The sun sets on our final day, and here are five learnings we’re taking with us from day two.

Riding high off the carnival treats from the last night’s SmartyParty, Hiring Success 19 attendees braved another misty morning in San Francisco as they congregated at Pier 27 for day two of panel discussions, breakout sessions, and the highly anticipated Hackathon and Recruiting Startup Awards ceremonies. Day one set a high bar for exciting content, but the crowd appeared ready for a second round after fueling up at the fresh donut bar. How could day two top yesterday’s activity?

Day one of Hiring Success 19 saw SmartRecruiters announce the launch of its new corporate social responsibility (CSR) program – Reverse Recruiting. This three-pillar approach to CSR includes SmartRecruiters donating one percent of the company’s equity towards a future foundation, making best-of-breed recruiting tools available to non-profits of all sizes through free and discounted products, and hosting Reverse Recruiting weeks across all global offices four times annually. And, for this last part, SmartRecruiters wants to invite you and your company to join in.

Learn more about Reverse Recruiting, and how to host your own event, here!

Now let’s turn our attention to today’s events to revisit the best reveals and takeaways for Hiring Success 19 – Americas.

1. New Hiring Success function to support customer achievement

Hiring Is Success laid out SmartRecruiters’ 2019 product roadmap, as well as a vision for the future of TA!

With the announcement of Rebecca Carr as SVP of Hiring Success comes a new branch of SmartRecruiters, staffed by TA experts (all of whom have previously held high-level positions in people functions) who will provide SmartRecruiters’ programmatic support in the areas of awareness, transformation, acceleration, and optimization.

Here’s what this support will look like on the ground:

Awareness – Business engagement around the metrics that matter, where the business needs to be, and how it will get there.

• Business Audit
• Implementation Success
• End-user testing and analysis

Transformation – Setting realistic goals for change in alignment with desired performance metrics & developing programs to support it.

• Product success
• In-product education
• Candidate and user Surveys

Acceleration: Differentiating against the competition with innovative programs, new technologies, and aggressive performance goals.

• Pilot programs
• Local events
• Business apps and integrations

Optimization: Consistent re-evaluation of existing processes and technologies to ensure your business is staying current against the market and competitors.

• Expert Workshops
• Hiring success dashboards
• Process and Technology Certification

2. What are the concrete actions you can take to turn good intentions into results when it comes to gender equality?

Gender Inequality offered solutions and insight into the microaggressions women experience through the hiring process and within company culture…

“It’s important to keep the channels of communication open, especially with the hiring manager. Keep explaining and re-explaining the actual needs of the role and how those need could be addressed by a diverse group of candidates.” – Sarah Blackmore

“Examine corporate values and how they apply to marginalized people. If you have a corporate value that says ‘assume good intent’, that value might tell someone that they have to assume that this person with more privilege is making a mistake for the first time.” – Margarett Quigley

“Having lived most of my life as a white male I never thought about privilege until my transition. Now, as a woman, I’ve lost my male privilege, I see that people generally treat gender equality as a woman’s problem, not as an everyone problem. People want to be themselves as at work, but women find it hard to simply do that.” – Joanne Lockwood

3. Optimizely sweeps gold at the 2019 Hackathon

Three teams locked themselves in a room for the last 24 hours to build on top of SmartRecruiters’ APIs for the grand prize of $5000 in this year’s Hackathon.

While each team competed admirably, Optimizely took the grand prize with Action Center, an app that solves for task completion lag time.

Right now, Hiring Managers have to search flooded inboxes for buried at-mentions, but what if all hiring tasks were in a dashboard that they could easily click into via mobile – resolving tasks in moments of free time throughout the day? Action Center does just that. Now, hiring managers have access to a task dashboard on the SmartRecruiters mobile app homepage where they can easily click into tasks and send digital nudges to other members of the hiring team to do the same.

4. Be a recession-proof recruiter

Matt Charney talked the long game in Recruiting in a Recession. Economy and labor trends are cyclical, and just because we aren’t in a recession now doesn’t mean there isn’t one coming. So, how should recruiters make themselves critical to business success in fat times so they stay competitive in the lean? Here’s the short answer…

• Treat recruiting like business school: ask many many questions.
• Make your hiring managers happy. Most recruiters rate their performance as stellar, while most hiring managers rate their recruiters as subpar – bridge that gap!
• Measure the metrics you, as a recruiter, control.
• Don’t spend budget just because you can – make sure it will affect P&L positively!

5. Recruiting Startup Awards

Over 100 recruiting technologies competed for a chance to pitch their products on the  mainstage, but five finalists got the chance to pitch to the entire Hiring Success 19 audience.  This was a moment to celebrate innovation in TA, and, after deliberation from an expert panel of judges – as well as the audience – Candidate.ID took gold.

Candidate.ID’s software allows organizations to create genuine talent pipelines and easily identify candidates as cold, warm, and ‘hire-ready’​ in real time, claiming to reduce time-to-shortlist by 50 percent.

An increasing number of businesses are turning to more proactive hiring strategies to remain competitive in today’s job market economy. Reactive hiring no longer yields high-quality talent, Candidate.ID addresses this problem by zeroing in on pipeline automation, offering tools and insights that enhance hiring teams’ ability to source, discover, and nurture talent ahead of business needs.

***

Thanks so much to all our attendees, and we hope to see you next time at Hiring Success 19 – Europe!

SmartRecruiters announces a new corporate responsibility initiative (CSR), and three other moments worthy of a mic-drop.

This morning, merry conference-goers were greeted by a classic case of San Francisco rain and fog. Is it any surprise that the number one tourist purchase in San Francisco is sweatshirt? However, damp environs proved no match for attendees’ giddy spirit or the palpable enthusiasm of a giant dancing alien named Winston the Smartian, SmartRecruiters’ brand new mascot.

