Hiring Success is almost here! February 11th-12th, TA leaders from around the globe will congregate at the Marquis Marriott in San Francisco to shape the future of talent acquisition. Where will you be?

With sessions ranging from social justice to inclusive leadership, social media recruiting, gender equality, cutting edge AI deployment and more, it’s hard to imagine a more inspiring conference than Hiring Success. Over 1,200 attendees will share in the insights of veteran recruiting and talent acquisition leaders from companies like Amazon, Visa, IBM, LinkedIn, Bosch, and more.

Below you’ll find seven profiles of speakers presenting at this year’s conference. A preview of coming attractions! 

Dr Steven Jones: JONES, Traveling Monk

Nationally known as one of “America’s Top Experts on Diversity” (Diversity, Inc., 2005), Dr. Jones’ philosophy is to lead with listening to support clients in finding a strategy and solution that works for them. 

Dr. Jones holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, a Master’s in Multicultural Counseling, and a Ph.D. in Industrial/ Organizational Psychology. He is the author of Journey to Excellence, a transformational book helping people define and achieve excellence in their lives.

In the global arena, while he was studying business practices in Chang Mai, Thailand, Dr. Jones became the first person of African descent to be ordained as a Buddhist Monk at a 700 year old monastery called Wat Umong.

Jones will be leading a session on Inclusive Leadership.

Carlos Fernandez: Houston Methodist, Manager of Talent Acquisition

Carlos Fernandez currently oversees talent acquisition strategy, employer branding, and sourcing outreach for a system of eight hotels and a workforce of 23,000+ employees.

Fernandez has over 10 years experience within talent acquisition, project management, learning development, and change management, and has led several technology implementations and processes to enhance the candidate experience. He led the redesign of Houston Methodist’s career site and social media recruitment efforts, increasing overall application volume by 40% since 2016.

Fernandez will be co-leading a roundtable discussion on Candidate Experience.

Gerry Crispin: Principal, CareerXroads

Gerry Crispin founded CareerXroads in 1996 to encourage the transformation of hiring into the 21st century. Today, with his business partner, Chris Hoyt, CareerXroads is in its second decade as a member driven community of Talent leadership teams from 130 major firms who are devoted to learning from and helping one another improve and succeed.

Among other achievements, he has co-authored eight books on the evolution of staffing, and has written hundreds of articles and white papers on similar topics. His career spans fifty years and includes Consulting, Recruitment Advertising, HR leadership positions with Fortune 100 employers, Executive Search and Career Services at the University where he graduated with his BE and in Engineering and IO/Psychology degrees.

Crispin will be leading the following session: What Keeps You Up At Night?

Jonathan Mears: VISA, Head, Global Executive Talent Acquisition

As a global HR and talent executive, Jonathan Mears is known for driving innovation in developing markets. He is currently responsible for Visa’s Global Executive Talent acquisition and delivery across all markets, leading Executive Talent teams to deliver internal and external talent, and Visa’s HR Leadership team.

Mears previously led large cross geographic and functional teams for IBM in 14 countries supporting LATAM, North America, Europe, MEA and Asia Pacific. His areas of expertise include leadership of high performance teams, employment branding and strategic sourcing, contract negotiation, business development, retention, redeployment, and more. 

Mears will be co-leading a roundtable on Interviewing Skills.

Lawrel Aufmuth: Advantage Solutions, Vice President, Talent Acquisition

Lawrel Aufmuth is Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Advantage Solutions. She is an innovator and HR professional with extensive experience in the private and public sector with growth organizations.

Lawrel is well known for delivering measurable results through creative, “out of the box’ solutions that build best in class measurable human capital strategies. Lawrel Aufmuth knows TA in and out, and is an expert in using Artificial Intelligence (RPA & ML & NLP) to bring organizations to new heights. 

Aufmuth will be leading the following session: Turning Recruiting Into a Profit Center.

Sarah Yang: Former Talent Brand & Diversity Lead at Getaround

Sarah Yang is the former Talent Brand & Diversity Lead at Getaround. She crafts and nurtures compelling stories on why Getaround is a wonderful place to work and has over fifteen years of experience in creating videos, blogs, and social media that are critically acclaimed. Yang is the recipient of the prestigious MarCom Platinum Award, which she won for the global recruiting video she co-produced for Workday. 

In addition to being a TA leader, she is a professional drummer, filmmaker, poet, comedian, and improv actor, and a magnetic and animated speaker on creativity (the #1 soft skill according to LinkedIn), diversity, and storytelling to global audiences (i.e. Grace Hopper, Cisco, Workday, Oracle, CoderDojo, Lesbians Who Tech, and Women Who Code).

