For companies like LinkedIn, the relationship between candidate and customer is a delicate balance, hinged on employer branding and hiring experience.

In an ideal scenario, every employee at your organization is an avid user of your company’s product, and all teams—from sales to development—have a personal investment in its success. Few organizations can make such a claim, but working for a company as ubiquitous as LinkedIn means high probability your employees double as users. The same can be said of the thousands of candidates who apply to work for the networking platform, particularly at the collegiate level, which falls under the jurisdiction of Emily Campana, Director of Global Campus Recruiting.

Since joining in 2011, Emily has worked her way up the LinkedIn ladder, from senior recruiter to her directorial role, and gleaned an intimate look at the company’s brand, values, and social purpose along the way. To learn more about navigating the tricky balance between candidates and customers, we invited Emily to speak at our Hiring Success conference in San Francisco.

“We have a strong consumer brand because we have so many members on the platform,” says Campana. By LinkedIn’s recent count, over 575 million—nearly 55 million of whom are college students. “But, we’ve never sat down with marketing and asked ‘what’s our EVP’, or ‘how are we going to build content for that?’ What’s happened has been pretty organic.”

The rest, Campana says, is driven by LinkedIn recruiters. “We teach our recruiters the full story of how LinkedIn came to pass, the company’s values, what we are working on, how we believe we are changing the world, and then really dive into culture and values—we call it master storyteller.” LinkedIn then asks its recruiters to promote the company brand in conversations with candidates, in a way that goes beyond job descriptions.

“Our recruiters spend time with candidates to understand what their motivators are,” says Campana. “Then, we speak to those through our culture, values, organization, and design. This way our recruiters drive the overall brand with our candidates.”

And this step is important for a company whose product is widely recognized, but whose employer brand is not advertised so much. “Our candidates believe that they know a lot about our company because they are users,” explains Campana. “We have to help them understand the consumer side of our business, and we get a lot of suggestions as a result.” And while LinkedIn welcomes critique from users, customers’ understanding of the business is often one-sided.

“Many people believe that we are just a TA product,” says Campana, “but we also have a sales product, a learning product, a marketing product, as well as our broader mission about what LinkedIn does to help empower and make professionals more successful.”

For students preparing to enter the workforce, LinkedIn hosts career-focused events at campuses across the country, where participants can receive help with their profiles, take headshots, and, according to Tey Scott, former Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, “help them land their dream job regardless of our recruiting efforts.”

These day-long development events are held in target cities like Atlanta, Boston, and San Francisco—regions with concentrated clusters of universities. By moving away from recruiting at university career fairs—a tactic that only reached about 40 universities per year—LinkedIn adopted a more scalable method that allowed the company to expand its reach to 300+ institutions.

While campus recruiting is just one facet of LinkedIn’s talent strategy, students—primarily Millennials and Gen Zers—are an important demographic for the professional network. And LinkedIn is not alone in targeting the future workforce, with an increasing number of organizations looking at how the next generation’s values and principles directly affect how companies view candidate experience, EVP, and employer branding.

Candidates can share their good or bad experiences across their social media networks, which will likely color their perceptions—as well as those in their network—as customers for LinkedIn’s products and services.

“One of the biggest pieces of our culture and values is ‘members first’,” says Campana. “And since every candidate who comes through our door is a member that’s even more important to us—their experience is not just as a candidates, but also as a LinkedIn member.”

For this independent music distributor, staying relevant in a continually disrupted industry means taking a non-traditional approach to client needs and staffing.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, physical formats like CDs dominated the music industry, comprising over 99 percent of all worldwide revenue. The Big Six labels—Warner, EMI, Sony, BMG, Universal, and PolyGram—controlled nearly all music distribution rights and reaped all profits. By the mid-2000s, however, it was a different world. iPods replaced Discmans, iTunes replaced record stores, and digital services began to take hold as the new industry standard.

When Napster blew up the Big Six oligopoly in 2001, it took the bottom out of record-store revenues and opened the market for the kind of on-demand streaming we enjoy today. While the new consumer norm is to create networks on streaming platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube, industry profits have not recovered. Despite three years of consecutive growth, music industry revenues in 2017 were just 68 percent of what they were in 1999. As a whole, the industry raked in $17 billion last year, up 8 percent from the previous year, but those figures fall short compared to the $25 billion of 1999.

This mix-and-match, playlist-based behavior reflects the free-flowing nature of today’s digital economy – complete with the struggle to profit from subscription models and subsist on paltry ad sales. So how can an independent, digital music distributor navigate such an inhospitable industry and still turn a profit?

