For a lean recruiting team to find the most entrepreneurial engineers in the US, only the slickest TA suite will do.  

Olsson Associates is in the business of civil engineering, both consulting and design, for multidisciplinary public and private infrastructure projects. What makes Olsson different is that it’s employee-owned, which means workers are more invested and the stakes are higher. So when Mandy Wehner, the company’s HR specialist, started shopping around for a new TA Suite, it didn’t take long to find, and ultimately choose, SmartRecruiters.

Thanks for chatting with us today, Mandy. Can you give us a brief history of the company?

Olsson Associates was founded in 1956 by John E Olsson, an East-coaster who decided to attend the University of Nebraska – Lincoln for engineering. Our headquarters are in Lincoln, and we have around 1,100 employees in eight states, and over 25 offices.

When did you join, and what attracted you to Olsson?

I became a part of the Olsson family in March 2015. What attracted me the most was how the organization fostered entrepreneurial thoughts, innovation, and encouraged employees to come to the table with new ways to solve problems. I love waking up every day knowing I get to make decisions, take ownership of my actions, and bring in new ideas to drive Olsson forward.

How did you find the hiring set-up when you arrived?

When I started at Olsson, the hiring was a bit different. In 2015, we had maybe 50 positions open at any given time. Since late 2016, we’ve had 90+ open positions to fill continually, and I don’t anticipate that slowing down at all. Our Human Resource team is starting to have some employees specialize in recruiting, so they’re really taking the lead in the ATS, knowing it inside-out and able to take the reins on the candidate experience.  

What were your biggest challenges, and victories, as you settled in and got things going?

Some of our challenges were being creative in trying to fill some challenging positions, creating talent pipelines, and building recruiting plans. Victories would include implementing a new ATS to help us become more efficient at our jobs, and more efficient with recruiting. We’ve been able to maintain better contact with candidates, and thus make their candidate experience enjoyable, with SmartRecruiters.    

How long was it before SmartRecruiters came into the picture?

We’d used a couple of ATS vendors before transitioning. We are still fairly new to SmartRecruiters, only having implemented the system in late September 2017.  

Was there a eureka moment that made the transition to SmartRecruiters a reality?

As we continued to grow, we realized we needed to upgrade our ATS to a system from which we could send emails, offer letters, and other documentation. Our old system just didn’t have that functionality. Our HR team is lean, and they were working too much outside the ATS, and it was taking too much time to complete tasks.

Did you know exactly what you needed to, or did SmartRecruiters come as one option of many?

We knew that we needed a new ATS, that was not a question. I had been doing a lot of research and SmartRecruiters actually was never on my list. It wasn’t until we were looking into onboarding systems (Clickboarding) that SmartRecruiters was mentioned, and when I looked into it, I was interested immediately.

What made you go with SmartRecruiters in the end?

Our HR group enjoyed the demo, because it was personalized for us. We felt the sales team really took the time to use our logo, and personalize the presentation to include our values, mission, etc. The functionality was top-notch compared to what we had before, and we felt SmartRecruiters would go the extra step to be a great vendor and to really work with us to get the most hiring success out of the ATS.

How long did it take to implement, and when was that?

We signed the contract to implement in July 2017, and we were up and running the end of that September. It was a very quick turnaround time for us, so we were really proud of the quick progress we made. The hardest part was getting our data out of our old ATS, but implementing SmartRecruiters was pretty painless.

Did you find any ways to make the software work for you that you hadn’t anticipated?

We have found that SmartRecruiters has new functions we didn’t initially anticipate using, ones around which we continually evaluate whether or not we should change our process. We especially like that SmartRecruiters has regular rollouts of updates – we didn’t have that with our old ATS so that is very promising.

What is the biggest thing SmartRecruiters has allowed you to do that you couldn’t before?

SmartRecruiters has allowed us to take a look at integrating our background check and drug-screen companies into the system. We’ve been able to save time and energy by completing tasks within SmartRecruiters that we couldn’t with our old ATS. We love the functionality of the system and look forward to continued improvements.

SmartRecruiters prides itself on providing bespoke solutions to our customers’ recruiting challenges. The flexibility of our Talent Acquisition Suite means it can be easily applied to a variety of situations and demands, as well as integrate a wide variety of additional tools and features. So whether you’re recruiting globally, locally, in high volume or low, SmartRecruiters will give you the tools you need to achieve Hiring Success.

However, don’t just take our word for it. Below are links to summaries of our various customer case studies. Each one examines a particular SmartRecruiters customer, the recruitment challenges they faced, and how the SmartRecruiters ATS helped to overcome them.

How DFC Left The Dark Ages And Saved 900 Work Hours A Week

Financial giant DFC was trying to recruit for a global company with nothing but spreadsheets and email chains. Here’s how SmartRecruiters introduced them to high-tech hiring.