The revelries began at the crack of 7:30. As conference-goers rolled into Pier 27 and began catching up over delicious cups o’ quiche, they couldn’t help but notice our friends at G2 crowd collecting surveys from SmartRecruiters customers. For every completed survey, SmartRecruiters made a $10 donation to Defy Ventures, a non-profit organization providing career training and mentorship for formerly incarcerated people in the US. Forgive the shameless plug, but it’s for a good cause, people!

But, enough of work. The sun is setting on our first day at the conference, and we’re all headed to the Smarty Party carnival, so let’s take a moment to recall some of the top moments of our first day at Hiring Success 19 – Americas.

When SmartRecruiters announced a new CSR: ‘Reverse Recruiting’ Invites Hiring Success Community to Give Back.

In the opening keynote by Jerome Ternynck, CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, attendees learned about the launch of a new corporate social responsibility program, Reverse Recruiting!

This CSR goes well beyond the SmartRecruiters business. It starts with SmartRecruiters pledging one percent of their equity towards a future foundation. SmartRecruiters also wants to ensure non-profits have access to top-level hiring technology through free and discounted services for organizations of all sizes, and ends with everyone (including your company) getting involved with Reverse Recruiting!

What is Reverse Recruiting?

On Reverse Recruiting days, recruiters no longer work for their companies — they work for candidates. They invite rejected candidates and previously overlooked talent to review their resumes, conduct mock interviews, offer suggestions, and assist struggling candidates in their job search. And guess what? Managers are invited as well! What a great way for everyone to give back.

SmartRecruiters will participate in Reverse Recruiting days once a quarter in all of our global offices, and the hope is your office will consider this as well. Sign up to learn more and receive a toolkit with all the materials you need to host your very own Reverse Recruiting session.

How to ‘backtest’ your hiring practice like the folks in finance do.

In today’s Select track, Are Purple Unicorn Hires Repeatable, Robert Coombs, CEO of Head of Business Operations at CredSimple, talked algorithms. It’s a word we hear a lot, and before today this author defined it as ‘the magical computer thing that figures stuff out for us lowly humans’. Now I know it’s actually as simple as a set of rules we use to problem solve. A low-tech example of an algorithm is a recipe. We can reasonably expect chocolate chip cookies when we put the right ingredients through the right preparation and cooking steps, but let’s get more specific.

An algorithm, whether it be for cooking or financial gains, has several elements in common:

• Inputs –  The thing that is applied: data, ingredients, historical trends,
• Outputs – The thing that comes out: transactions, delicious cookies, great hires
• Definite –  Clear, unambiguous, and feasible
• Finite – Must have an endpoint
• Effective – Similar inputs yield similar desired outputs

So, let’s look at a recruiting example. Take one of your really successful hires, and let’s reverse engineer the process to see if your recruiting algorithm is effective. This is called ‘backtesting’.

We took the example of Roy Baladi, head of the marketplace for SmartRecruiters. Say we want to test effective keyword searches — we look at the job description and start pulling keywords to search for candidates. Again and again, Roy’s name does not show up in the shortlist. What does this tell us? Maybe we need to revisit the job description (i.e. our input) and revise our wording to be more relevant towards the role.

Some people call this process ‘dogfooding’, which basically means internally testing your external processes to see if they are indeed effective. Have hiring managers test this on themselves to increase empathy and produce more accurate job descriptions!

Three recruiting lessons from teachers, that are scalable for your TA function.

Speaking on the Attract track, Brian White of the Auburn-Washburn Unified School District 437 asked everyone seated at the session Get Ahead of Seasonal Hiring Challenges to close their eyes and think of a teacher who made a positive influence in their life. For most attendees, it didn’t take long for inspirational educators to come to mind. Whether it was the math teacher who sat with you until multiplying fractions finally made sense, or the tutor who helped you master the past perfect in Spanish, the examples are practically infinite.

When we are asked to think of similar moments with recruiters, the examples are far fewer. So what can TA take from teachers’ best practices to boost candidate experience?

1. Learn what’s important to the student. The most effective teachers find out what motivates their students, what they care about, and use that knowledge to inspire learning.
2. Learn to communicate based on the individual. For teachers, this can mean catering to different learning styles. Brian’s team used this advice to create a texting line for job inquiries and implement a chatbot.
3. Understand the student is more than a number. Even with the incredible volume of students teachers interact with every year, they think of each one as an individual person. For recruiters this can be as simple as including a personal detail their outreach to show talent they really care.

The biggest myth is that anyone is normal.

In today’s hire track, during Mind Mix: Neurodiversity at Work’ Sara-Jane Harvey, an autism advocate who also is on the spectrum herself, helped our audience understand the prevalence and value of neurodiversity in our society.

The biggest mental health myth is that there is indeed a “normal”. Normal doesn’t exist. If your mind is a computer, then the way you process information is your operating system, and just because your computer doesn’t run Windows doesn’t mean it’s broken.

There’s no need to be ‘realistic’ when setting goals.

In today’s closing keynote, Colin O’Brady, four-time world record holding endurance athlete, reminds us how crazy his goals seemed when he first set them.

When Colin told his mother from a hospital bed in Thailand, where he was recovering from third-degree burns covering a quarter of his body, that he wanted to train for a triathlon, she didn’t say, ‘let’s set a more reasonable goal.’ Even with doctors saying Colin may never walk normally again, his mother took him seriously, and immediately got Colin small weights to start training.

