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.

Virtual reality, instrumental jam sessions, live chat-bot battles, and everything else you would – and wouldn’t – expect from an HR conference.

Hiring Success 18 EU is here! 250 Talent Acquisition leaders from around the globe – including yourself, perhaps – have landed in Berlin for 48-hours of thought-provoking interactive sessions and live demos on three main tracks, #Innovation, #Inclusion, and #HiringSuccess, that will delve into the most important topical issues in recruiting today.

With over 30 sessions to choose from in only two days, we thought it wouldn’t hurt to recommend a few!

Have you hired a refugee?

#Inclusion

Is your company interested in starting a program to hire refugees? The first step is empathy and understanding. Hear from actual displaced persons about what it means to leave behind the life you know and rebuild everything from the ground up. The second half of the session invites informational Scientists from Humboldt University to participate in a panel discussion to deep dive into the programs available to refugees now, and how your company could start building its own.

Unlock potential with augmented and virtual reality

#Innovation

Explore the burgeoning fields of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, first through art, then though recruiting. Josephine Ackerman COO & Deputy Global Head Art, Culture & Sports at Deutsche Bank gives a live demonstration of how her company uses AR and VR to bring artworks to life in contemporary art exhibitions they support. These new technologies allow an artist’s intention and historical context to come to the forefront of the museum experience without dense wall text. Using only a smartphone, a static image or text can turn into a rotating font of information. Learn how Deutsche Bank and others have begun to apply the same principles to job advertising, onboarding, and training.

Battle of the Bots

#Innovation

Watch the leading chat bots battle it out in a live face-off. Leading recruiting chatbots will have a face-off in a live battle. Ask these virtual helpers questions to test the limits of their natural-language processing, get to know their unique personalities, and see how gracefully they fail. Your vote determines the winner at the end!

Accelerate revenue with TA

#HiringSuccess

Stop looking at TA as a cost center. Learn how the recruiting team at Microsoft were able to accelerate revenue for Azure Cloud during their digital transformation with heir Director of TA for EMEA, Elke Jorens. This workshop shows how infusing data from market and funnel-analysis contributes to the bottom line, so you can apply that same expert methodology to a project of your choice.

Synchronicity

#Inclusion

Whether you are a practicing musician or haven’t picked up an instrument since the recorder, this session is for you. Join the MIT grad and leadership expert, M Baha in an interactive jam session that uses the principles of music to promote the tenets of diversity and inclusion in a business setting.

Inspire your Remote Workforce

#Inclusion

While the draw of global talent is great, managing remote teams is still largely unexplored territory. Which is why we brought in Beat Buhlmann, one of the few people in the world who have a doctorate related to managing virtual teams, and the current GM for Evernote.  

Buhlmann lays out the benefits of employing a remote workforce and then shows how to address the challenges these offsite teams pose,  from both a culture and a tech standpoint. Walk away with the tools to sell your board on remotes hires, and the know-how of how to engage them throughout their tenure.

Internal Career Pathing

#HiringSuccess

Companies unanimously recognize the value of employees who have experience in more than one department, yet these high performers remain an anomaly rather than a matter of course. The abstract promise of great return on investment (ROI) in hiring, never seems to be enough to push internal mobility initiatives to the top of the to-do list. So we bring you the director of people for Native Instruments, Laura Moreno Salinas, and the Director and Program Lead Accelerate One HR at Coca-Cola European Partners, Sanam Moayedi-Stummer to demonstrate the success of their internal career pathing programs and help you get started on your own.

Recruiting Startup Awards

#Innovation

Step into the future of TA technology with our Recruiting Startup of the Year Competition, where the newest and most daring startups in HR pitch it out on our main stage. The winner will receive €9,000 in sponsorship and an article about them written by a leading TA influencer. The contest began July 1st, when these fledgling startups leveraged the strength of their social network to be voted into the top five, who will now convince the expert panel at Hiring Success 18 they have what it takes.

New ideas, new tech, and a whole new batch of bright-eyed startups ready to make their mark on the recruiting world.

Help decide the future of Talent Acquisition (TA) by nominating and voting for your favorite recruiting startup. From today until August 15th, help us nominate the best new hiring tech to compete for the opportunity to pitch 300 CHROs and recruiting leaders at Hiring Success 18, September 19-20 in Berlin, Germany.

Once confirmed, these fledgling companies will use the power of their social networks to win votes and make it to the top six invited to #HIRE18 EU to pitch it out for the grand prize of $10,000 in sponsorship and media spend.

Vote now!

With over 50 companies already in the running, we see solutions addressing a wide array recruiting challenges, from diversity and inclusion to recruiter marketing and employee referrals. Which ideas are novelty band-aids, and which will stand the test of time? Hear from our expert panel of judges including head of the startup ecosystem for UNLEASH, Anna Ott, and Victoria Sehgal, VP of TA for Rocket Internet.

