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.

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!

Seeking to answer the question “What’s next?” Talent Tech Labs assembles more than a dozen industry innovators to solve today’s challenges using tomorrow’s technology.

Most early-stage tech companies lack enough gravitas to effectively promote through industry channels, often relegating themselves to intermittent tweets and blog posts. Where social media fails to gain traction, Talent Tech Labs (TTL) steps in with support, mentorship, and most importantly, market intelligence for new organizations. TTL builds communities of startup and mid-level tech companies to investigate, promote, and accelerate new technologies that improve recruitment processes, from sourcing to interviewing and hiring.

Talent Tech Labs continually asks: What’s next in Talent Acquisition? They know the answer, but want industry professionals to see and, more importantly, decide for themselves. Which is why TTL is showcasing 13 innovative technologies from promising TA companies at the Talent Tech NEXT event in New York City this spring.

With the Manhattan skyline in full view from the stylish rooftop terrace of NYC’s 230 Fifth, companies will take the stage to demo their cutting edge, fully-vetted technologies ready to implement directly into modern recruiting stacks. The 13 competitors of the NEXT startup expo will present to an expert panel of executives as well as audience attendees. Previous NEXT guests included execs from Amazon, Fidelity, Microsoft, E*Trade, Samsung, Nike, PwC, KPMG, Intuit, and many more.

This isn’t a cleverly disguised sales pitch, but a unique opportunity to engage with future recruitment technologies and the brilliant teams who create them. The competitors represent several different market sectors, from accounting and finance to chatbot platforms and hourly hiring, but are unified in their mission to produce innovative products that make recruitment a futures industry.

TTL began as an R&D lab located in bustling Manhattan before it evolved into a startup incubator, technology scout, and sector leader in the TA tech space. Backed by Mercer, Allegis Group, and Mitchell Martin, TTL leverages its substantial knowledge of product marketing to foster relationships between companies and industry leaders. But its true recognition stems from its ability to make these connections at scale. They have evaluated, demoed, and cataloged information on over 1,500 TA tech startups since 2012, and will soon add more company names to their roster of successful partners, to be decided by event attendees.

In the preliminary round of interactive presentations, demo spectators will act as pseudo-investors, using TTL’s own faux cryptocurrency NEXTbucks, to “fund” competitor products. Of the 13 original competitors, the two who collect the most funds and impress the expert panel will return for a second round of deep-dive presentations at the end of the day’s program.

In addition to the NEXT startup expo, keynote speaker Matt Hoffman, VP of People at DigitalOcean, will share insights on how he implemented a high-velocity TA strategy to scale up from 70 employees to 410 during his three-year tenure. His talk also promises to enlighten attendees on how to build a unique and compelling employer brand that prioritizes candidate experience. Even with a plethora of cutting-edge technology at recruiters’ fingertips, HR remains a people business.

Register for Talent Tech NEXT online and mark your calendars for May 3, 2018.

From 50 initial competitors, five of the most innovative recruiting startups in the world were chosen to pitch it out on the main stage of Hiring Success. Watch now!

The first annual Recruiting Startup of the Year competition from Smartrecruiters saw fledgling recruiting companies from Germany to Washington State battle it out on social media to see who could leverage their networks for the most votes, to be one of five finalists to make their pitch to the 1,000+ TA leaders and executives at Hiring Success 18.

The campaigning was fierce, but from 50 initial contestants, JobPal, Recruitsy, Talent Savant, and Recruiterly distinguished themselves as especially promising in their field and flew to San Francisco to make their case for first place at the third annual #hire18.

Before they took the stage, the startups had to meet their “Shark Tank”, aka the six judges who would determine the winner: Matt Gallo, partner at Insight Ventures; Ted Wilson, partner at Silicon Valley Bank; Tejas Maniar, Partner at Mayfield; Jeff Diana, Investor and high-growth consultant; and Rebecca Carr, Smartrecruiters’ VP of product .

The Prize was $10,000 in media spend from HR.com, an article by Talent Tech Labs’ executive Director Jonathan Kestenbaum, and a gold level sponsorship to next year’s Hiring Success Conference.

First up, JobPal. A builder of recruiting chatbots with a custom language processor built especially for recruiting. They leverage messaging applications like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger to make the candidate experience smoother and save recruiters time.

Judge Jeff Diana said he was impressed by the 15 percent conversion rate these bots get on average, but cautioned against losing focus. “They scared me a little when they talked about moving into the broader employee experience. My advice is to go crush the recruiting market first.”