Eighteen months later, Colin entered the Chicago marathon — and won! He continued to set outrageous goals, and continued to check them off like items on a grocery list. Climb the seven highest peaks in the world in a record-breaking 132 days – check! Be the first to cross Antarctica solo and unaided – check!

“I don’t think everyone wants to go walk across Antarctica,’ said Colin, ‘but I know that people certainly have challenges in their life. Everyone has reservoirs of untapped potential inside of themselves and can achieve really incredible things.”

We talk people analytics with the TA leader breaking down big data at Hiring Success 19, February 26-27 in San Francisco.

Chris Louie, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition for LinkedIn, didn’t start out in TA. Four years ago this recruiting leader was a product marketer rising through the ranks of Nielsen, the NY-based global performance management company. So, when Chris announced his move to the company’s people function, everyone had the same reaction.. ‘But, why!?’

Where Chris saw an opportunity for innovation and an unscripted future, the rest of the world saw a department with a reputation for being the most corporate of all the corporate functions, ie a dusty snoozefest. As one recruiter so delicately put it “The pros are that you would be part of a new generation of HR leaders; the cons are that HR is still dramatically underpaid and disrespected as a function!”

Yet, none of this well-meaning guff deterred Chris. He saw how critical talent was to business success, and he thought, “If I can effect change in TA, it will really make a huge difference to the organization as a whole.”

Chris didn’t know it at the time, but he was actually part of a larger trend of outsiders entering this once insulated field. And, as it often does, his outside experience informed his new work in positive and unexpected ways. Chris began approaching the challenges of HR with the mind of a product marketer, leveraging his penchant for analytics, and working backwards from the desired end point to find solutions.

After three years as Nielsen’s Talent Acquisition and People Analytics, Chris began a new chapter at LinkedIn, taking with him his love of experimentation. Ahead of his session ‘Impact of Analytics in Recruiting’ at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco, we catch up with this industry changemaker to hear what it’s like to be at recruiting’s premier brand, and why HR needs its own Hippocratic Oath.

What have your first couple months at LinkedIn been like?

I’m part of the talent acquisition team here at LinkedIn. I’m not going to lie, it’s a pretty awesome team…and you would hope so given the brand reputation, right?

At LinkedIn, I am leading the teams that support all of our recruiters, helping them be their best for our hiring managers and candidates. This includes inclusion recruiting, talent attraction, candidate programs, platforms and assessments, project management, and feedback to the LinkedIn product team – so they can make our solutions better both for LinkedIn TA and the broader industry.

You once wrote that TA systems need product managers, not administrators – could you explain this idea?

Software companies don’t just develop a product for clients and walk away. They market the system, support their customers, and think about user experience – honing and evolving solutions over time. However, there’s a tendency to not view internal systems as ‘real products’ and instead just roll them out to employees with no marketing or customer success. That’s why when you look at the NPS of internal systems it’s typically quite low.

My thought is, that we need to bring the same marketing, support, and tracking efforts to these internal systems as we would to the products we deliver to our customers. Internal systems are ‘real products’, and they are critical to business success.

Tell us more about your session at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, what will practitioners walk away with?

The approach I take to people analytics is basically the scientific method. What is the problem statement or challenge that we’re trying to solve? The answer to that question dictates what you should do from an analytic perspective. Start with what you’re trying to accomplish instead of ‘what analysis can I run?’

I really love marrying analytics and talent acquisition, because you can use insights to make decisions and improve processes that payoff immediately. At the end of the day we’re not running analytics to write papers or sit on panels. This is about boosting the experience for everyone – candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters.

All that said, people analytics is still fairly underdeveloped, and only recently have we attained ready access to the data we need. The catalyst has been the digitization of our workflows and the adoption of HR tech that puts capturing data and enabling analytics at their core. But there’s still a ton more we can do.

People tend to be intimidated by the idea of creating an analytics program, do you have to be a math whiz to make sense of your data?

Anybody who’s intimidated by the math of it at all should know it’s really not about the math. We can hire statisticians or programmers to do that. What’s hard is finding people who understand the way HR and TA work today and can identify the real problems and challenges, as well as the root causes.

Could you describe your personal brand in three words?

I guess I would go with connect, care, and create.

Connect: Competing initiatives often pop up in complex organizations and ideas get lost in the shuffle. I strive to be close enough to what’s happening on the ground but also understand enough of the broader narrative to help bring things together – projects, people – so we can accomplish things instead of working at cross-purposes inadvertently. I really enjoy making connections, so that everyone gets to contribute instead of feeling their time has been wasted.

Care: At a really fundamental level, I think the ultimate job of a leader is to help his or her team succeed. And so, when you spend time with anyone on your team, you should spend more time trying to be interested than interesting. I love problem-solving, and anytime I meet with someone on my team, I try to understand what challenges they’re facing and ask how I can help. I’ve been able to progress in my career because people have shown they’ve cared about me. I hope I’m able to pay that back by doing the same for others.

Create: I’m always at my best when I’m trying to create something new or take on a challenge that’s stymied others. If you have the perfect system in place and just need someone to maintain it, then I’m probably the wrong person for the job. I’m continually looking for a fundamentally better way to do things instead of just going through the motions, which is probably one reason why I’ve made relatively dramatic career moves across multiple functions, instead of just progressing linearly in one.

In the wake of the #metoo movement, you suggest HR leaders create their own Hippocratic Oath. Tell us what yours would be.

I believe HR should adopt the ‘do no harm’ credo when it comes to the employees they support. While the impression some have is that HR is naturally “the people’s function,” the reality is that practically (given relatively large ratios of employees to HR people) it’s much more aligned with leaders. I think as an industry, we should consider whether HR should have an official responsibility of employee advocacy, which could call for creating a structure where it can have some independence from the leadership – like reporting to the Board. It might be a radical idea, but I think it still merits a discussion.