Equinox: Hiring the Best Personal Trainers for Every Fitness Club

Equinox relies on finding the best and most experienced trainers out there, and who better to recruit great trainers than great trainers themselves? With SmartRecruiters’ in-built collaborative features, Equinox could involve its expert professionals in every stage of the hiring process.

Brightsparks: How Recruiting Agency Uses Technology to go “Beyond the Resume”

Brightsparks needed a way to entice the time and technology conscious Generation Z. SmartRecruiters allowed them to easily create the employer brand they wanted to espouse and make it easy for busy students to apply.

IGI Sharpens Its Focus On Successful Recruiting

Audio-visual developer IGI may be at the forefront of video technology, but their recruitment was still relying on filing cabinets. That’s until SmartRecruiters helped them develop a system and brand that matched their own products.

Scality: Powering 100% Year-Over-Year Growth with Great Hiring Quality

Scality wanted to ensure it found the best professionals out there by using a long and multi-faceted recruitment process. Unfortunately, their first attempts resulted in ‘spreadsheet madness’. SmartRecruiters on the other hand allows them to easily create a clear standard process which could include all their technical expertise.

How Pluralsight Regained Perfect Hiring Vision with SmartRecruiters

Pluralsight was expanding, and needed to recruit fast. A slow legacy system was letting them down, allowing great candidates to slip through the net and buckling under their demands. Luckily, SmartRecruiters provided the streamlined and scalable platform they needed.

Christian Brothers Automotive: Growing a strong franchise by growing strong teams

As a successful franchise, Christian Brothers favored a decentralized hiring approach that let local store managers becoming recruiters. Unfortunately, their legacy tech was cumbersome and unwieldy to operate. SmartRecruiters allowed managers to quickly and easy put on a recruiter hat, meaning they could spend more time dealing with customers and not clunky ATS.

Colliers International: Closes more deals with stronger candidates

Recruitment at Colliers was tedious. What made it worse was that previous candidates and recruitment efforts went unrecorded, wasting time and resources that could be applied to future searches. SmartRecruiters turned that around and introduced a quick, easy and robust system – saving time, money and stress.

Expeditors: Lean Resources. Global Footprint. Robust Results

Expeditors chaotic system of emails and spreadsheets was damaging their candidate experience and brand, counting them untold potential great hires. SmartRecruiters revolutionized that and allowed Expeditors to project the image both it, and its candidates, wanted.

Gameloft: Finding The Best Candidates The World Over

With offices in over 30 countries, Gameloft knew it needed to rely on local recruiters to find local talent. However, in a vast company, you also need standardized practises and standards. SmartRecruiters provided the tools to allow a global company to recruit locally.

Indigo: Recruiting Platform Adds Joy to Customer and Employee Experience

Indigo knows happy workers make customers. The first step to creating a happy staff is to make sure they have a great candidate experience when applying. SmartRecruiters let Indigo develop their brand, send jobs to the boards and platforms they wanted, and bring in the large numbers needed to fill seasonal vacancies. All from one platform.

IGI is one of the leading advanced visualization and commercial audio-visual applications in the United States. Based out of Commerce, IGI works with a diverse variety of industries, including cinematic post-production, military and intelligence, engineering and oil and gas exploration.

When you’re dealing with such precise industries in a constantly evolving technology environment, anything less than excellence simply won’t do — and to achieve excellence, you need excellent employees.

That’s why, in 2012, IGI became an early adopter of SmartRecruiters’ talent acquisition software.

Moving Beyond Filing Cabinets and Emails

IGI’s organization presents some interesting recruitment challenges. As Director of Marketing Paul Helm explains, they are a specialist company within an highly specialized industry:

“In many ways, it’s especially challenging at IGI because we’re not a typical audio visual company, but recognized more as specialists in a very narrow niche of that industry called advanced visualization. Because we design, engineer, build and maintain such highly complex systems, we require highly specialized talent.”

Even though IGI only needed to fill a small number of positions at any particular time, their legacy ATS didn’t provide the support to find the expert talent they required. In particular, there was no simple way to closely compare candidates, and they still relied on filing cabinets and messy email folders to record and retain candidate information.

This situation was made even more cumbersome when you realize IGI employees often have to wear many different hats spanning departments and disciplines.

Turning Your Entire Expert Team Into Hiring Managers

IGI quickly realized that SmartRecruiters was the platform they needed, helping them to get ahead with hiring the best talent in a specialized and competitive industry. Here’s how SmartRecruiters turned IGI’s hiring processes around:

• SmartRecruiters allows for rapid and easy sourcing over a wide variety of job boards and social media platforms. This means you’re always in the prime position to find that expert you’re looking for, wherever they may be.
• The built-in collaborative features of SmartRecruiters allowed IGI to pool the expertise of all of their staff into the hiring process — an important advantage in a highly specialized industry. Furthermore, SmartRecruiters allows easy integration of other applications, so collaborators could continue to use established tools of their trade.
• With IGI employees taking on many diverse roles, Paul Helm highlighted SmartRecruiters’ ease of use as an important element. Employees with little or no recruiting experience could be part of the process with no need for extensive training.
• Online candidate profiles means recruiters can quickly and easily contact anyone who has ever applied through the SmartRecruiters platform. No need for those cumbersome filing cabinets or spreadsheets.