In a world where even the definition of “record label” is up for debate, Ingrooves Music Group walks the line between distribution company and marketing agency, liaising between artists/labels and third-party retailers like Spotify or Apple Music. The company also tracks the analytics, managing rights and royalties for its clients.

During the early years of conflict between analog and digital formats, Ingrooves Music Group was founded when entrepreneur Robb McDaniels saw a business opportunity in the nascent digital music scene of 2002: Music was quickly becoming accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and new bands, DJs, and other artists needed help promoting and distributing their music across the web. As part of his mission to create the “digital record label of the future”, McDaniels sought to bridge the gap between music artists and music retailers, offering a platform for more accessible music distribution and artist representation: An artist or label sends Ingrooves a song or album, which is then converted into the proper format and pushed out to iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, and 600 other digital retailers. When someone buys or streams the music, the artist’s royalties are passed along to ­Ingrooves, which pools them and then reimburses the artist. Ingrooves profits by taking a percentage (10%–30%) of an album’s wholesale cost (A typical album ­on iTunes retails for $10 and wholesales for $7).

In the midst of this race for digital domination, people remain a key element of the music industry, and Ingrooves understands that at the end of the day, it’s not algorithms, but people, that truly matter. “That’s just the core of HR, and our job is to take care of our clients,” says David Kroes, who had been heading Ingrooves’ hiring drives for technical and creative teams since January, 2016, captaining recruiters, hiring managers, and employees through the modern music industry.

With offices in Los Angeles, New York, London, Berlin, Oslo, and Victoria, BC, Ingrooves currently generates around $150 million in annual revenue and holds a two percent market share of recorded music in the US. To stay on top of competition within the industry, Ingrooves is pressured to manage a highly successful global team. A poor hire could cost the company, and in an industry feverishly scraping away at profits, that is one mistake Ingrooves cannot afford.

Hundreds of candidates flood Kroes’ inbox on a regular basis looking to break into the music scene. Unfortunately, the reality of pacing such an uncertain industry is that many employees become obsolete and burn out much faster than in other organizations. “The music industry is a lot like surfing” says Kroes. “People keep coming back even though it’s not the most forgiving environment, but their love for the industry is what keeps people loyal.”

The Ingrooves business model is a far cry from that of the brick-and-mortar retailers like Tower Records—the last of which shuttered in December 2006, more or less the final breath of the American record industry as we knew it—but as Ingrooves emerged, its practices were already forward-thinking, earning mainstream recognition as one of the first independent distribution companies to partner with iTunes. The music industry, however, is a fickle beast. In a few short years, on-demand streaming would incite another format revolution that, to this day, shows no signs of slowing.

Figures released by IFPI’s Global Music Trends 2018 report show that streaming accounts for 38 percent of total recorded music revenue, making it the industry’s single largest profit driver for the first time ever, with 176 million users of paid streaming services contributing to a 41 percent growth over last year.

With real money to be made from this new format ($5.6 billion in 2017) companies like Spotify, Apple, Google, and Amazon all currently offer dedicated, paid streaming platforms. Additionally, video streaming services like YouTube comprise more than half of on-demand stream time, attracting 1.3 billion total users in 2017, according to the IFPI report. How does Kroes plan on keeping Ingrooves ahead of upcoming changes within the industry while supporting the workforce powering a global music distribution and marketing company?

“At Ingrooves, we went through a situation where we were a teenager for a long time,” he says. “We were a startup and we never really outgrew the startup mode. After I joined the team we really started to realize our opportunity to become an adult.”

Pushing the company into the next phase wasn’t about changing out the old guard for fresh blood, it was about building a “culture of adults” that are adaptable and able to think on their feet. “The culture at Ingrooves is still evolving, and new talent is bringing it in,” says Kroes. “You always want to bring in new perspectives and balance that with experience. To me, experience is the best teacher.”

Kroes came onboard in the midst of company-wide restructuring that required a challenging personnel shift and revamp of its company brand. With a strong grasp on the analytics and reporting side of licensing, publishing, and distribution, Ingrooves doubled down on its high-impact marketing, PR, and promotion, working closer with artists and other industry organizations, to “help them understand and anticipate their needs” before they even knew what to ask for, a paradigm that Kroes carried over into his recruiting practices. Kroes leveraged his decade-plus of experience working in TA, as well as a strong background in philosophy, to reshape the organization’s approach to hiring.