On a personal level, I guess, my Hippocratic Oath be as an advocate for my team and the candidates.

It’s important to not fall into the trap, as a manager, of viewing your team member’s work in an overly transactional way. That means continually seeing how the people working for you are growing, knowing what their professional goals are, and helping set them up for a positive trajectory. That “care” thing again.

I name candidates as well because they are often the voiceless in the recruiting process. If someone is having a negative candidate experience, they can feel alone and really have no recourse. There’s the one-in-a-hundred candidate who will get an email through to the CEO or CHRO and elicit some action, but that’s pretty rare. Given the numbers, candidates can sometimes get lost in the shuffle unfortunately. You really need to pay attention to this and safeguard the candidate experience and our sense of responsibility to them. At LinkedIn, candidate engagement and experience is extremely important to us, and it’s one of the KPIs we measure to gauge our success.

This year’s contestants represent the most diverse mix of global startups to date—here’s what you need to know ahead of their pitch presentations at #HIRE19

In recent years, the TA industry has seen a proliferation of recruiting startups rising to meet the demands of hiring teams seeking top talent. Many of these startups are small rooms full of people, all working on an idea in the hopes of moving fast and breaking things. While a vast majority of these budding companies will fail, those successful few must demonstrate exceptional innovation and purpose.

As part of SmartRecruiters’ mission to help businesses achieve hiring success, we want to highlight those scrappy startups offering truly unique products and services for hiring teams worldwide. Now in its third installment, the Recruiting Startup Awards returns to Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26–27 in San Francisco.

At the outset, over 140 startups leveraged their business and social networks to earn votes. Soon, the top five with the highest number of votes will fly to San Francisco to pitch their business in front of 1,200 CHROs and recruiting leaders—which will walk away with $10,000 in sponsorship and press?

Previous RSOTY winners include Honeypot.io, an e-staffing company focused on software developers, and Enboarder, an intuitive onboarding platform that helps candidates hit the ground running. This year’s finalists run the gamut from chatbots to pipeline automation services, and hail from the UK, Canda, Australia, and the US.

Get to know the 2019 Recruiting Startup Awards finalists below, and be sure to watch them deliver their pitches on the final day of Hiring Success 19 in San Franciscos—see full agenda here!

1. Candidate.ID

Candidate.ID’s software allows organizations to create genuine talent pipelines and easily identify candidates as cold, warm, and ‘hire-ready’​ in real time, claiming to reduce time-to-shortlist by 50 percent.

An increasing number of businesses are turning to more proactive hiring strategies to remain competitive in today’s job market economy. Reactive hiring no longer yields high-quality talent, Candidate.ID addresses this problem by zeroing in on pipeline automation, offering tools and insights that enhance hiring teams’ ability to source, discover, and nurture talent ahead of business needs.

2. Jobiak

Jobiak created the industry’s first AI-based recruitment marketing platform designed for Google. In a few clicks, recruiters, TA teams, and HR professionals can quickly and directly publish job postings to Google for Jobs. Jobiak makes it easy to post jobs by eliminating any coding or complicated HTML edits from the advertising process thanks to its advanced algorithms and machine learning functionality.

With over 70 percent market share, Google is the world’s most popular search engine by far. Additionally, Google captures 80 percent of all mobile traffic. With this in mind, Jobiak puts forth the following stat: 73 percent of jobseekers begin their search on Google, but the majority of them never see your company’s job ads.

3. GoHire

GoHire leverages text messaging, Facebook Messenger, and chatbots to help organizations reach more candidates at the right time while also automating recruiting workflows. These optimizations help GoHire clients generate as high as 500 percent increases in applications, and significantly reduce the amount of time spent on pre-screening candidates.

GoHire was founded during the height of the TA industry’s focus on social media recruitment strategies, with founders Jonathan “JD” Duarte and Mike Lam seeing the opportunity to combine innovative technology with the preferred communication channels of today’s jobseekers.

4. Vervoe

Vervoe decided that candidates should be evaluated on their merit, not their background, so the company built an AI-powered skills testing platform to improve the quality of candidates in the hiring pipeline.

Companies can test applicants’ skills and attitude with customizable assessments that mimic real-world scenarios, and the Vervoe AI automatically scores, ranks, and recommends the best candidates for the position. Vervoe claims that it can help businesses identify the best talent at under $100 per hire.

5. VanHack

Globalization has allowed more companies to expand into new markets and geographies, but staffing new offices can be challenging. Enter VanHack, a growing community of over 180,000 software developers, designers, and digital marketers seeking jobs abroad. VanHack believes in building a borderless world where careers are not restricted to a particular office, city, or country.

More than simply connecting jobseekers to opportunities, VanHack also works with employers to find talent for hard-to-fill roles like senior data scientists, machine learning experts, DevOps, and more, while helping facilitate visa and relocation processes for selected candidates. According to the company’s website, 90 percent of all jobs posted on VanHack receive qualified applicants in less than 24 hours.

Food trucks, giant Jenga, LED hula hoopers, and a cupcake Ferris wheel – these are just some of the colorful delights you can expect at this year’s Smarty Party.

After Colin O’Brady’s shares with us his record-breaking journey solo and unaided across Antarctica, join us downstairs for another spectacular Smarty Party! (See full agenda here.)

Who doesn’t love a carnival? Adulting is great, but every once in a while it’s important to unwind with whimsey and just have fun. The Smarty Party is a can’t miss event at each of our conferences, and Hiring Success 19 – Americas is no exception. Network with your peers while trying not to topple a tower of giant Jenga blocks, or follow up with speakers at the pop-a-shot hoop. Indulge in some childhood nostalgia with oversized Connect Four, and make sure to grab a sweet from the cupcake Ferris wheel!