Watch the pitches from Hiring Success 18 San Francisco now, and check out the latest contestants here!

Don’t be fooled by their cutesy graphic design. This job platform means business, and in just a few years, has flipped the script on traditional steps of recruiting.

When a Colombian software developer decided he wanted to live abroad, he turned to a newfangled job platform called Honeypot, a Berlin startup that’s turning tech-recruiting on its head by asking companies to apply to candidates. We take a look into the process with the company’s co-founder, to find out what it’s all about.

“Living abroad, learning new languages, getting to know new cultures – these are all things I had imagined for my life,” says Andres Visbal, recalling what first led him to Honeypot. “So I started looking for a job abroad, but it was surprisingly frustrating.”

Andres is a backend software developer with eight years’ experience in an industry projected to grow by 24 percent by 2026. His skills are in high demand, so it wasn’t so much a lack of offers, it just seemed like the companies were clueless.

“Most ads I saw seemed like amalgams of Google searches for the term ‘software developer skills’,” he says. “I would see lists of requirements impossible for anyone to live up to, and sometimes I would even start the interview process only to realize the company had completely different needs from the description. Finally, a recruiter recommended Honeypot.”

Andres liked the “companies apply to candidates” model of matching developers with work they love across the EU, and so he thought, “Why not?”

“A few clicks later I had a profile,” he says. “I just imported my LinkedIn info and tweaked a few minor things. Once I was finished, the platform surfaced me to the first batch of a dozen or so companies, so I could begin interviewing with the ones I liked. The process was staggered, so I was never inundated with emails, but I still had consistent interest, and I had a talent representative from Honeypot assigned to my case, to advocate for me through the process, like if a company didn’t respond. Later, they even helped me and my partner obtain the right visas. And all the inquiries I received were actually relevant to my skills.”

Andreas moved to Hamburg at the end of June of this year to start his dream job with Xing, a German language competitor of LinkedIn, and he’s just one of 36,000 success stories. So how does this whole thing really work, and why do so many companies already have their paws in the Honeypot?

For this, we spoke to Honeypot co-founder Emma Tracey, who took home the title of Recruiting Startup of the Year at the Hiring Success Conference in San Francisco last March, and who’ll return as a judge in the RSOTY competition at Hiring Success Europe, September 19-20th, in Berlin.

What was the hardest moment for Honeypot in the midst of this rapid growth?

There are hard moments for every founding team, anyone who is taking on a startup should be prepared for that. For us, we thought our platform would be much, much more automated than it turned out to be. Our algorithm does all the matching, don’t get me wrong, but we still needed a human element. Honeypot experienced rapid growth once we doubled down on support for the candidates. You can’t deny that people need help with big decisions, and we can provide that expertise and guidance via our talent reps.

What was the most transformational moment for Honeypot?

It may sound basic, but for me, it was when we started to do in-depth user-interviews, and take them seriously when considering product development. It’s something so obvious, right? Of course you should talk to the people navigating your solution, yet it’s so easily overlooked. It hit me when I was having a casual conversation with one of our users at an event, I was like “Wow, why aren’t we doing this all the time? Let’s institutionalize this kind of feedback.”

What stands out about your company culture?

When I think of our team, three words come to mind: curious, caring, and smart. Everyone on our team wants to experiment and learn, we care about the people who use our product and we want to make it great for them. We’re constantly learning and evolving.

In honing our work culture, “Sprints” is a Google Ventures concept that has worked really well for us. We decide on a new feature we want to roll out, and work together to design a prototype in under a week. The results have been great. We’ve experienced a huge amount of buy-in from all departments, so we are now implementing this methodology into our operations and strategy.

Of course, there’s fun stuff that’s just kind of sprung up as we go, like our conference table is actually a ping-pong table, there’s a book exchange in the break room, and – my personal favorite – the office dogs!

You are on the front lines of tech recruitment, seeing demand grow. What’s the answer to the talent shortage in the tech sector?

I definitely don’t think that you need to go to university to be a developer. These degrees are great for learning the foundations of software, which is important for a certain type of developer, but there are many, many types of developers. I think that’s what people forget when they are building a modern technology company. A broad range of skills is extremely important to have within your software development team, so I see the rise of coding boot camps and other shorter programs as a big positive.

To me, the future of training tech talent is a combination of modernizing computer science degrees, and probably opening up more vocational training, like one- to two-year courses that focus more on practical software development than the tenants of computer science. We offer coding classes for all employees, as well as tuition benefits to encourage anyone who’s interested to learn more about programming. After all, it’s our business and we want our team to be literate.

Why is your platform good for companies?

We help businesses to understand better what they need. Not everyone is a tech person, but most companies need tech people, so we give recruiters extensive training on programming languages. That way there’s a basis of understanding of how all this technology works together, and what exactly their needs are. We empower both sides of hiring to find what they need. Companies get vetted candidates that are actively looking for a job, and developers only receive offers that are relevant to their skills and interest.