Paul Helm had much more to say about how SmartRecruiters helps companies like IGI achieve their hiring goals. Make sure to catch all the details over at our case study, IGI: Advanced Visualization solutions technology integrator sharpens its focus on successful recruiting.

We move fast, and we hire people with passion. We’re over 250 people and we are consistently in the highest brackets for diversity. What we bring to the table is people who are passionate. We want our customers to feel that through our brand.  Our success is found in through our employees, who are able to do just that.

At Karmaloop we search for employees who aren’t afraid to be themselves, who are bold and eager to bring something different to the table. SmartRecruiters allows us to organize our entire hiring process from start to finish, in way that really represents the Karmaloop brand.

We advertise a variety of jobs across different boards, we are always able to find exactly what we’re looking for because SmartRecruiters gives us the opportunity to advertise there. We are also passionate about staying true to our brand, the SmartRecruiters career widget allowed us to create a branded careers’ page so if a candidate looks at our jobs they’re still getting a Karmaloop experience.

SmartRecruiters is forward thinking, as are we. My “a-ha” moment with SmartRecruiters was when I realized I could do everything on it. No candidates fall through the cracks, jobs get incredible visibility, hiring managers can collaborate, and the entire hiring process is consolidated in one incredibly organized window.

SmartRecruiters is consistently an open page on my computer screen. It’s where I spent most of my time because there is nothing more important than finding the right people to grow our business. The Karmaloop model emphasizes speed and efficiency. We have to be sure we’re getting the product to our customers with as little friction as possible. We seek to always create the best customer experience; the same is true about our hiring process. SmartRecruiters makes a positive candidate experience easy. Answering candidates is easy with customizable templates, so I never have to worry about someone saying we’re the kind of company that does not value its candidates.

Before SmartRecruiters, we were not using an ATS at all. We were doing things relatively archaically. Within one posted job, SmartRecruiters revolutionized our hiring process. My hiring bandwidth increases with efficiency, as a result Karmaloop’s bandwidth increases. It’s a beautiful cycle.

Kostas Klokelis currently leads Human Resource & Talent Acquisition at Karmaloop, Inc. where he is responsibility for hiring technical staff, policy implementation, compensation management, employee development, benefits and employee communication.

Prior to joining Karmaloop in 2011, Kostas was a Talent Manager for a large publicly held staffing firm where he partnered with Fortune 500 on technical and highly sensitive positions. For more about hiring practices and joining Karmaloop follow @Klokelis and @KarmaloopHR.

When SmartRecruiters’ Community Manager Lexie asked me to write about our hiring philosophy at Shoto Consulting Group I quickly replied, “Sure.”  What I hadn’t realized is that we never put into words exactly what that philosophy might be.  I’m sure lots of you are in the same boat.  You might know what you’re looking for on a case–by–case basis, but what are the underlying fundamentals?  Rather than getting deeply philosophical, I’ll keep it simple, which is how we tend to do things around here.

First, we hire for attitude.  One thing we have not been able to figure out is how to train attitude.  I have seen firsthand a well–qualified candidate lead to disappointment once hired.  It came down to hiring for what the person was on paper and believing his qualifications could be his salvation.  It won’t happen and none of us have time for that.  No matter where the candidate might fit into our company, someone who is positive, flexible and adaptable ranks well above where he or she may have worked or from what school he or she graduated.  So what’s the takeaway?  Save yourself the trouble and consider your candidate’s attitude with weight.

Second, we hire for experience, but not the ‘working’ kind.  We look for candidates with an adventurous past and an overwhelming excitement for life.  We seek out active, highly–capable people who have a thirst for worldly experience and growth.  Many times we look beyond our current boarders, in fact, most of the people on our team have lived abroad, have grown up abroad or are currently living in a country foreign to their own.  Why is this so important to us?  Travel experience breeds creativity and adaptability.  Travel fosters intelligence and brings about a positive attitude.  These are all must–have’s for us.

I am what some call a Third Culture Kid (TCK): someone who spent a significant amount of his or her developmental years outside of his or her home culture.  I seek out others who have similar backgrounds.  I believe real diversity creates an amazing group dynamic, one where past experiences from different cultures come together to create highly effective ideas and strategies.