As the sun sets on our jam-packed first day, LED hula hoopers take the floor to dazzle us with a personal light show, followed by onsite food trucks with all your California style favorites, from empanadas to delicious Asian fusion.

And what carnival is complete without cotton candy or food on a stick? Don’t worry, we have that too!

At Pier 27, attendees get to enjoy a sweeping view of San Francisco’s iconic bay. While some work trips relegate you to little more than hotel lobbies or conference halls, the Hiring Success conference takes pride in imbuing every event with the spirit of the city. San Francisco has always been a place for creatives and dreamers, from the artists and activists of the 60s, to the innovative tech minds of today. We invite you to take a cue from the Golden City and reimagine what Talent Acquisition could be.

Speaking of the future, don’t forget the big debate on our second day: What can robots do that people can’t? And, how far do we go with selection by algorithm? TA industry vet and noted disruptor Bill Boorman will facilitate an interactive debate with live audience commentary. We have assembled two teams, practitioners vs data scientists, and you get to vote in real-time polls. This is a perfect time to discuss your arguments and gain insight from other practitioners.

While you’re there, seize this opportunity to make new connections, process the day’s learnings, and follow up with presenters who sparked your interest. The scenic vistas, classic games, and inspiring company (no scary clowns, we promise) will ensure you are recharged and ready for another nonstop day of demos, panels, labs, awards, and interactive sessions.

See you there!

Who’s ready for a paradigm shift? Here are the session highlights most likely to change your mind, deepen your empathy, and get you out of your chair.

It’s time to get on your feet and out of your comfort zone. In just two weeks, over one-thousand TA leaders will convene at Pier 27 in San Francisco, and not just for the amazing view. February 26-27, Hiring Success 19 – Americas – our largest conference to date – will challenge industry leaders and recruiting practitioners to define the future of Talent Acquisition (TA).

Over two days, 100 speakers and 50 sessions will bring new insight to the common pain points of TA, and introduce what’s on the horizon for tech and best practice. Sessions are divided into three tracks so participants can mix and match to meet our expert content at your point of need. See full agenda here!

• Innovation: Understand the latest recruiting tech and see how these digital tools will actually affect you and your practice.
• Inclusion: Stories of success and inspiration from hiring practitioners that will help you create the business case for a diverse workforce and inclusive work culture.
• Hiring Success: Case studies and hiring hacks from practitioners who have #BeenThere and know your pain points.

Here are just five sessions from the magnetic lineup of changemakers who will help you break down your loftiest goals into actionable steps.

1. Mind Mix: Neuro Diversity at Work

The ability to think differently brings societal changes, and can grow your business exponentially. People often say they want ‘out of the box thinkers’ but when it comes to actually including those who think differently, the execution is often lacking.

In this session, unique thinkers will share their experiences on both the candidate and recruiting side. By the end of this talk, the preconceived notions about autism, ADHD, and dyslexia will be shaken, flipped, and served a reality check.

You’ll tap into an extra 80 IQ points by adding new perspectives to your organization and deepen your empathy along the way.

2. Impossible First: Journey to Everest and Beyond

Summit the peaks of your ambitions with Colin O’Brady – the four-time world record holder who most recently became the first person to cross Antarctica solo and unaided.

Hear how Colin’s career as an adventure athlete started with a major injury in Thailand – that left him bedridden with doctors warning him he may never walk normally again – and took off when he entered and won, the Chicago triathlon just 18 months later. From there, Colin went on to climb the seven highest peaks in the world in a record-breaking 132 days.

Yet, even more humbling than these amazing feats of endurance, is how this explorer encourages all of us to erase the line in our minds between the few who can achieve and the many who cannot. Rather, he hopes his journey demonstrates that you too can draw on your “inner reservoir of strength” to pursue your loftiest ambitions.

“I don’t think everyone wants to go walk across Antarctica, but I know that people certainly have challenges in their life. Everyone has reservoirs of untapped potential inside of themselves and can achieve really incredible things.” – Colin O’Brady

3. The Great Debate: In Two Parts

Recruiting has arrived at a watershed moment, where the future of the industry will be defined by how we choose to collaborate with technology.

TA industry vet and noted disruptor, Bill Boorman will facilitate an interactive debate, with live audience commentary. We have assembled two teams, practitioners vs data scientists, and you get to vote in real-time polls. Who said discourse was dead?

Debate 1: What can robots do that people can’t?
Debate 2: How far do we go with selection by algorithm?

4. Impact of Analytics in Recruiting

Learn how to make your source-to-hire a 10-day process from the company that’s already done it, and yes we are talking about corporate reqs. Hear from Diana Ferguson, VP of Talent Acquisition – technology solutions and services at Oppenheimer Funds, how to construct a streamlined hiring process that leverages tech to increase hiring manager engagement, boost candidate experience, and discover new talent… all while decreasing time to hire.

5. Double Session: Recruiting Startup Awards  and The Future of Recruiting with Lou Adler

We close out two days of amazing learnings as we always do, looking to the future! Recruiting Startup Awards gives one fledgling company the chance to win a $10,000 sponsorship to our next conference, followed by the ‘Godfather of Candidate Recruiting,’ Lou Adler who will show you how to achieve the best performance-based interview!

Recruiting Startup Awards

Over 140 recruiting technologies vyed for a spot in the top five, and now these finalists are coming to San Franciso. This is a moment to celebrate innovation in our beloved industry, judges and the audience will vote to decide the winner!