She will be leading the following session: Convincing Your HMs to Value Diversity Hiring.

Hung Lee: Recruiting Brainfood, Curator

Hung Lee is the founder and CEO of WorkShape.io – the revolutionary recruiting platform for Software engineers and Editor of leading industry newsletter Recruiting Brainfood. He is an industry professional with over 15 years experience as an agency recruiter, recruitment manager, Internal Head of Talent, recruitment trainer and strategic advisor for rapid growth businesses.

In a time when recruiters desperately compete for talented candidates’ attention, building communities could be a way to stay ahead. 

The job advertising market has ballooned into a multi-billion dollar industry, which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, drawn the attention of tech giants Google and Facebook towards technologies that make it easier for people to find jobs, as well as build massive, on-demand databases of skills.

Meanwhile, many companies are finding it increasingly difficult to market their open requisitions to the right audience. Too often, hundreds of under-qualified candidates flood recruiter inboxes with applications, or worse, job postings are left open for weeks, failing to yield promising applicants. In both cases, the amount of resources thrown at finding the best candidates only continues to increase.

However, successful hiring teams are combating these challenges by proactively building communities of people with common interests and skillsets ahead of demand. This expedites the hiring process and nurtures relationships with talented professionals for future job opportunities. The question is…where do you start?

To answer this question, we spoke with Hung Lee on our Hiring Success podcast. Hung is a recruiter and influencer in the Talent Acquisition (TA) space and—as the creator of the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter—knows a thing or two about building communities. After all, his TA bulletin circulates to over 14,000 subscribers every week. Find out how Hung’s newsletter found success and why candidate community building is a must for the modern-day recruiter. 

Listen to the full episode—featuring a thought-provoking conversation with Anita Grantham of Pluralsight—over on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

How did Recruiting Brainfood start?

In the beginning, there was no strategy behind it. It was a vague idea inspired by the fact that the internet got so noisy and so big that it was very difficult for me personally to find the great bits of recruiting content as a consumer. I knew there was great stuff out there, but it was swamped by everything surrounding it. I started bookmarking articles and eventually, I realized that I had collected a bunch of great content. I was getting value from this and thought if I were to share it with others, maybe they could get value out of it as well. The Internet got too big and Recruiting Brainfood was my attempt to make it smaller.

Was there ever a moment where you doubted the newsletter would find success?

Not a single person read the first newsletter. I had no subscribers, so no one actually received it when I sent it out. I was a bit worried, but I went back to the drawing board, did more promotion, and when I pushed out the second one a few hundred people were reading it. I would gain around one subscriber per week and it would be the most exciting moment ever. At the same time, growth wasn’t the primary objective. The foundation was built on providing interesting and useful content for recruiters, and I think that is what made the newsletter a success. If I was looking for immediate wins or immediate audience then I would have bailed a long time ago. It did take about half a year before people started to pay attention, but then large numbers of people began signing up, reading it, and talking about it. 

Why do you think that it takes six months of consistency before people are really willing to give you the time?

When you are promoting content, the goal is to create an audience. You are asking people to spare their time for you, which—for them—is very precious. The first thing is to clearly signal that the content is around to stay. A newsletter or any type of series isn’t a one-time event; anything that is subscription-based is not a single purchase or transaction. 

This is why consistency is crucial, which then directly translates into trust. The same is true of human behavior. If you had a friend where you couldn’t predict their mood or behaviors between Monday and Friday, it is quite difficult to imagine a long-term relationship with that person. A good friend is someone who is going to be solid and predictable in some respect that you can rely on. This builds the foundation of that relationship and that is the key to audience building—they need to trust that you are going to be there.

A quote you often use in conferences or presentations is “Attention is the currency of the digital age.” How does it relate to recruiting?

It refers back to this idea that we are all in a permanently distracted state. The folks listening to this podcast right now, I guarantee you, are also looking at least one, maybe two different screens at the same time. When attention becomes scarce, it becomes valuable. Right now there is real competition for candidates’ attention. If you manage to get someone’s attention then that is the opportunity. That is when you can have a solo conversation or communicate—opportunities emerge from that. 

Without that attention, you can’t start a sales process, a relationship, or a plan. As a result, there is substantial competition between recruiters for candidates’ interest. Companies utilize ad notifications and other marketing tricks but it creates chaos, this huge noise. It is actually much more powerful if people step towards you rather than if you interrupt them. 

How do you think you can reach out without adding to the noise? 

