As Hiring Success 18 Europe fast approaches, we bring you the people who are disrupting Talent Acquisition with tough questions and thought-provoking commentary.

Whether it’s psychology, technology, social justice, or simply the bottom line – there is no singular path that leads a person to a life in TA. However, there is a common question: How can we make work better for everyone?

This inquiry is what drives the practitioners you will see at Hiring Success 18 EU in Berlin September 19th-20th, and it’s what drives us at SmartRecruiters to bring the HR and recruiting community together for two days of seminars, demos, and networking on the scenic banks of the river Spree.

“This is a new era for recruiting,” says SmartRecruiters CEO and founder Jerome Ternynck. “Businesses recognize that their Talent Acquisition function is the competitive edge they need to succeed. Hiring Success is here to bring practitioners out of their silos and connect them with the latest in technology, best practice, and strategy.”

So let’s meet some of the changemakers!

Bill Boorman – Tru Events

Recruiting’s “man in the hat,” Bill Boorman is the harbinger of new tech and the creator of recruiting’s merriest meetup, known as #TRU un-conferences. He’s hosted 100 events in 65 countries and five continents over the last 12 months. As he zigzags the map, he’s learning about the latest in grassroots TA – and he’s ready to share! Meet Bill on the Innovation track as he hosts Battle of the Bots, a live showdown of recruiting chatbots where the audience asks the questions.

To learn more about Bill and why he was dressed as Father Christmas the first time we met, click here!

Jeri Doris – Delivery Hero

From Silicon Valley to Berlin, Jeri Doris, Chief of People for Delivery Hero, is always thinking about company vibes, like what makes an organization a great place to work, or how can a great employee experience happen at scale? Jeri joins us on the Hiring Success track with the session What Hyper Growth Look Like. A rare peek into a business phenomenon that few people ever get to experience, this TA vet will take us through the systems she used to stay on top of the company’s exponential expansion without sacrificing quality or culture.

Noor van Boven – N26

With 15 years of international HumanResources experience, Noor van Boven focuses on building, scaling and transforming companies into successful enterprises. Noor is the Chief People Officer at N26, where she is responsible for building the organization while maintaining a high employee experience and guiding the company through hyper-growth in a healthy way. Her session, What Hyper Growth Looks Like, will explore the instigators for exponential growth, and address key rules and processes needed to scale operations.

Before joining N26, Noor was the VP People at SoundCloud and led the Recruiting, Talent, and Organizational Development initiatives at TomTom worldwide. Her passion for travel, coupled with work opportunities from respected international employers, has allowed Noor to live across the globe, including New York, India, and Germany.

Joanne Lockwood – SEE Change Happen

In 2016 Joanne embarked on her personal rebrand, which included selling her IT services company and transitioning to her true gender identity. In the wake of this decision, she discovered the hidden obstacles that many trans candidates face when they search for the right employment opportunity.

In response to her experience as an applicant, Joanne founded SEE Change Happen, a diversity and inclusion practice specializing in supporting Transgender inclusion to businesses and other organizations. She joins us for the Inclusion track for the session A Path to Gender Parity, a candidate discussion of the subtle obstacles that undermine women in the workplace.

Hilary Klassen – Career Ari

As an HR leader with a decade of experience, Hilary Klassen, the founder of Career Ari, was constantly approached for career advice. So often, in fact, that it became a pattern. Klassen realized that even successful employees at companies that provide career counseling wanted a personal and professional opinion from a third party. “There has to be a way to scale this,” she thought, and that’s how the idea for the first-ever automated career brand coach came to be.  

Hillary joins us on the Hiring Success track for Internal Career Pathing, where she will discuss how to make lateral and upward mobility a frequent occurrence in your business.

Sergej Zimpel – ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE

To Sergej Zimpel, Senior Recruiter for ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE and Co-Founder of the HR organization Purple Squirrel Society, buzzwords like “candidate experience” actually mean something. A psychologist by schooling, the ever-evolving world of HR will never cease to fascinate this TA practitioner. Sergej will join us on the Inclusion track for a deep dive into The Art of Community Building, and a step by step guide of how.

