Jerome Ternynck and Tracey Allison join Lorne Epstein on his eponymous podcast for a frank discussion on the challenges of today’s talent economy.

“The war for talent is over and the candidates have won,” says Jerome Ternynck, CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, as he sits down with Tracey Allison, Director of Global Talent at Avery Dennison, on the latest episode of the Lorne Epstein “How To Capture Talent In Today’s Candidate-driven Market”, recorded at Unleash Amsterdam 2018. Far from taken aback, Lorne and Tracey laugh in agreement.

“[Recruitment] today is about how you attract talent to your organization,” says Tracey. “You are marketing candidates and bringing talent in, rather than, ‘I have a job – who wants to apply?”

During the next hour, the three experts discuss the needs of today’s talent practitioners from both a strategic and technological perspective, with stories of personal challenges they’ve faced in the field, from diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives to getting a seat at the table. Listen now for the full scoop and check out the top 5 takeaways below.

1. HR technology is a must.

“Why does everyone have great tech except recruiters?” Jerome asks.”Sales, Accounting, and Marketing software are all par for the course, yet people balk at allocating budget for Recruiting systems. Recruiting is a digital function now, and they need the right tools to be successful.”

2.Don’t force candidates to fit your mold.

“It’s about engaging the right way,” says Tracey. “We need to stop ticking boxes and go after talent. Right now, we should be driven more by the individual candidate and how they can be successful – which will really be your department’s ROI – versus just filling a job.”

3. Engage hiring managers, they are your friends.

“The relationship between recruiters and hiring managers is, in many ways, a broken one,” says Jerome. “It doesn’t get supported through technology, which should be the enabler. At the end of the day, hiring managers and recruiters both want to find great people. If you put them together in one place where they can actually work together then suddenly you don’t have the dynamic where hiring managers are the customers and recruiters are the service center. Instead, it’s a shoulder-to-shoulder partnership where recruiters feed the pipe and hiring managers close the deal.”

4. Sell a lifestyle.

“In a candidate-driven marketplace, getting the message of what life is actually like at a particular organization is extremely important,” says Tracey. “More and more, the lines between work and life are blurred, and it’s all about the experience.”

5. D&I every step of the way.

“First, you have to go the extra mile to source candidates from underrepresented groups,” says Jerome.  “And it’s not good enough to do a regular sourcing effort, and then say ‘oh well, only white guys applied, not our fault’. You have to actively go and source people that are underrepresented. Diversity is critical to business success in every organization. Second, you gotta make sure that once you have that diverse talent coming in, that they’re not being discriminated against. Which, in recruiting, means having some objective criteria to rate these candidates throughout the interview process.”

Learn more about creating an interview process that discourages bias in the full episode, alongside other awesome learnings including examples from Tracey on how TA can be a strategic partner for business success.

MobieTrain swept the recruiting startup finals today at UNLEASH, a strong message that learning and development are what employers care about now.

“Every Startup – from Google to Facebook – starts with someone believing in the idea. That’s what we are here for today!” said Jerome Ternynck as he kicked off the final pitch session for the recruiting startup awards at UNLEASH, in Amsterdam. As the founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters, MrTed, and others, Jerome knows the nerve it takes to get on a stage in front of hundreds of people and pray they see your vision for the future.

. @jerometernynck hosts #UNLEASH18 startup competition! pic.twitter.com/orEHg3wqAG

— SmartRecruiters (@SmartRecruiters) October 24, 2018

Today, four startups took the stage with vim, and laid it all on the table in the hopes of becoming this conference’s recruiting-tech champion.

First up, MobieTrain, a micro-learning platform for the retail sector. With content at the point of need as well as fun badges and helpful nudges, this app is imparting needed-knowledge without the headache of lengthy courses.

Micro learning with @mobietrain goes for the gold! #UNLEASH18 pic.twitter.com/q6xu93n1xz

— SmartRecruiters (@SmartRecruiters) October 24, 2018

Second on the stage, Career Spark, this company wants to transform career pathing by making people decisions more data-driven rather than opinion based. How? Through machine learning and fact-based data science that helps you learn from your company’s top performers.

.@career_spark wants people-decisions to get data driven! #UNLEASH18 pic.twitter.com/ZHJJbDo4Vx

— SmartRecruiters (@SmartRecruiters) October 24, 2018

Third, Candidate.ID, the platform that turns your recruiters into marketers. Save time and increase the quality of hire with this ATS/CRM integration that includes candidate nurturing and scoring, email marketing, and closed-loop, real-time reporting tools.

