a job counselor to further develop those skills, or have the opportunity to go to the Institute for Hire Learning, where they are connected to internships with local businesses and organizations.  With over 47 sites in the Bay Area, the internships not only give work experience to youths, but also host and mentor them, developing a diverse number of skills in the work place.

One problem with connecting the youth to jobs lies in their own self esteem.  Fountain says that it is so important for the youth to believe in themselves, and to show them that they are capable of entering the professional world.

“They need to first learn to love and accept themselves.  We need to get them to see that they are special, and that they are intelligent.”

Fountain says that often times, he is able to show the youth that they have developed skills that they might not know about.  Whatever these skills are, they can be transfered to the workplace.

“Some of our young people were involved in street life. So they say, “I’ve never worked.” I ask them how they got the money. “Oh I dabbled in street life. And I ask them if they sold a product. ‘Yeah.’ And I ask them if they were good at it. ‘Well, yeah.’ And I ask them if they had customer complaints, inventory issues, cost control. ‘Yeah.’ And I tell them, that’s business…These are transferable skills. Anything you’ve done, that you were successful at, in any shape or form, is a transferable skill.”

So what is the biggest challenge for the youth in terms of connecting them to job opportunities?  It starts with what Schwartz calls, “The Triangle of Need.”

“Housing, mental and physical health, and a job.  And if any of those three legs of the stool are shaky, the whole thing tumbles down.”

In order to find employment, youth need both a stable living arrangement and stable healthcare.  Once stable living and health is secure, the youth can be better prepared to enter the job market, and employment opportunities arise.  Whether it be developing skills within the program, or being connected to outside internships and mentorships, these youth organizations are opening the doors.

However, the youth organizations are only one part of the equation for connecting youth to job opportunities. The private sector businesses and organizations that offer internships and mentorships to the youth are also an important factor.  Giving the youth a hands on opportunity to further develop career skills is important to the overall goal of youth employment.

Many of the young people at LYRIC have been marginalized from education and any kind of job training. Schwartz said that the youth social service network cannot support youth employment alone, and needs the support of the corporate sector.

“While we can get them through our job readiness program, they still need a lot of support once they arrive at the doorstep of their new job,” said Schwartz.

LYRIC and Larkin Street Youth Services are two of the youth organizations in San Francisco that are guiding young people on the path to satisfying work.  To reduce unemployment, support the youth organizations that open doors to employment.

Connect with SmartRecruiters’ Zero Unemployment & Give Labor Movements. SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform for non-profit.