Up next we had Recruitsy. It’s Yelp meets recruiting: a public rating system of recruiters and recruitment agencies. Candidates can see reviews for individual recruiters as well as agencies, and agencies can use the platform to build their brand, target problem areas, and reach out to candidates.

Of Recruitsy, Judge Matt Gallo was convinced of the need, his only question was how they would gain critical mass?  “In these reviewer marketplaces, it tends to be a winner take all or winner take most. How will you grow quickly enough to put out competitors?”

Following these recruiter focused tools we take a look at Honeypot.io, the job board for developers and other computer engineers that turns the application process upside down by making the employers apply to candidates who are vetted by the site. Established in October 2016, this platform already has over 50,000 candidates (all of which are only on the site if they are actively seeking work) with 1,000 more signup weekly.

Honeypot.io presented an interesting conundrum to Judge Ted Wilson. “I think the approach of candidate first is unique and clearly developers are willing to sign up,” said Wilson, “but usually we talk about passive candidates as the best candidates. How do we change the narrative and convince employers that the candidates who are raising their hands for jobs are really the ones to look at?”

Recruiterly is a brand-building and social network tool for recruiters and recruiting agencies, so employers come to them. The goal is to change the perception of the recruiting industry and allow recruiters to showcase their skills.

Judge Tejas Maniar was on board for the product but he wanted to see more passion. “Recruiterly established the need superbly but I want to see a double-click on the enthusiasm and excitement.”

To wrap up we had a presentation from Talent Savant, a mission-based recruiting agency that answers staffing needs without the hard sell, outrageous prices, or irrelevant resumes. The goal is simple, get people jobs and get employers the workers they need – it’s called ‘pro-human hiring!’

Talent Savant was the only no-tech startup pitching for Recruiting Startup of the Year, but judge Rebecca Carr felt they held their own. “I think it’s great how this startup puts forth its personality,” she said. “Their brand of mission-driven recruiting gives them a unique flair and cuts through the noise.”

(Talent Savant presenting with the Recruiting Fairy)

After the presentations, the judges deliberated live on stage. The startups were appraised on the criterion of vision, do they have a mission that people can get behind? –  influence, is their idea innovative enough to break through? – and presentation, can they make people believe in their company in just five minutes?

In the end, Honeypot was awarded first place! The judges were impressed by how this job board has been able to turn candidates into active players in the employment search and want to see how the platform grows.

“In the world of startups,” says CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, Jerome Ternynck in his closing remarks “there are no winners or losers, only hustlers working to change their world, creating and grabbing opportunities, embracing effort, and learning from every failure as well as every success – that’s really what it’s all about.

Keen to rejig the status quo, SmartRecruiters pulled out all the stops for this year’s Hiring Success conference. Need proof? Check out the Hire18 sizzle reel and see for yourself.

In typical San Francisco fashion, March was cold, wet, and foggy. Meanwhile, the atmosphere at the Hyatt Regency in the city’s historic Embarcadero crackled, as SmartRecruiters welcomed nearly 1000 recruiting and TA professionals from across the globe to share insights, network, and discuss the future of the recruiting industry at our annual Hiring Success conference.

For 48 hours, the Hyatt glowed bright green as top industry analysts, thought-leaders, and speakers took to four stages with topics running the gamut from technological innovation to workplace empathy.

In addition to a seam-bursting schedule, Hiring Success 18 ushered in exciting company announcements including an AI recruiting assistant, on-demand analytics, and all that was just in SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck’s opening keynote.

Between sessions, attendees perused vendor and sponsor booths, observed the first ever recruiting Hackathon, which saw the talented team at Visa create an internal mobility add-on for the SmartRecruiters platform in just 24 caffeinated hours. Attendees also found out why Honeypot.io bested the competition to become the Recruiting Startup of the Year.

Finally, no Hiring Success conference is complete without a rousing SmartParty. This year we served up unparalleled views of the San Francisco skyline — along with a taste of the VIP lifestyle — from the decks of the mighty California Hornblower yacht.

Check out the post-wrap sizzle reel below as you try and try to stifle your FOMO. We are already planning for next year’s event, so be sure to mark your calendars and we’ll see you at Hiring Success 19!

If you’ve been feeling like a bit of an underachiever lately, probably better you don’t read much about Lisa Wang. Because if, like many humans, you’re susceptible to envy which quickly gives way to self-loathing, you’re at risk of taking Lisa as an enabler for your own depression.