Recruiters who need to interact with candidates can employ two broad techniques. The first technique is what I call the ‘stand out from the crowd’ technique. This is when you send personalized emails and make sure you follow up. Other strategies include sending a rich media message instead of a text-based email, which is the predominant way in which today’s recruiters try to interact with candidates. My view of it is that these things might be incrementally effective, but overall they contribute to the noise. At some point, every time you reach out you add to the cacophony, which ultimately pushes that technique towards the end of its effectiveness. 

The other broad technique is to create a type of community or audience where people willingly seek you out. Once you have that, then you realize that you don’t really need to rely on marketing tricks to have a conversation. A good example was when you wanted me as a guest on this podcast. There was no need to send me a long email with arguments as to why I should be here. A short email or text was all that was necessary because we already had built a relationship and already had some social capital.

The future of recruiting is going to rely on recruiters who are able to build strong relationships with large numbers of candidates before the need to hire. One of the major problems we have in recruitment is that it is a very transactional relationship. Recruiters have a role they need to fill in that exact moment and that is the only reason why they are interested in speaking with the candidate. 

This relationship is not reciprocal because recruiters are not there when candidates need them. However, I do believe we’re heading towards more equitable relationships between recruiters and candidates. The expectations of recruiters are beginning to change with the increased use of recruitment marketing and candidate relationship management tools, but there still needs to be changes in how recruiters are compensated and measured in terms of performance. In the future, we will see skilled recruiters who are judged on their ability to build communities of talented people interested in working at a particular company or a specific position.

Learn more from leaders like Hung lee in the next part of the podcast series where we find out how to master talent attraction with Celinda Appleby, the Global Talent Attraction Director of Visa

Sure you know the basic etiquette, but at the end of the day are you writing something someone actually wants to read?

“Attention is the business currency of our age.” Says Hung Lee, recruiting influencer and Co-Founder of Workshape.io. “So how do we get that attention and keep it?”

For Hung, the answer is email. As the creator of recruiting brainfood, the talent acquisition newsletter eagerly awaited by over 9,000 people weekly, he knows the power of a successful campaign, unfortunately so does everyone else. According to a recent study from salesforce for every dollar spent, companies can expect $38 in ROI. So needless to say the competition for attention in the inbox is steep, which has to lead to a communication overload…

We all have an unconscious relationship with our email inbox, one that goes beyond our rational mind, deep into the reptilian center of our most basic instinct: stress!  Every message is an interruption, an ask, or a demand on our time, and for many, even opening the email app on our phones initiates an involuntary groan.

Any professional today is constantly at battle with their overloaded inbox. There are books of strategy, software solutions, sorting features, and virtual assistants all to help workers manage the incessant flow of information. Though the idea that it’s the recipient’s job to tackle the communication overload, seems a bit backward, maybe it’s time for those implementing outbound campaigns to check themselves before they wreck email for us all.

That’s what Hung Lee wanted to do in October of 2016 with the first recruiting brainfood. He decided that rather than making a ‘demand’ on the recipient he was going to ‘give’, and maybe – just maybe – with this approach, he could access the slow thinking part of the mind, that makes rational decisions, instead of the stress-induced reactive mind, that lashes out at every perceived threat.

He realized one day, that he was another voice in the inbox cacophony, and wanted to go from asking to give, here’s what we learned from this marketing maven during his session “What I learned from sending 250,000 Emails” at Social Recruiting Days 2018.

Make it about mission!

“What is my value-add to the person I am contacting?” Should be the first question you ask yourself before sending an email. Make it clear, so the recipient can understand, right away, that you are there to help, not to take.

Consistency equals credibility.

Consistency is key to building audience trust, especially when it comes to both cadence and style. Stick to your schedule and your format so that people become familiar with your messaging, and learn to look forward to it!

Give-give-give.

In the immortal words of the spice girls “taking is too easy, that’s the way it is.” Taking/asking/demanding/pushing are quick ways to destroy your social credibility. The favors will come back around if you focus on giving value and building trust.

Have an opinion.

An audience will want some commentary and context about why you are sending them certain articles or information. It may feel uncomfortable to share your take, but authentic thoughts are what gives your campaign personality, and helps your audience connect to your content on a deeper level. It shows you read what you are sending and you have a clear idea of why it’s important for them.

Separate scared and profane.

When it comes time for business, think about using a different channel. Your email is where you’ve created familiarity so now you can connect on LinkedIn or Slack without muddying your email mission.

Bonus point: Be human!  Some of the best engagement comes from when you make a mistake and say “whoops, my bad!”

These are just five of ten awesome points from this audience-builder extraordinaire so be sure to catch him live if you can!