Manjuri Sinha – Zalando

Manjuri Sinha leads the technology talent acquisition team for Europe’s ecommerce giant, Zalando. Prior to this, she was lead HR business partner for technology at Accenture. In addition to her professional career, she is also a speaker, mentor, and blogger. For her session at Hiring Success, Manjuri will speak about how to fix problems within organizations “in the battlefield”, offering practical advice on course correction that is invaluable to even the most veteran recruiters.

Chris Raw – Zalando

As candidate experience and innovation lead for one of the fastest growing ecommerce sites in Europe, Chris has helped Zalando through a hypergrowth of hiring in the past three years. His whirlwind tenure at Zalando has forced him to get creative, moving faster than the fashion cycle to get the right talent on board at the right time. This recruiter comes on board for the Innovation track to talk Course Correction in the Battlefield.

Juliane Stiller – Humboldt University

As an informational scientist for Humboldt University in Berlin, Juliane Stiller is in the business of finding, assessing, and applying critical information to the education and work industries. In essence, she looks at how we can take what we know and apply it to real-world scenarios to get a better result. In this case, Julie helps us take on the scenario Have You Hired a Refugee in the conference’s Inclusion track so all recruiters and TA leaders can learn how to help support this rich source of talent.

Robindro Ullah –  Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr AG

Robindro broke into the Human Resources field in 2005 as a trainee at Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr AG. Over the next few years he pushed for more social media coverage of talent acquisition at DB, which brought his passion for HR Marketing and Recruiting into focus. Most recently, he served as Head of Employer Branding and HR Communication at VOITH GmbH and oversaw global recruitment. Robindro rounds out his professional profile as an author, blogger, and speaker in the German HR scene. His session talk will look at creative ways to combine recruiting strategies with marketing and social media best practices to amplify TA efforts.

Natalie Mellin – Mellin Consulting

Strategic and hands-on. That’s how we would describe Natalie Mellin, a globetrotting diversity and inclusion specialist, and founder of Mellin Consulting, a consultancy that advises global companies how to convert well wishes to real programs. Behavioral economy is her game, and if you are fuzzy on what that means then your attendance at the Path to Gender Parity session is mandatory. As part of our Inclusion track, this panel will delve into femme experiences of the workplace in the wake of movements like #metoo.

Tracey Allison – Avery Dennison Co

Tracey Allison began her career in recruitment in 1990, and has built a reputation as an HR leader throughout the EMEA region and beyond. She is the Director of Global Talent at Avery Dennison Corporation, where she oversees Talent Acquisition teams covering all of EMEA, as well as head up the leadership program for the largest business division of Avery Dennison. Prior to joining Avery Dennison, Tracey worked at major tech and telecom firms, including Microsoft and Vodafone.

Tracey’s session will focus on the fundamental skills that elevate recruiters to “rock star” level, and share insights that only a Hiring Success veteran and a self-made, global TA leader with decades of experience can offer.

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.

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. 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.

Recruiterly co-founders Matt Gibbs and Jamie Robshaw moved into the HR startup space with a goal: change the perception of recruiters in the industry. They felt that the traditional platforms did not give recruiters enough space and freedom to espouse their skills, develop their brand and effectively sell themselves to potential clients. Faced with this, they pooled their years of global recruiting experience into creating a new platform that could help put real human recruiters back on the agenda in a positive way. In the run up to the Recruiting Startup of the Year contest at this year’s Hiring Success 18, Matt and Jamie took the time to flesh out their concept with us.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Recruiterly is the world’s first recruiter branding and reputation management tool. Build your influence and personal brand in your industry and have the top employers come to you.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

Jamie and I got together about 18 months ago and started coming up with concepts for products that we could build to help recruiters and ultimately improve the perception of the recruitment industry, which continues to take a battering (just watch the LinkedIn feed for a few hours!). The only way we thought we could effectively do this at scale was to introduce a level of credibility and accountability. Essentially, we want to provide a platform where deserving recruiting experts get the recognition they deserve and in return, become busier!

Is there a particular experience you could point to?

There are so many examples of great recruiters with a passion for the industry burning out due to constantly fighting against poor industry perceptions. Often recruiters are treated as the last resort, or worse – due to the actions of others, that have provided that hiring manager or candidate a previous bad experience. To increase the overall quality of the industry we need to stop this happening, provide better education and training and promote, and recognize the experts – raising the bar industry wide.