At age 29, she’s been inducted into the US Gymnastics Hall of Fame for her four National-level gold medals, graduated from Yale, and cast off the yoke of Wall Street hedge-fund management to co-found Sheworx, a startup to foster female entrepreneurs into tangible funding forums — connecting over 20,000 people so far. As a 30-Under-30 listee, you can now read her column in Forbes, and AND she’s been dubbed by CIO.com as one of the top 20 female entrepreneurs to watch in 2018.

 SmartRecruiters recently welcomed Lisa to our Hiring Success 2018 conference in San Francisco, where she spoke of gender parity in a post-Weinstein world, among other relevant topics for companies eager to be part of the shift towards gender equality. If you missed Lisa’s session, read through our pre-conference interview with Lisa below.

In your capacity as founder of SheWorx, what does the concept of Hiring Success mean to you?

Hiring Success, to me, means putting together a team where people feel valued, included, challenged, and respected for the unique strengths and perspectives they bring to the table. The hiring process is a multi-layered challenge and it’s so easy for things to get distorted along the way by your own biases and judgments. Having a clear idea of your values as a company, being cognizant of the need for diverse perspectives, is essential to hiring success.

Where on your list of priorities is “recruitment”?

Recruiting a team of A-Players is always a priority. Currently, it is primary for me, insofar as the work I am doing in helping other companies attract, cultivate, and retain top female talent. Through intensive experiential workshops and thorough assessments, we are helping companies create diverse and inclusive environments that allow women to feel heard, supported, mentored. As a result, they perform at a more effective and efficient level. Leadership is changing, team environments are changing, employees’ needs are changing, and we can no longer passively sit back and expect the best talent to come to us, unless we proactively prioritize diversity and inclusion in the recruitment process. If your company is looking to build these sorts of environments to attract and retain top female talent, you can contact me here.

Who was/is your biggest professional influence and why?

Oprah. For her drive, her tenacity, her ability to turn every challenge into an opportunity and then capitalize on it. She created a media empire through asking tough questions, being vulnerable, and creating abundance everywhere she goes. I am doing the same and am so grateful to be able to follow in the footsteps of such strong women.

How much of your confidence and work ethic and discipline comes from your success as a gymnast, and what are some of the most and least transferable skills from high-level gymnastics to being an entrepreneur?

As a gymnast, I sacrificed everything for the pursuit of a dream. Gymnastics taught me the importance of having a clear, singular focus. At my peak, I was training 8–9 hours per day at the Olympic Training Center, and no matter what distractions came around, I was able to brush them aside because nothing else mattered except for my dream. As the leader of SheWorx, everything I do is focused on helping more women succeed in their entrepreneurial journeys. That means speaking up when no one else is willing to, standing up when it’s uncomfortable, and sometimes setting aside my own interests for the good of the greater community. I know that anything worth pursuing requires perseverance and pain. I believe that in my lifetime, we will change the status quo and achieve gender parity. I will continue to play my part as a leader of this movement, because if there’s anyone who knows how to push the limits to manifest change, it’s me.

Tell us a bit about the Eureka moment where Sheworx first started to crystallize.

When I was fundraising for my first startup – a food tech company that had been incubated at a top food innovation accelerator – I realized for the first time just how difficult it would be to raise money. The investor landscape is 94% male, making it objectively harder for women and minorities. I didn’t have any expectations going into the fundraising process, but the obstacles were immediately apparent. In one of my first meetings, I remember walking into the room and the investor went straight over to my 35-year-old white, male COO, and brushed me, the CEO, off as the assistant. You just can’t prepare for those moments — when your value is completely diminished without even saying a single word.

After going to numerous women’s networking events to try and connect with other female entrepreneurs facing similar challenges, I found a lot of events geared towards inspiration, but nothing that served my needs. As a female founder, I needed access to the right investors and mentors, to learn actionable skills, and to connect with a community of other ambitious women on the same trajectory. This is when I decided SheWorx needed to exist, a space for the women who wanted to build and scale successful companies, who wanted to do whatever it takes to get there. We believe that behind every successful woman is a group of other successful women who have her back.

What was your initial outline of what you wanted to accomplish, and how far along are you?

Initially, I had no intention for SheWorx to become an organization. I was merely trying to create a space for active learning and connection for women like me. The idea was to democratize access to top investors and mentors, and give women a priority seat at a table they’ve normally been denied. After a few months, it became clear that this wasn’t just a community, it was a much larger social movement to which I needed to dedicate myself full-time. In the first six months, the SheWorx community grew 90 percent month-on-month, simply through word of mouth, because it was such a unique, action-oriented community. Today, we’re 20,000 female entrepreneurs, committed not only to building our respective companies, but closing the global funding gap as well.