Having lived in Tokyo and Singapore during my adolescent years, I attended school with classmates from over thirty countries.  This, I believe, will serve as the workplace of the future, where it will be natural to look not only to new cities for opportunities, but across boarders.  Both of my alma maters, the American School in Japan and the Singapore America School are a preview of what is to come, a prototype.  And it’s happening at Shoto, too.  We’re currently managing three projects full time, with team members from Albania, Bermuda, Bulgaria, Canada, Japan, Singapore and the US.  Additionally, we have candidates right now, thanks to SmartRecruiters, from China and India.

So, back to hiring for life experience.  When you consider someone who has traveled around the world, they bring along the excitement for living that best fits our group.  We aren’t tied to our desks; in fact most meetings take place while on different continents.  Our most active project, developing and shooting a TV pilot, has involved a team that’s currently spread between Albania, Singapore, the US and a variable third country, usually India or Indonesia.  We work remotely, using nothing more than our laptops, Skype and a concentrated focus on timezones.  We work this way because we’ve chosen freedom over structure.

Since we’re always out engaging the world, we never really had a good method for sourcing candidates from multiple platforms, nor for tracking applicants.  SmartRecruiters has taken all of that work out of the equation.  I would never say hiring is an easy process, but the boring, stop–us–in–our–tracks ‘paperwork’ side of things is now gone.  That means more time to focus on development, application and our lives.  The candidate–tracking feature I love.  I’m a visual person and having all our applicants in one place – on one screen – has been incredible.

SmartRecruiters has also held several web seminars that I’ve listened in on.  I’d strongly recommend joining in sometime.  And if you don’t already know how easy the SmartRecruiters software is, I’m sure it won’t take long.

Adam Hacker is the Founder of Shoto Consulting Group.  He’s been launching and managing small businesses for the past ten years.  He attributes his success to being adaptable and building diverse, well–traveled teams.

The saying, Candidates are Customers too, should be hung over every wall of Human Resources departments across the country. Sometimes we forget that each candidate that goes through the HR department will most likely influence a future purchasing decision of your product/service. There are some exceptions to the rule, but know, word of mouth spreads like wildfire and if a candidate is treated wrong, their friends and their friend’s friends will hear about it. Recruiters and hiring managers need to look beyond the old ‘recruit-to-hire’ experience and put on our new corporate hats. Purchasing decisions are made based on the aggregation of every little experience the company has with the market. Read below for the 3 methods to treat every candidates as well as customers.

According to the Candidate Experience Results over 21% of candidates said they were or have been customers to places they applied. As buying power increases in our growing economy it’s becoming more likely that those who are applying for jobs are customers. The idea that negative feedback travels faster than positive couldn’t be truer in this scenario. Even if a candidate isn’t qualified for a certain position, treating them as a customer goes a long way in making sure their experience is a positive one. There are multiple ways to achieve top results when recruiting, here a few that have helped in the past:

1. Invest in Candidate Relationships. This should be the ‘no-brainer’ bullet point for any recruiter. In order to successfully recruit top talent it’s essential that you’re investing in the actual relationships and not the end result of hiring. The goal in this part of the hiring process is to not be a pushy salesman, but show each candidate, regardless of qualifications, that they’re important. Building communities that show the focus on these relationships will engage and keep the customer beyond the candidate process. Talent Communities, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Groups, even email marketing solutions, and other types of communities are out there, you just have to find which one fits your company best.

 

2. Don’t Upset Your Applicants. There has been a lot of discussion on the transparency of the HR department and the black hole of the candidate process. If you’re a larger company and receive thousands of applicants a year it’s sometimes impossible to return each call or follow-up with each resume. Many job descriptions carry the disclaimer that not everyone will receive some type of feedback due to volume. Although communication is not required for every applicant, there are some instances where the job status should be communicated. The cost of no communication could be loss of sales, referrals, which leads to less money in the bank.

 

3. Think Like Marketing. Recruiting is not just about filling an open position any longer. Recruiting is another form of marketing and the only way for employer branding to survive the hiring process is to create a candidate-centric approach that prioritizes the candidate experience. As recruiters you promote your company, which helps bring candidates into the hiring funnel while maintaining an ongoing relationship. This is the foundation in building up the candidate experience to not only keep the customer, but also find the best talent out there for your company.

There are numerous benefits to treating a candidate like a customer. When it doesn’t happen sometimes there are no consequences, but all it takes is one angry person to spread negative feedback. Each candidate interaction affects your brand. There are multiple sites out there that anonymously rate companies on their interview processes, you don’t want to be one of those with 0/5 stars. To combat this, make sure each applicant is treated like you would treat a customer making a purchase. The life of a HR professional isn’t an easy one and the candidate experience is hard to perfect, but with these steps you should be on your way to achieving better practices.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs, Huffington Post and Smart Brief. When she talks, people listen.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform. Everything you need to source, engage, and hire top talent.