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting?

Because it needs it. Jamie and I have over 20 years combined experience and there has been very little improvement in the way things are done. Most technology over the last few years has been more focused on replacing the recruiter, while the industry continues to grow. We believe in the value great recruiters provide to both candidates and employers and so are focused on building tools to help the recruiters perform even better. If we achieve that, then employers and candidates will both enjoy an improved experience with expert professionals.

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

Our core mission is to improve the perception of the recruiting industry. To do this, we need to provide tools that enable the best recruiters to stand out and become even more successful, while the recruiters who harm the industry’s reputation get less and less work. If we achieve this, globally, we will fundamentally change the way the world looks at recruiters. Our unique, media rich profiles, branding and content tools and our reputation management system will facilitate this transition.

In providing a platform for expert recruiters, it equally made sense for us to build a simple and powerful collaboration tool between the employer and the recruiter. Now, employers can use our job marketplace to jump in and globally distribute their requirements within minutes. We’ll match whatever requirements you have with a verified recruiter, who has a proven track record and the right experience  – making the decision on the best recruiter super easy. All recruiter profiles are public so you can check them out in detail before even considering working with them. Our tool then facilitates communication between all hiring and recruiting stakeholders on one simple screen. We massively reduce the time-to-hire and the common frustrations in the process. Multiple jobs, multiple recruiters per job, multiple candidates per recruiter and everyone wanting updates, feedback and progress? We replace all of this with one simple tool.

The final core feature of the platform is to improve the common issue of inter and intra-office communication and collaboration within recruitment companies. Our private social-community tool facilitates instantaneous, socially driven company communication, interactions, sharing and collaboration.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

This is simple. When a company’s priorities, mission, ethics, motivations and ambition are in complete alignment with that of the candidate (the new hire), we have a perfect match or ‘hiring success’. This perfect match results in improved performance and culture for the company and an improved work and personal life for the candidate. It’s a positive feedback loop. Happy, motivated and appreciated staff will work harder for the company, and in turn, the company performs better, allowing them to continue to improve the working environment for employees.  

Identifying this is obvious and simple – achieving this consistently is something very few companies accomplish. Those that do typically have a significant competitive advantage and outperform the others over the long-term.

What is your favorite interview question and why?

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!

Today, SmartRecruiters announced the launch of the new Store on our hiring platform. You can now browse through our recruiting services in a single marketplace, to help you source, engage and ultimately hire the best talent for your team and company. All of our partners and their products are on display in the Store – including Job Boards, Recruiters, Assessments and Databases. If you haven’t checked it out already, click here and have a look!

Feature Walkthrough

You can access this feature by clicking on the new ‘Store’ link in the top header bar (next to ‘Jobs’ and ‘People’). You’ll find a healthy cross-section of all the different partners in our marketplace. At the top is our ‘Featured’ section, where you’ll see images of the most recognizable and in-demand partners in our Store. Below is our ‘New and Popular’ section, where you’ll find a mix of the newest partners we’ve teamed up with and those that are rising in popularity. The rest of the page is organized by product category (Job Boards, Recruiters, etc.) and highlights some of top partners in each.

At the very top of this storefront page, you’ll also notice there is a ‘Store’ header bar with links to each of our product categories. You can use these shortcuts to go straight to a particular page to browse specific partners. Some of the product category pages, like Job Boards for example, also have additional ‘sort by’ and ‘search’ fields to find the partner services that best match your needs.

If you click on any of our partners in the Store, you can view more details about their company, the services they offer, and the pricing of their services. In a few weeks, we will also support the ability to view media files showcasing our partner services (videos, documents, images) AND let you read and write reviews about them, both of which will help you make more informed decisions along the way.

What’s Coming Next?

The new Store brings all of our amazing partners to the forefront and puts a spotlight on all the recruiting services that we offer on the SmartRecruiters platform. This is just the first step and we plan to keep investing in the marketplace to deliver the best experience and value for our users.