What’s been the most predictable and unpredictable moments/factors as you’ve grown?

There’s nothing about the entrepreneurship journey that is predictable! I love that about it, but sometimes it does get extremely stressful. I suppose the only thing predictable is my faith that at the end of the day, everything happens for a reason, and I will be able to turn any challenge, failure, rejection into an opportunity for growth.

The fact that Sheworx exists is great, but in quieter moments, do you see it as a big step forward, or are you annoyed that we still live in a world where it’s necessary?

I absolutely see it is a big step forward. Anything worth having is worth fighting for, and while gender equality, unfortunately, is not a given, I am hopeful when I look back at how many big strides have been taken even this past year. For the first time in history, women’s voices are being truly heard, and it is up to both men and women to translate that awareness into action. I don’t think there is a point to being angry or annoyed, that just detracts energy from me and I try to keep those negative emotions to a minimum. There is so much left to be done to reach gender parity (The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report indicates that at the rate we’re going, economic gender equality will not be achieved for another 170 years), but I’m confident that with the work I’m doing and with the help of this rising generation of leaders, we’ll be able to speed that up significantly.

Have you been able to find and put to use a silver lining in the post-Weinstein workplace?

Yes, there is always a silver lining. The silver lining is that we are being heard, and not only are we being heard, there are material consequences for people who have abused the system for so long. Women are coming together in collaboration, in support, in solidarity. (Some) men are standing up and speaking out and it has been so refreshing to have honest conversations with them. Simultaneously, it has made the silence of others that much more deafening. Silence speaks volumes.

What would be your first piece of advice to companies eager to get aligned with a workplace that adheres to gender parity?

Managers and leaders need to ask themselves this simple question: “What do I not know?” Creating environments that prioritize empathy starts with being aware of the experience you are personally blind to, especially if you come from a background of privilege. Any toxic workplace begins with the leaders and the types of actions (or lack of action) that are excused. Asking yourself “What do I not know?” turns the conversation inward as you consider how simple experiences like attending a team meeting, speaking up, asking for a promotion, can be drastically different for someone else based on gender, race, religion and so on. Through the work I’ve done for the female entrepreneurial community, connecting women to top investors and mentors, I have created unique programs that help companies directly create work environments that build the gender diverse teams they need.

As we barrel on towards Hiring Success 18’s Recruiting Startup of the Year, we’ve been tracking down the most promising contestants, and today we managed to pin down Pedro Oliveira, co-founder of Landing.jobs, a candidate-driven platform to help tech professionals advance their careers.

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. Register here!  Your vote determines which six are flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders and puts them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

Since he and his team got it off the ground in late 2013, Pedro’s moved from jack-of-all-trades to Chief Operations Officer. His background is Computer Science, but he knows a thing or two about business, processes, and people, and he had this to say about the offering he’ll be bringing to San Francisco, March 12-14.

Great to Meet you, Pedro. Quickly, what’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Landing.jobs is a European recruitment marketplace that matches tech professionals with the right jobs, using human evaluation powered by AI.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

I helped build a microscopic version of Landing.jobs when I was studying at university, where we matched our colleagues with interesting companies looking to hire them, for internships or recent-grad positions. So for my co-founder Jose Pavia and I, we were both bound to tackle this industry’s problems, we just didn’t know how or when.

How do you envision your idea changing the talent acquisition landscape?

I think Landing.jobs will change not only talent acquisition, but also the talent evaluation and engagement landscape. I mention “engagement” because we’re taking a broader strike at careers development and coaching areas. Our vision is to become the ultimate tool provider for tech professionals wanting to improve their careers, and our team works hard and smart on using AI.

Aside from the snappy name of our conference, what does Hiring Success mean to you?

Hiring success means retention on both sides of the marketplace. Candidates keep coming back when they need to shift into new roles, and companies keep renewing their partnerships with us.

What would say the role of technology is when it comes to hiring?

In one word, essential. Hiring talent can’t be done without technology anymore, the major question is how to best use technology to make recruitment a rewarding experience for everyone.

Retire ‘what’s your greatest weakness?’ from your interview repertoire, and try one of these,  fresh from the mouths of the brightest new recruiting startups.