Finalists include:

Candidate.ID: pipeline automation

Jobiak: recruitment marketing

GoHire:  chatbot

Vervoe: AI skills assessment

VanHack: tech recruiting

Performance-Based Interviewing

Strong interviewing skills is something every recruiter and hiring manager needs in their wheelhouse. Join Lou Adler, as he interviews everyone in the audience – everyone – to demonstrate his signature evaluation technique of performance-based hiring.

Sometimes a strategic view doesn’t mean high-level, it means seeing what’s happening on the ground…

Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify, joins SmartRecruiters for the fourth annual Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco where he will be leading the session “Inside the Mind of Today’s Chief People Officer”. Full agenda here!

As a tech recruiter in the late 90s, Lars had a “front row seat” to the manic growth, and painful demise, of the first internet economy. Despite this trial by fire introduction to Talent Acquisition (TA), Lars continued in the industry, taking his talents in-house.

In the proceeding decade, he went on to run global recruiting for household names like Ticketmaster and NPR. Now, as the principal of Amplify, this people strategy chameleon helps companies build progressive talent functions for 21st century HR.

After so many years in TA, Lars’ view of the industry might be described as ‘high-level’. Yet, we prefer the descriptor ‘in-touch’ as much of his success has been his special attention to the ground-level of practitioners’ day-to-day.

For Lars, a big part of staying in-touch means continuous and open communication with the people in the field. That’s where HR Open Source (HROS.co) comes in, a not-for-profit he founded in 2015 along with fellow recruiting enthusiast Ambrosia Vertesi, VP of People at Duo Security. This global community aims to democratize access to modern HR practices through connecting practitioners who collaborate and share learnings to prepare themselves, and their organizations, for the future of work.

Speaking of the future of work, HROS.co recently put out a report on the near-future of TA, surveying over 500 HR/TA practitioners to understand what is happening on their teams now, and in the next three years!

Today, we speak Lars to learn about some of the surprising results, including how people-teams are investing in tech, and why TA is still wary of automation.

Why create another future of work report?

There’s so much content about the future of work, anywhere there’s another blog/podcast/report! The thing is, most of this content is developed by analysts, consultants, and pundits – entities that are a couple of layers removed from the actual work. We wanted to create a report that captured the perspective of practitioners on the ground: How do they view the future? What things are impacting them right now?

HR Open Source Future of Work Report found HR has concerns about job automation, and believe their organizations will be impacted in the next three years, what do you make of this finding?

The automation piece was certainly interesting. Our community tends to be on the innovative side of the practitioner spectrum and closely attuned to the technology impacting their work.

I don’t think automation will replace the majority of recruiting positions, but certainly, some roles will be impacted. Sourcing for instance: with everyone having such a large digital footprint it’s easier to find people, but harder to get their attention. Going into the future, sourcing will be more and more about personalized outreach sequences and tailored messaging.

Going into the future, recruiters will have to focus more on the human side of recruiting TA. Tech tools will automate tasks that don’t require empathy and human engineering. For the foreseeable future, humans are still the best equipped to understand what motivates candidates, and how to design the message to get them on board.

CRM is the top investment for the coming year, why is candidate experience coming to the forefront?

The reality is that most TA functions use their ATS as more of a transactional engine, than a talent database. Organizations have this dormant candidate database, of thousands – maybe more – who have already raised their hand and said, ‘yes, I’m interested in your company!’ Yet, recruiters approach every job as a ‘one off’ when they don’t have the means to leverage this talent pool.

With the means of a candidate relationship management (CRM) tool, recruiters are able to mirror the marketing function and replicate some of the more sophisticated branding exercises like audience segmentation and personalized nurture sequences.

Do you think tech in diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives will impact those programs’ efficacy?

Technology alone won’t solve a lack of diversity. Organizations need to have some non-tech foundational pieces in place, before these tech tools can be used to their full power. Pieces including interview design, closing the wage gap, internal mobility, continued learning, etc. – which come together under the umbrella of a general philosophical buy-in. Technology can then help you really accelerate those efforts, whether it’s software to scan job descriptions for gender bias, or bots to anonymize candidate details to prevent unconscious discrimination.

Was there anything in the report that surprised you personally?

One point, which I had experienced anecdotally to be true, that was interesting to see born out in the numbers, is that 70 percent of respondents previously worked outside of HR and recruiting. It’s a big shift from 10 years ago when HR was a very insular field, that people would enter and move through in a strictly linear fashion. This shift is important because it means the field of HR and recruiting is being infused with new skill sets and perspectives, and I view it as  extremely healthy for the function as a whole.

D&I may not have a finish line, but that doesn’t mean we want to have the same conversation 50 years from now.

Torin Ellis, host of SiriusXM CareerMix, author of RIP the Resume, and leading diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategist joins SmartRecuiters for the fourth year in a row at Hiring Success 19 – Americas for an expert panel on the economic value of diversity.

Torin started a recruiting firm in 1998 and what he saw in the industry wasn’t always pretty. Up close with transactional Talent Acquisition, he was privy to the dearth of diversity across industries. He found himself asking “why” a lot – Why was there only one black person on the whole North American sales team?… Why were there so few in management?… Why were company leaders talking about a ‘war for talent’, yet failing to consider non-traditional candidates? The list went on. And although in his capacity as a headhunter, he did his best to boost under-represented talent, he wanted to do more.

So, in 2010 he decided it was time to face the issue head on and founded the Torin Ellis Brand, a boutique HR agency  to advise companies on D&I strategies and risk mitigation.

During this time of economic recovery in the years after the 2008 financial downturn, D&I was not on the forefront of the workplace milieu, and when it was the news was dismal – homogeneous workforce and biased hiring processes, but Torin didn’t want to focus on the bad press.