“Media companies, whether TV, movies, or music, are very much people businesses,” he notes. “A lot of talent is not cookie-cutter.” In order to hire both technical and creative roles in tandem, Kroes needed a non-traditional approach, which, he says was made possible with tools like the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite. “A good recruiter should be looking for ways to find talent that maybe other people haven’t, and SmartRecruiters allows you to experiment with a smart approach that pushes the limits of what the tool is designed to do,” says Kroes. “It gives you more insight into the state of things.”

While predicting what’s next to come in the music industry is far from science, Kroes is confident that Ingrooves Music Group will continue to adapt as the industry embraces on-demand streaming. Issues such as diminishing profit margins will be a challenge, but Ingrooves is ready to face the challenges like the now grown-up company that it is, one which, with Kroes at the helm, can finally have its HR Head say that the company, firmly, “knows the path forward.”

The international law firm boosts hiring success with the implementation of SmartRecruiters talent acquisition suite.

Please join Smartrecruiters in celebrating our latest go-live with law firm Crowell & Moring!

Crowell & Moring is an international law firm recognized for representing clients — including Fortune 500 companies — in high-stakes litigation and regulatory matters, as well as for its commitment to pro bono and diversity. With more than 500 lawyers in Washington, DC, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County, London and Brussels, Crowell & Moring serves clients in litigation and arbitration, regulatory, and transactional matters.

“Crowell & Moring is dedicated to connecting with and attracting the best talent in a dizzyingly competitive hiring environment.  We rely on SmartRecruiters to provide the smooth hiring experience our star candidates deserve – and to let us focus on the compelling case we need to make for the firm.” – Ryan Tisch, Partner

In bringing SmartRecruiters’ TAS  into its hiring process, Crowell & and Moring expects a competitive edge by plugging into a ‘live’ talent pool to solve duplicate issues, and receives better reporting & analytics.The mobile/tablet compatibility means fewer less clicks for applicants and fast access to Helpdesk anytime.

Crowell & and Moring benefits from a hiring process that encourages collaboration across departments and, in addition, is GDPR compliant.

For more information about the company and how SmartRecruiters functions from the candidate-facing side, the Crowell & and Moring Career site can be found at www.crowell.com/Careers

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.

With 89 superstores and 124 smaller shops, Indigo is Canada’s largest book, gift and speciality retailer. With a business that big, it is clear recruitment has to be conducted via a decentralized hiring model.

Indigo currently boasts a staff of 6,100 with the retailer taking on around 4,000 new hires every year. All together, this mighty team brought in almost a billion dollars in 2016.

The requirement to find additional staff quickly and easily, especially for seasonal periods, is therefore central to Indigo’s success. However, they soon discovered this task was far above-and-beyond their legacy applicant tracking system.

Working With A Joyless ATS

Initially, Indigo hoped to jury-rig their older Taleo platform in order to meet their newer, more strenuous, demands. However, as Indigo’s Director of Talent Acquisition and Performance Management Sarah Wilson explains, it quickly became apparent this would not work:

“The costs of an initiative like that with an extensive set of new requirements would have been cost prohibitive, so we began evaluating other solutions.”

Furthermore, the legacy software did not match the image they wished to project, resulting in a poor candidate experience and potentially poorer quality candidates. Indigo firmly believes joyful employees make joyful customers, but their hiring process was not conducive to this. Luckily, Sarah Wilson recognized the problem and understood something had to be done, adding:

“During that process it became clearer than ever that our decentralized model – and the need to fill 4,000 jobs per year – required an entirely new solution.”

Happy Staff Making Happy Customers

With SmartRecruiters, Indigo found a new talent acquisition suite which fulfilled their demands for large scale, decentralized hiring. Sarah highlighted the following ways SmartRecruiters helped them achieve their goals:

• Although SmartRecruiters allowed integrations with almost any tool, the pre-configured settings and ease of use means the platform can be easily picked up by store managers in both their larger and smaller stores.
• The constant and concise reporting of data allowed Indigo to experiment with their recruiting strategies, allowing the company to be more innovative in candidate sourcing.
• The collaborative features of SmartRecruiters also allowed for decentralized hiring within stores, resulting in happier candidates and staff.
• The ability to source candidates outside of traditional job boards, such as via referrals or their own career page, meant Indigo were able to reduce their hiring costs. Eventually over 50% of applicants would come via these channels.

The Results Speak For Themselves

With SmartRecruiters, Indigo saw immediate improvements. Sarah reveals that 44% of potential candidates who see an Indigo posting click on it, while 88% of that number will complete the application. This allowed Indigo to fulfill their 2016 holiday season hiring goals two weeks ahead of schedule.