Candidates are sick of stock questions and hiring managers are equally unenthused about cookie-cutter answers.  We turned to some of our Recruiting Startups of the Year nominees to help you if you’re in an interview-question rut.

We selected 10 of the 50 recruiting startups vying for first place at  Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14 to give us their favorite interview questions – the ones that really help you get to know how someone thinks.

Once you’re done reading, cast your RSOTY ballot here before March 1st. Your vote determines which six are flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders and puts them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

Relocate.me is a job relocation platform for software developers seeking long-term employment opportunities abroad.

Founder and CEO, Andrew Stetsenko

One of my most beloved interview questions is, ‘what’s your favorite book and what are you reading now?’

I always try to ask questions that go beyond a someone’s professional traits. It’s always interesting to find out what they do outside of work –  do they play sports, do they volunteer, do they like to travel? These questions give me a sense of a candidate as a whole person beyond just checking off skills. 

HeyJobs is a candidate sourcing platform for high-volume hiring demands. Through tech – and data- enable performance marketing for jobs and a modern application solution, HeyJobs delivers significantly more quality candidates for clients than their existing solutions.

Founder and CEO  Marius Luther 

“Tell me about the topic you are most passionate about in life. In 3 minutes, help me become an expert in that topic by explaining it.”

I love this question because it helps me find out a) how passionate/driven the person is, b) how logical he can explain, c) whether he is an exciting personality. Also, this way I learn about a new topic every interview. 

GoodTime.io is the first Talent Operations Platform that provides intelligent interview scheduling for recruiting teams. We seamlessly schedule high-volume phone interviews and complex onsite interviews, allowing companies to scale efficiently while focusing on higher value talent acquisition activities.

CEO, Ahryun Moon

“What kind of advice would you give to your current manager to help them grow into a better manager?”

Recruitsy is the smartest way to connect candidates and hiring managers with the best recruiters. We bring the candidate experience to the forefront with the first-to-market public rating and review platform built exclusively for the staffing and recruiting industry that features over 30,000+ recruiting agencies.

Founder and CEO, Kurt Smith

What is your ‘why to buy message’?  Which translates into their elevator pitch and 30 second sale for why I should hire them. Our personal/career brand is everything and we should be prepared to quickly describe our value proposition. I’m looking for what makes this person unique relative to their peers. It’s also a question that they typically haven’t rehearsed coming into the interview.

Are you an experienced recruiter looking for a great employer? Are you a great employer looking for an experienced recruiter? In either case, Recruiterly could be the one-stop platform for you.

 Cofounder, Jamie Robshaw

A favourite ‘type’ of question is one that challenges the industry without bias and is asked with the entire purpose of working towards a better solution. One question we recently asked a series of some of the top global recruitment industry influencers was to call ‘bullshit’ on one myth in recruitment. That evoked some great responses and lead to some very interesting discussions. There are so many strong feelings about the misconceptions in the industry…on both sides of the fence! 

JobPal builds chatbots for the recruiting context and industry with a strong focus on user experience.

Founder, Luc Dudler

As a first question I always ask: ‘Regardless of this conversation, our company and your current job what do you want to do professionally as a next step?’ You can get a lot from it. 

Ratedly monitors anonymous employee review websites and sends you alerts when new ones are posted online.

Founder, Joel Cheesman 

“If you’re in here a year from now resigning, what would be the likely reason?” I love this question because it throws candidates for a loop, forcing them to think on their feet, and gives employers real insight into how to retain that candidate. 

ROIKOI surfaces candidates who are diverse and pre-screened for talent, fit, and likelihood to join a company. ROIKOI customers make 1 hire by contacting just 25 passive candidates in the platform, save $10K per hire, and most notably, improve employee diversity.

CRO, Houston Perry

favorite interview question is: “Do you have any questions for us?” It gives the candidate an opportunity to showcase their knowledge and passion for the company they want to join. 

Journey is a game based interactive simulation which allows companies to quickly screen candidates by assessing skills such as communication, collaboration, leadership, influencing, and emotional intelligence.

CEO, Rajiv Roopan

“Tell me about an interesting problem that you came across and how you went about solving it?” 

Botmatic automates the process from candidates application to employees on-boarding with chatbots.

CEO, Arthur Boivin

My favorite question interview is “Do you have a motto?” Well, one for hiring is “Go to bed with a dream, wake up with a purpose.” Hiring is all about finding purpose between a company and a candidate. 

The whole point of implementing new tech is to make things easier. With this handy little app, an hour’s worth of grunt-work is taken care of in ten minutes. 