“My thought then, and I follow this principle today, is that I need to get more people involved,” says Torin. “If we keep having punitive conversations about D&I, that aren’t solutions-oriented, then I know white men are going to run in the opposite direction. I know that white women may not participate. I know that black men are going to continue to be frustrated when they get passed over for a job or a promotion. And I know black women will continue to have to work until August to make the same amount of money that their white male counterparts made in by December of the previous year.”

His main goal is to not have the same conversation 50 years from now, and what he preaches are solutions-based D&I programs, that achieve more than a press release. Learn the three tenants of successful strategies, and the next challenge work culture faces.

Give us the outline for a D&I strategy that is more than window dressing?

• Empowerment
• Strategic Exploration
• Tactical Execution

Empowerment: We need people to speak up. D&I programs fail when there is silence. So part of the strategy needs to be grassroots where people leverage their own power to tell their higher-ups ‘D&I programs are something we need’. The other part is management creating avenues for those voices to be heard and the concerns addressed.   

Strategic Exploration: Be willing to sit amongst people that are different from you and explore a variety of strategies. Know that there will be gambles and mistakes. Be genuine with apologies, and don’t be afraid to recalibrate. Most of all, trust that the community will be receptive to genuine efforts.

Tactical Execution: Not everyone can be in the meeting making the decision, so include people at different levels. Talk to the people on the ground, understand their needs, and empower them in the execution of  the program goals. These people can be the evangelists, amplifiers, and action-takers that translate your D&I efforts from paper to practice.

Last year you started your session ‘The Power of Diversity’ by quoting Bernard Coleman the III, global head for D&I at uber saying: “The house burned in front of them but they wanted the data to prove it. That is the audacity and ridiculousness of making the business case: convincing one of the obvious. If the smoke doesn’t alarm you, the fire certainly should.”

Why did you share this and what does it mean?.

That quote arrested my spirit. It made me think, there is absolutely no reason, people like myself, should have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to create a business case for diversity.

For the last 20 years, people have been saying there’s a war for talent. Well, if there’s a war for talent, then why are organizations not embracing – or even seeing – different talent pools? Why are organizations not looking for ambitious and creative ways to nurture non-traditional candidates?

Too many companies are paralyzed in their comfort zone of ‘we are preparing a white paper on why diversity is important’… It’s a thin veil covering a lack of progress.

Watch last year’s session below!

Looking to the future, it’s hard enough to implement D&I programs in a traditional workspace, how will organizations find success in the gig economy?

We have a more disparate workforce than we’ve ever had before. Companies struggled with D&I programs when everyone came to the same place to work. So, how are we going to do it when people are all over the place?… How are we going to make sure that remote workers still feel a sense of culture and inclusion?

The truth is we don’t have definitive answers to ‘what’ will be successful in this, the fourth industrial age. We are beginning to employ the tools from like big data, analytics, AI, and nanotechnology, which is a great start.

What people need to understand is that D&I doesn’t have a finish line, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get somewhere.

Four-time world record holder, and first to cross Antarctica solo, joins SmartRecruiters at Hiring Success 19 – Americas. This is his story.

We are excited to welcome Colin O’Brady to Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco (register now to hear Colin live), where he will share the details of his record-breaking trip across the 932-mile continent in just 54 days – solo and unaided.

Even more humbling than this amazing feat of endurance is how this explorer encourages all of us to erase the line in our minds between the few who can achieve and the many who cannot. Rather, he hopes his journey demonstrates that we can all draw on our “inner reservoir of strength” to summit the peaks of our own ambitions.

“I don’t think everyone wants to go walk across Antarctica, but I know that people certainly have challenges in their life,” O’Brady told Business Insider. “Everyone has reservoirs of untapped potential inside of themselves and can achieve really incredible things.”

But how to start? For Colin, it started in a small hospital in Thailand. He lay heavely bandaged from head to toe. Twenty-five percent of his body covered in severe burns.  Alone and fearful, he pondered the news his doctors had given him: he may never again walk normally.

Just a few months prior, Colin was a recent Yale grad with his whole life ahead of him. The 22-year-old felt invincible, and—after withdrawing his savings—set out to find adventure with nothing more than a backpack and a surfboard. He found himself on a remote Thai beach one night, watching fire dancers jump with flaming ropes, he decided to join in.

A moment later his leg caught in the flaming cord and ignited his whole body. Colin’s instincts kicked in long enough for him to dive into the nearby ocean… then darkness, then silence.

Colin awoke in a rural hospital, alone save for a cat who would run through the clinic and jump on his bed. He realized the situation was dire. Recovery would be a miracle in the best case scenario but, in these unsanitary conditions, it seemed impossible.

“The searing pain was unimaginable, and the morphine made it feel like there were insects crawling all over my skin, I don’t know which was worse. I was downward spiraling, ready to give up.”

Colin’s mother arrived 5 days later and began encouraging him to make goals. “Ok Colin, what do you want to do after this?” she would ask. At first, Colin couldn’t give an answer, he was too depressed to consider a future. But his mother’s relentless positivity inspired him, and a dream took shape. “Mom, I’m going to compete in a triathlon.”

Colin’s mother didn’t let him forget those words. The first day home, she put a chair infront of him saying, “Today you have to figure out how you are going to get out of your wheelchair and into this chair.” It took three hours, but he finally did it. The next day, the chair was five steps away; the day after that 10.

Eighteen months later, Colin was at the starting line of the Chicago Triathlon, where he swam, biked, and ran a combined 31.93 miles, beating out 4,000 contestants to take first place.