Indigo also conducted an internal survey of recently hired employees to gauge their experiences, and the results were rather impressive. Here are just some of them:

• 92% agreed that job postings were clear and provided relevant information about the opportunity
• Ÿ95% agreed that the recruiter communicated in a professional and timely manner
• 96% rated the candidate experience at Indigo as “great” or “excellent”
• Ÿ99% would refer others for employment opportunities at Indigo

To see those results in full, as well as read the full experience of Indigo with SmartRecruiters, head over to our special case study, Recruiting Platform Adds Joy to Customer and Employee Experience.

Gameloft‘s profile is filled with some pretty astronomical numbers, which isn’t that surprising when you consider it is the world’s largest publisher of mobile and video games. With 3 million daily downloads, 140 million monthly users and 2016 sales of $256 million, Gameloft clearly doesn’t do things on a small scale.

However, that’s not the end of Gameloft’s impressive haul of integers, as all this progress was made thanks to 6,000 employers in 48 offices in 30 countries. That means there’s barely a time zone without a Gameloft office.

Recruiting Locally, Globally

Since Gameloft has spread into diverse and myriad countries, it needed a way to ensure standardized recruitment processes across all its offices, while simultaneously allowing for flexibility on the local scale.

Unfortunately, the applicant tracking system that may have served Gameloft in the early years wasn’t up to the task of hiring both  globally AND locally. Furthermore, a drawn out and convoluted recruitment process could have been deterring countless talented candidates. As Gameloft HR Manager Romain Delebecque explains:

“Whether hiring a software architect in Romania or a game designer in Vietnam, we need to make sure that the application process is smooth and represents a company that the best developers in the world want to work for — in any office worldwide.”

That’s why, in 2016, Gameloft found a new solution: SmartRecruiters.

Global Data All In One Place

SmartRecruiters’ Talent Acquisition Platform provided the ideal response to the needs of an expanding, global company. Here are just some of the ways how:

• SmartRecruiters is localized in 16 user languages and 35 candidate facing ones, allowing Gameloft’s diverse recruiters and candidates to communicate clearly in their native languages.
• Clear and concise reporting, applicant tracking and data-backed metrics provides both recruiters with unprecedented visibility. No more lengthy email chains asking for updates or information, it’s all available on one dashboard. As Delebecque says, for a global recruiter “it’s all about the data.”
• SmartRecruiters allows for additional tools and infrastructure to be easily integrated into the platform. This promotes local flexibility and means recruiters spend more time assessing candidates and less time navigating clunky software.
• The ease of use of SmartRecruiters for both users and candidates, including one click applications, means Gameloft can cultivate a positive candidate experience that best matches the innovativeness of their company.

To hear more from Romain Delebecque, read SmartRecruiters’ full Gameloft case study:  Hire the world’s best talent in 30 countries? Game on!

Over the past 30 years, DFC Global Corp has become one of the world’s leading providers of accessible consumer finance services, taking the lead in serving unbanked, underbanked and small business owners across the world.

With around 1,000 branches in seven countries and a staff of 6,500 members, DFC recruiters require a tool which can assist and support the quantity of candidates they expect, especially when you consider the company favors a high-volume model headed up by only six recruiters working in close cooperation with local managers.

Tangled In The Spreadsheet Quagmire

To deal with this task, the North American division of DFC established the North American Talent Acquisition Center of Excellence in 2014 – a group designed to find the best candidates and ensure DFC maintained its high level of staffing.

Up until the creation of this group, DFC had been relying purely on rudimentary email and excel spreadsheets, creating a vast and unnavigable administrative mess which Jason Fisher, the Director of North American Talent Acquisition, likened to ‘the dark ages’.

As well as being antiquated in approach, this method was also incredibly time consuming and inefficient. Recruiters would be spending many more hours than necessary in their hunts and were still not finding the best candidates at the end of it all.

Faced with this, Jason and his team created a set of specifications any new adopted system would have to satisfy. Firstly, it should be easy to pick up and use, secondly it should be flexible in terms of integrations, and finally it should provide additional analytics, metrics and data so the recruitment efforts could be properly scrutinized and analyzed.