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. Register here!  Your vote determines which six are flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders and puts them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

WebClipDrop is a recruiter productivity tool that helps recruiters go two to three times faster by letting them clip contacts, find emails instantly and drops data into any CRM or ATS system. We asked WebClipDrop co-founder Doug Berg how they did it.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

WebClipDrop is an intelligent web clipboard that helps you clip data from any site (Job boards, search engines, directories, social networks), enrich data (find email and contact info) and drop the data into any ATS, CRM, or HRMS, saving you hours each day and 50% or more on sourcing costs.

That’s actually a really good idea. What gave you the initial idea?

We’ve worked with thousands of recruiters who waste tremendous amounts of time with dozens of tools to try and mine data. We wanted to create a productivity tool that would make all that data movement as easy as two clicks.

Can you give us an example of when you saw the idea become a reality?

One example comes from two larger corporate sourcing teams, trying to build talent pipelines from several social networks, search engines, and resume sites. It took hours of time per recruiter to pull, clean and enrich the data, then enter the data into their CRM. With WebClipDrop, we’ve automated the entire process from clipping data, enriching data, or exporting hundreds of contacts into a single click, which has resulted in recruiters saving anywhere from one to three hours per day of unproductive time.

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting? 

Recruiting is ripe for productivity gains, especially because there are so many apps and sites that people’s data traverses during the recruiting process. Being able to take the friction out of all that movement was a perfect use case for WebClipDrop.

How do you envision your idea changing the talent acquisition landscape?By making WebClipDrop so easy to use on nearly any site on the web, we’ve instantly made the entire recruiting supply chain more productive, while simultaneously helping companies to see what sources are most productive, and ultimately making the quality of data better within all of their applications, all of which dramatically speeds up the recruiting process.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

When any WebClipDrop user uses our tool to magically clip, enrich, and drop data in three to four seconds versus what used to take 30-40 minutes, we know we’ve made a big impact for the recruiter and in the end every candidate who gets more time from the recruiters.

What’s the main role of technology in hiring?

If technology isn’t making it easier for every stakeholder in the recruiting process (along with adding value), then it shouldn’t be deployed. I’ve seen companies hang on to legacy technology for years just because they’re afraid to change, but they never see the impact that not changing is having. Ignorance is miss – meaning missed hires, missed talent, missed opportunity, missed innovation.

With Relocate, technology companies can reach beyond their local market and attract a large pool of international talent, all of whom are ready to, you guessed it, relocate.

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. Register here!  Your vote determines which six are flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders and puts them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

Since 2012, Relocate has supported hundreds of developers across the world – from Australia to Sweden, Brazil to the Netherlands, France to the Czech Republic – in their job-seeker and relocation efforts by providing a source of truth for the ‘need to knows’ of  visas, work permits, insurance, cost of living, schools , and all those other fun details.

We talk with founder and CEO of  Relocate, Andrew Stetsenko to understand how running a tech recruitment site led to him creating a job relocation platform for software developers seeking long-term employment opportunities abroad.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Job relocation made easy.

Seems nice and simple! So tell us, how did it strike you that people needed help relocating?

We learned from experience. After running the tech recruitment agency Relocateme.eu for five years time and again we saw that many companies, didn’t provide relocation support to international candidates they bring on board.

Though it’s actually quite common for tech firms to relocate candidates, there still isn’t a system to provide accurate information to these new or potential hires – especially from a single source. That’s where Relocate comes in.

How do you envision your idea changing the talent acquisition landscape?

Relocating for a job isn’t something new. Moving is difficult on its own, but adding the challenge of finding companies that offer visa sponsorship/relocation packages makes the process truly overwhelming.

Relocate encourages the global exchange of ideas from an employee standpoint through providing pertinent information about relocating and on the employer side through promoting the concept of relocation packages as central to the hiring schemes.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

Providing a more streamlined experience for both parties: for software developers, willing to land a challenging new job abroad; and for tech companies, trying to attract international talent.

What is your favorite interview question and why?

One of my most beloved interview questions is, ‘what’s your favorite book and what are you reading now?’

I always try to ask questions that go beyond a someone’s professional traits. It’s always interesting to find out what they do outside of work –  do they play sports, do they volunteer, do they like to travel? These questions give me a sense of a candidate as a whole person beyond just checking off skills.

What’s the role of technology in hiring?

The right technology reduces hiring costs and shortens your time-to-hire. The challenge is selecting the technology that will work for you from all the thousands of options.