Colin set more goals for himself in a steady progression until he found himself tackling one of the most brutal ventures of strength and endurance, summiting the highest peak in the world: Mt Everest.

Under normal circumstances, this feat would be hard enough, but Colin planned to climb this daunting peak as part of the Explorers Grand Slam, where adventurers summit the highest peak of all seven continents and travel to the North and South poles. Colin had already climbed five of those peaks and reached both poles in the last 100 days. Now, only Mt. Everest and Mt. Denali lay before him.

His eyes bulged, his face was swollen – Colin had reached what is known as the ‘death zone’, 26,000 feet above sea level – the same altitude that a commercial airline flies. At this altitude, the human body begins dying—every breath is a struggle and every step feels like a mile.

The trek was hard. He left his tent at midnight with encouraging words from his wife (and expedition coordinator) via satellite phone. The rising sun illuminated the two-mile drop on either side of his path. Colin began to question whether or not he would reach the summit—that’s when he saw the chair.

He knew if he could take those first steps after his accident, he could finish now.

Exhausted after reaching the top of the world Colin dropped into his tent and phoned his wife to let her know he made it.

“Honey, put on your boots,” she said.

“What!?” he asked, assuming she was joking.

“If you climb Denali within the next week you will set two world records. We have a chopper waiting for you at base camp.”

So, he laced up his boots and set out for the next challenge, taking with him a rock from Everest to remind him even this mighty mountain can be broken down to its smallest part, and any journey is possible one step at a time.

Colin went on to summit Denali that same week. Completing the Explorer’s Grand Slam in 139 days. The previous record was 192 days. Now speaking about his accomplishments, Colin travels around the country to inspire athletes, students, and businesses to achieve their goals, both big and small.

SmartRecruiters is now excited to welcome Colin to our fourth annual Hiring Success Conference where he will ask recruiters and TA leaders his biggest question: “What’s your Everest?”

The Winner of Hiring Success 18 – Berlin Edition’s Recruiting Startup Awards drives engagement from hiring managers and new employees by meeting both at their individual points of need.

As Recruiting Startup Awards heat up for Hiring Success 19 – Americas with over 100 startups vying to be one of the top five who will be joining us in San Francisco February 26-27 to pitch it our in front of an expert panel of judges and one-thousand plus TA leaders (voting ends February 4, click here to pick your fav!), we talk to the latest winner about their product and vision.

Enboarder wowed judges last September with an intuitive onboarding platform that helps candidates hit the ground running, boosting retention rates for employers.

Onboarding is a major struggle for most organizations. In fact, according to a recent a recent SHRM study “half of all senior outside hires fail within 18 months in a new position and half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days.”

The reality is Hiring Managers are busy and most lack the HR training to orchestrate new hire engagement in a meaningful way. That’s where Enboarder comes in. The name itself is a portmanteau of “engaging” and “onboarding”, and the mission is pretty much as simple as that – make onboarding engaging for everyone, including hiring managers.

We turn to partner strategist for Enboarder, Chris Cherry to learn more about how it all works, and the Enboarder’s vision for the future of talent acquisition (TA).

Briefly, on the back of a cocktail napkin, how does your product work?

Enboarder is an experience-driven onboarding platform that guides new hires and their managers through the onboarding process. We enable HR to design beautiful, engaging digital content that delivers automatically along bespoke timelines, straight to mobile. New hire/managers choose their communication preference (text message, Email, Facebook, Slack or WhatsApp). Each message is sent with an embedded link, which opens in the device browser when clicked. No apps to download, no usernames or logins, and no training required

What does your product do that can’t be replicated?

Enboarder is built from the ground up to solve the onboarding challenge from an engagement and experience perspective. From our choice of communications channels, the way content is structured and delivered, to the interface of the platform, no other product so holistically delivers on employee engagement.

Enboarder is also the only onboarding solution that solves the engagement issue from the hiring manager’s perspective. Managers have a major influence on a hire’s experience at their new job, but they’re busy, and don’t usually have in-depth HR training. Enboarder provides manager coaching, nudges and reminders to help even the busiest of managers deliver engaging onboarding experiences for their new hires.

Why is your product a necessary tool for Recruiters?

The TA challenge does not end with the offer letter. Given the cost and effort associated with getting the right person through the door, it makes sense to take steps to ensure you then retain that talent. Enboarder is the bridge that ensures a successful recruitment process is followed up by an engaging onboarding experience, guiding both new hires and their managers through the process from offer acceptance to day one, probation, and beyond.

How does your product help make the hiring process as easy as possible?

There’s a few things, Enboarder…

• Enables recruiters to deliver an engaging new hire experience.
• Makes new hires feel valued, accepted for their individuality and welcomed to their new organization.
• Helps prevent issues such as no-shows, and reduce early stage attrition.
• Gathers feedback and prompts stakeholders to immediately address problem areas.
• Provides a consistent experience for all new hires and promotes positive engagement with their manager.
• Leverages advocacy from new hires to generate referrals and promote workplace reviews (e.g. via Glassdoor).

At what stage of growth are you, and where is that relative to how big you want to be?

Founded in 2015, we have powered more than 100 thousand onboarding experiences via our platform. Our team is growing, with offices in Sydney, London and Austin TX. We are focused on major growth over the coming year, including expanding our international presence.

What do you see as the future of TA and how do you fit into it?

The human factor will continue to be the key to success in TA. Strong employer branding will need to be backed by real relationships, connections, and employee engagement.
At the same time, smarter technology will play a key part in helping busy employees and employers build these meaningful connections while balancing the other tasks that need to be done.

Enboarder will continue to evolve and innovate this intersection of technology and human experience.