A Platform That Meets All Specifications

With SmartRecruiters, DFC found a solution which perfectly matched their requirements. Here’s how:

• SmartRecruiters’ integrated assessments means recruiters only had to deal with applications that passed a certain criteria. This meant they spent less time sifting through resumes attached to emails, and more time working with the most promising candidates.
• The flexibility of SmartRecruiters’ APIs means it can be easily integrated with DFC’s existing or desired tools, such as Cornerstone Insights.
• SmartRecruiters comes pre-packaged with a suite of analytical tools providing recruiters with a wide range of metrics. This can allow them to conduct testing on their sourcing and processes, potentially allowing for savings in terms of time and recruitment costs.
• The ability to quickly and easily collaborate within the SmartRecruiters platform ultimately allows for higher quality hires and an end to lengthy email chains.

As a result of working with SmartRecruiters, DFC saw major positive changes in its recruitment process, in particular regarding efficiency . They now save 900 work hours per week compared to their time in the ‘dark ages’, while the metrics and additional tools have reduced administrative costs to the equivalent of 200 hours per week.

Additionally, the number of qualified candidates DFC receives rose by 30%.

Thanks to this success with the North American division, SmartRecruiters has been rolled out in all DFC branches in the UK.

To find out more about how SmartRecruiters revolutionized DFC’s recruitment, check out the dedicated case study: DFC Leaves The Dark Ages.

With around 80 locations across the US, Canada and Europe, Equinox has become the benchmark for high quality gym and fitness clubs around the globe. Central to the companies philosophy is creating bespoke experiences with their customers, providing ample face-to-face time with highly trained expert professionals.

Hiring success for this kind of human-centric business is therefore of critical importance. The employees and their knowledge are the very product Equinox is selling and to achieve this they need to find and hire the best people and best experts possible.

Equinox uses a decentralized system which local branch managers conduct their own hiring based on their requirements. This approach utilizes around 20 full-time recruiters supported by over 300 local hiring managers who may often carry out many other activities on a daily basis.

How To Ensure Consistent Excellence?

Although this approach provides the flexibility local managers need to keep their branches staffed, it also comes packaged with some inherent challenges. Most importantly is the concern a highly decentralized approach will suffer from a lack of consistency in the long-run.

The high quality standards customers have come to expect are central to Equinox’s brand and business. Several, or perhaps even a single, poor hire in one branch could potentially cause ongoing brand problems, especially considering they primarily court luxury customers with high demands.

Another issue concerns the tools Equinox needs to fulfil this hiring goal. The core strength and value of the company comes from the knowledge of its trainers and professionals in relation to their chosen speciality. It’s unlikely this professional knowledge will be possessed by full-time recruiters and hiring managers. Therefore, it makes sense for Equinox to allow its trainers, nutritionists and instructors to be involved in the hiring process. For this to be effective, they need to have access to an easy to use platform that economises their time. After all, the last thing an Equinox trainer wants to do is spend hours trying to work with clunky software in a backroom.

Turning Your Experts Into Hiring Managers

To solve this problem, Equinox joined SmartRecruiters in 2013. Here’s why they haven’t looked back:

• SmartRecruiters has collaboration as a keystone of the platform, allowing hiring managers from across the country to conveniently discuss candidates. This was particularly useful for Equinox, since knowledge from other branches could be brought into the hiring process if it was not available locally.
• The platform is also incredibly flexible and mobile, allowing trainers-cum-hiring managers to recruit on the move, saving them vast amounts of time and allowing them to concentrate on other daily responsibilities.
• The use of SmartRecruiters’ customizable scorecards allows for a consistent assessment process to be used across the company. This ensures local managers, while having the freedom to work on their own, also adhere to the high quality standards demanded.
• All of these factors, combined with SmartRecruiters’ support for social media and one-click-applications, results in a great candidate experience which supports the brand Equinox wishes to project.

After teaming up with SmartRecruiters, Equinox quickly saw an increase in applications — to the tune of 45 percent. Additionally, they saw an increase of 9 percent in terms of new hires, while 80 percent of individuals who saw a job posting applied to it.

To find out more about how Equinox found hiring success with SmartRecruiters, check out the full case study, Equinox: Hiring The Best Personal Trainers For Every Fitness Club.

If you attended university in the United Kingdom, you’ve almost certainly heard of Brightsparks. In fact it’s highly plausible you could be one of the 14,000 students they have worked with every year since starting in 2003.

Headquartered in London, Brightsparks specializes in placing UK students into both temporary employment during their studies, and entry-level graduate positions afterwards. As their Senior Talent Manager Jake Wibberly reveals, Brightsparks wants to approach their work differently from other temporary employment agencies, building long-term relationships with their candidates:

“This is quite a unique niche. We get to know students very well as we screen them, assess them, and gather feedback after placing them into roles with our clients, so we can gather deep insights into their personalities and skills.”