“Genuine talent pipeline means you know who is cold, who is warm, and who is hire-ready!“ — @Candidate_ID pic.twitter.com/hsqQtSYnY4

— SmartRecruiters (@SmartRecruiters) October 24, 2018

And finally, Zapiens, knowledge management software that uses AI to raise the level of intelligence in your company so your employees can get answers fast!

.@zapiens find talent — and keep it — with data based learning solutions for your employees! #UNLEASH18 pic.twitter.com/kMtZqrgRDO

— SmartRecruiters (@SmartRecruiters) October 24, 2018

After the pitches, we heard from the judges about who they found impressive, Candidate.ID and MobieTrain emerged as clear front-runners.

“I’m split between Candidate.ID and MobieTrain,” shared Bill Boorman. “Though I am leaning slightly towards the latter because I think a platform that focuses on one sector, in this case, retail, tends to do better.”

“Yes,” agrees China Gorman, “I like that MobieTrain isn’t trying to boil the ocean.”

In the end MobieTrain won out, with Candidate.ID taking a close second. As Jerome pointed out, ”Sometimes it’s better to attack the market with a knife over a hammer.”

The main challenge that judge Yvette Cameron foresees for today’s winner is content creation. A stellar learning flow still needs the right sequence information. It will be interesting to see how this fresh recruiting-tech tackles this in the year to come.

Are you a Startup ready to compete? Check out Hiring Success 19 Recruiting Startup Awards!

Just because there’s no one fix for GDPR compliance, that doesn’t mean there aren’t solid ways to keep from pulling a Zuckerberg-level cock-up.

Photo credit: Raphaël Labbé from Paris

This week, in London; it was a speech to disappoint anyone hoping to snag a secret recipe to comply with the fast-approaching General Data Protection Regulations, or GDPR – the European Union’s play to shield its citizens’ online information from precisely the kind of parasitic commercial pilfering brought to light by the ongoing Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Unleash Conference, Main Stage; it was a frightening but opportune confluence, as Ardi Kolah, director of the GDPR global transition program at Henley Business School, explained to a large section of 500 Talent Acquisition professionals, that with breached-data threatening one of the most powerful players on the web, causing its once-bulletproof stocks to plummet, most organizations won’t be adequately protected when the new laws kick in on May 25th.

To understand this new legislation, “consider the bill’s genesis as a way to regulate the digital marketplace, a codification of best practices, as opposed to protection against malevolent hackers,” says Kolah, “and GDPR will make a lot more sense.”

That said, it’s hard not to conflate fears around what GDPR could do to your business with what Facebook’s going through in the wake of the revelation that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica amassed data from up to 50 million profiles that were used, via Facebook, to sway votes in favor of the 2016 Trump campaign. These actions contravene not only Facebook’s own rules, which forbid third parties from using any user data for commercial means, but had GDPR already been implemented – given that it’s not only applied to EU citizens in Europe, but anywhere they exist in cyberspace – this kind of data scraping, from that many profiles, would more than likely have fallen under its legal purview, and possibly cost Facebook four percent of its annual profits. (Facebook has reportedly lost about as many dollars of stock market value as there were affected users.)

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied that the net-quaking profile harvest was any kind of theft at all, and this issue isn’t going to go away soon. But to bring the issue into a more earthbound context, if, say, a medium-sized company has followed Kolah’s advice and retained legal counsel to ensure compliance, what would happen should they experience an involuntary breach?

Kolah maintained that each situation will be unique, but laid out the basics for what an action plan could look like:

• Identify risk in areas of your business or service at high risk of data breach.
• Mitigate the risk by tightening up porous areas which can be carefully monitored.
• Record your efforts to mitigate risk, to increase transparency, and protect your company should a data breach occur.

The biggest takeaway is that training is your first line of defense. Anyone in your company handling data that relates to information of EU citizens protected by GDPR should be schooled in handling this sensitive information appropriately.

“If your company experiences a data breach,” warns Kohla, “you can be sure HR will be paid a visit, and the first thing these government agents will ask for is your training records.”

But, he noted, good faith efforts like training will certainly move the needle in your favor if you find yourself on the wrong side of GDPR:

“I don’t think the EU will be chasing anyone down the street with random punishments. They are much more concerned about people who will deliberately put millions of people’s data at risk without blinking an eye in the name of profit.”

Right now, in every business leader’s head; while no one knows 100 percent how they or their business communities may be affected, for the time being, it’s most important that your business is seen as being trustworthy with sensitive personal information, the kind of trust that Facebook, a harbor for billions of online profiles and thus saleable personal data, is bleeding, profusely, right now.