What if there were useful recruiting applications and plugins that you could download? What if you could see what other users hiring in the same industry recently purchased? These are questions we keep asking ourselves, and we believe the answers will make the recruiting process easier for everyone. We continue on our mission to deliver these features into your hands. Stay tuned!

The post The New SmartRecruiters Store is Here! first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.]]> https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/who-owns-the-candidate-experience/ Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:44:12 +0000 http://www.smartrecruiters.com/static/blog/?p=14428

By now you must have heard the term Candidate Experience, and possibly even the nonprofit organization that started the Candidate Experience Award. Companies spend a hell of a lot of time and money to have the most sophisticated Applicant Tracking System, a cutting edge career site and the most advanced HR technology to help build their brand and […]

I pondered for a second; the first thoughts were well I am pretty much a guru at all of the day to day recruiting skills.  I have 29 years’ experience in all forms or another in recruiting. The answer that came to mind is I am passionate.  Is it a skill?  Maybe, but what I am sure of is passion will drive learning the skills needed to support one’s passions.  And it is an amazing transformation that has been happening in me because it has not always been the case.  Being that passion is not so much a hard skill, in one context it is an emotion, in the context I am coming from it is an inner drive that comes from the center of my being.  And that passion changes everything; is changing everything.  It is valuable very, very valuable.  In fact, passion’s price and value is immeasurable.  For me it is the engine that drives life and defines what my life is. Passion is not something that can be made or learned.  I can’t make myself be passionate.  But I can know what I am passionate about.
Passion in the context of career is a motivation in an occupation.  A passionate individual about their occupation is more likely to yield a result of greater work and extra-work satisfaction.  Well-being is elevated, confidence soars, the soul is fed and the feeling of being satisfied is reached.  There is getting physically tired from a full day, but never burnt out.  The other beauty about passion is that those with it tend not to get stressed, even under high demands and tight deadlines to perform.

Business, family and social relations are improved, joy cannot be contained, it bubbles out and others are affected by it.  Others see it and you become a fun person to be around.  The choice of pursuing one’s passions when there is a decision to make around choices, decisions and opportunities yields the result that life just keeps getting better always.

Another result of my passion is I am at ease, I don’t react or on the rare occasion that someone pushed my buttons, I get over it quickly as I reflect it’s not that big of a deal, as I have purpose, challenges and obstacles are gone around, through or over.  It is an immense feeling of gratitude to know what I want and I am creating that and others want to be around me.  Doing the things I love is no greater feeling.  Creating an environment and circumstances (the circle that stands around me) is one of the most fulfilling activities to undertake.

One of the great companies I have had the honor to work at, Microsoft, has built a blue chip company on what they refer to as their core 3 P’s of Microsoft: Passion, Potential and People.  They understand passion as key, for people who are passionate about their occupation, work harder, they create, they are a joy and pleasure to work with, a culture of collaboration ,excitement and enthusiasm is fostered and nurtured.  Careers and lives are fulfilled; life and business challenges are overcome.

Last year Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer spoke at the University of Southern California’s commencement speech and Ballmer gave this advice: “Number one, great ideas matter. Number two, find passion. And, number three, be tenacious, be irrepressible.”

This topic is so important a dissertation and books could be written, and have been written.  To end, my advice, person to person, recruiter to professional, is to ask you 5 questions from the New York Times Bestseller, The Passion Test:

• Am I excited about my life and turned on by the things I get to do each day?
• Do others comment on how happy I am and what fun it is to be around you?
• Am I very clear about the top five passions in my life, those things that matter most to me?
• Do I make decisions based on what will help me live my passions most fully?
• Do I spend my days doing things I love, surrounded by people I love?

Passion and blessings to all of you,

Marc Gurtman

Everybody’s too busy – far too busy – to wade through the volumes of applicants to find nuggets of talent. Hiring managers are doing their “real” jobs. Recruiters juggle between posting jobs, screening resumes, managing interviews, and other elements of a complicated hiring processes. Automation tools, designed to make things easier, often make things more complicated. Smart recruiters can focus on three elements to make things easier for everyone, applicants included.

Ask yourself: What do you need in a candidate?  How is candidate attracted to this opportunity? & Why would people want to work for my company?