Appealing To Generation Z

This approach is not without major challenges, especially when working with students who may have little or no job experience. Traditional CVs and application processes are of little value, and with Brightsparks dealing with such a large number of applicants, they need standardized processes to ensure efficient and fair placements.

Then there’s finding the students in the first place. Generation Z has a disdain for the older, lengthier application processes of previous decades. University is a busy time with essays to finish, societies to join and — let’s face it — copious amounts of partying to fit in. With this in mind, Brightsparks needed a quick and easy process that would appeal to students AND give their hiring managers the data they required.

Building Long-Term Relationships With Candidates

In 2016, Brightsparks discovered that SmartRecruiters offered the solutions to all of these concerns, and more. Let’s see how:

• SmartRecruiters’ easy-to-configure dashboard allowed Brightsparks to develop standardized tests for candidates. Not only did this provide them with all the data they needed, it also helped reduce bias and increase diversity.
• Candidate profiles provides the ability to track students throughout their entire relationship with Brightsparks, allowing long-term monitoring of their data and experience. This means a profile created for a temporary job can be updated and later used for finding a graduate position.
• SmartRecruiters’ flexible API allows it to seamlessly post to multiple social media platforms, a critical advantage when attempting to source younger candidates. Additionally, the ease of click-and-go applications further appeals to time-pressed students.
• The data reports and metrics at the core of SmartRecruiters’ platform allows Brightsparks to quickly assess a large number of candidates and effectively analyze their sourcing channels, saving them money and giving them an edge over their competitors.

In 1982, Mark Carr noticed a gap in the automotive market: good, honest repairs which put the customer first. With this in mind, and using the founding principle “love thy neighbor as yourself” as a guide, he set about creating what would become one of the most successful franchises in the United States, Christian Brothers Automotives.

Today, Carr has franchised the company, and its principles, to around 165 branches in 22 states. Central to Christian Brothers’ success is its devotion to providing fair and honest services to their customers, and this is something Carr also extends to his employees. Unusually, Carr only takes his portion of a franchised stores’ income once they have paid all their other expenses, including wages and health insurance. This results in stronger stores, happier staff and ultimately happier customers.

As a result of this approach, Christian Brothers has a 100% success rate with its new franchised locations, making it into Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2016 list of best franchise opportunities.

A Legacy Platform That Can’t Keep Up

Carr permits his franchised outlets a lot of autonomy, including in recruitment. Instead of directing from above, Christian Brothers has a team of recruiters who can advise local branch managers when required. However, as Christian Brothers Director of Recruiting, Matt Miller, explains, there are potential issues with this approach – especially if your tech isn’t up to scratch:

“We thrive on finding people dedicated to excellence, but we struggled when we were using an older legacy applicant tracking system. With limited functionality, it was challenging for busy store owners to manage all of their recruiting efforts, monitor spend, and source candidates while at the same time running their day-to-day business.”

This issue of time is particularly important to Christian Brothers, as their brand depends on having face-to-face time with customers. Managers and staff can’t provide this level of care if they also have to hide away in backrooms sifting through applications.

An ATS Which Supports Your Brand

In order to find a way to maximise the efficiency of their hiring efforts, Christian Brothers set up trials in five locations with various applicant tracking systems. After the trial concluded, four of the five branches claimed SmartRecruiters was the ATS they wanted to use. Here’s why:

• SmartRecruiters has been built with the user in mind, features a navigable interface that can be picked up quickly, regardless of the user’s technical skills.
• The streamlined platform allows recruiters, or acting recruiters, to efficiently move candidates through the process. This fluid design, coupled with instantaneous access to communication tools, saves time that can be spent elsewhere.
• SmartRecruiters easily integrates a number of social networks, providing wide reach for even small local branches with little effort.
• All this allowed Christian Brothers to create personalized, branded job postings that appealed to their ideals as well as the best candidates out there.

The Results Are Clear

After using SmartRecruiters, Christian Brothers saw a 30% increase in applications. This allowed them to rapidly staff new branches and make hires within days.

Christian Brothers Automotive is frequently cited in various ‘best place to work’ lists, and although SmartRecruiters can’t take all the credit for this, the ease and flexibility of the platform must surely be a contributing factor.

Read more about Christian Brothers Automotive and SmartRecruiters’ partnership in the case study: Christian Brothers: Growing a strong franchise by growing strong teams – in every store.