To simplify your hiring, focus on:

1. The 3 critical factors that you need in a candidate.

2. The 3 reasons someone would want to be hired.

3. The 3 reasons people want to work at your company.

1. Focus on the candidate’s 3 (or as many as 5) critical factors.

This is essential. By focusing on the things you need in the person you will hire, you create clear messages that make it easy for qualified candidates to screen themselves in. You make it easy for employees, customers, and other stakeholders to refer people they know. You make it easy for applicants to highlight their qualifications and easy for hiring managers to interview them. You also make it easy for wannabes who are not qualified to see that applying for the position is a long shot at best. Clear messaging sets up a self-screening situation. Everybody wins.

2. Focus on 3 (or as many as 5) reasons why someone would want this job.

Many job messages focus on what the employer wants, but, you must bait the hook with something tasty if you want big fish to bite. The motivation needs to be job specific, not a broad based “my company is a great place to work” branding message. If you have a big mess for someone to clean up, you want to attract someone who loves cleaning up messes, who loves a huge challenge. Be creative with your words; sell the sizzle; but don’t be afraid to let people know the big things about the job.

3. Tell them the 3 (or as many as 5) best things about your company.

This is critical to your employer brand. Often company messages are muddied by an “inspired” HR leader who comes up with something that isn’t nearly as compelling to potential employees. This is a great opportunity to partner with your internal marketing geniuses. They can help.

Some companies don’t need anything more than their logo. Apple is one such company. That’s because everything they do communicates that it is a great place to work. The only way to have an employer brand like that is to BE a great place to work!  If that is your challenge, then it’s time to sit at the table with your company leaders and have a strategic conversation.

Focus on these three areas when making any decisions involving talent acquisition and see dramatic improvements in the quality of your applicants. Be a smart recruiter.

Pat Sharp, The Talent Architect blends strategy, technology tools, and assessment tools with marketing magic to create unique talent solutions. Past and current clients include: Motorola, Deloitte, TiVo, and Cloudscaling.

The interview process itself is the single most important part of the candidate selection process. It’s essentially the first date where an employer and candidate meet face to face after they’ve reviewed each other’s profiles, and have mutually opted to learn more about if this relationship could be “the one.”

As if the candidate courting and selection process wasn’t enough for both parties, the actual interview and evaluation process can go a number of different ways. Recruiters, hiring managers, and job seekers should be prepared to get to know one another in a variety of different interview settings and formats. Here are a few of the most common to get you started:

• Informational Interview. This style of interview is exactly what it sounds like, for informational purposes only. Job seekers meet with a prospective employer’s hiring managers and/or recruiters to learn more about the company, their culture, and hiring process before an actual position is available. Take part. These are a great way to pre-interview a candidate, establish a relationship, and build talent pipelines for future company openings.

• Traditional Face-to-Face Interview. Most interviews are face-to-face. The candidate and the company representative get to know one another mono a mono, eyeball to eyeball. As the interviewer, your focus should be on asking prepared interview questions. Also make sure you are prepared to answer the interviewee’s questions about the position and company. Maintain eye contact and be prepared to make the candidate comfortable.

• Panel/Committee Interview. In this boardroom-style format, there is more than one interviewer. Typically, three to ten members of a panel may conduct this part of the selection process. Interviewers will likely ask individual questions and the candidate not only works to answer the question directly but also to engage and develop a rapport with each panel member. Interviewers should have a series of planned interview questions and scoring or interview evaluation process in place prior to the interview. Know the criteria you are looking for before the interview has begun. Incorporating a scoring or consistent interview evaluation system is known as a structured interview.

• Lunch/Dinner Interview. The same rules apply at a restaurant as in the office. The setting may be casual or formal. The interview questions are important but just like the panel interview, the interviewer has placed the job seeker in an environment where they must not only maintain poise, develop relationships, but also answer interview questions effectively in what likely will be a more casual conversational format. As a job seeker, I always recommend that they follow the lead of the interviewers they are dining with. Eat less. Order an entree that is light and easy to eat. Baby back ribs are not an appropriate choice.  Do not drink alcohol at any point in the interview process.

Learn more about the employer candidate selection and interview evaluation process by visiting Part Two of this blog series.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers.

Photo Credit HRKeyFunctions

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