You’ve already heard the buzz around Berlin’s venture capital swarm. Now meet one of the fastest movers in the hive.

MoBerries is a Berlin-based HR AI technology company, founded in 2015. CEO Terence Hielscher developed the idea while working for one of both Europe and Southeast Asia’s predominant Venture Funds, having observed the value in establishing a shared talent pool for their portfolio network. After only six months, over 50 portfolio companies were actively sharing and referring candidates within the network. Together with his best friend from University, Mo Moubarak, and a trusted colleague from within the Venture Capital Fund that built StudiVZ, Andre Zayarni, MoBerries introduced itself to the German market.

Why is your product a necessary tool for any SmartRecruiters customer?

The fact that you are using SmartRecruiters means that your company is in a state of growth. MoBerries is today’s largest shared-talent platform and a new candidate sourcing channel for SR customers with over 10,000 weekly candidate referrals. The partner network consists of leading DAX and digital companies, as well as venture capital funds.

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

MoBerries sources actively searching candidates to be placed in open positions in real time.

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

The network effect. Every partner company contributes to an exclusive candidate pool, enabling partners to access quality applicants when they need them most. Over 10,000 referred and active candidates join the platform each week. Profiling candidates and companies alike helps drive matches based on a reinforced learning approach, derived from live interactions on the platform. The AI further uses neural network methodologies to source faster, by taking into account your feedback in order to identify the perfect company/candidate match.  This is especially helpful for non-traditional roles where not all candidates have the prerequisite skills clearly represented in their CV.

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

Traditional recruitment consists of three steps: Posting a position to job boards, screening candidates, and hiring the most suitable one. MoBerries eliminates the first two steps for its partners, and our platform identifies where talent can best unlock their potential based on predictive models centered around their interactions within the job market. Essentially, we are a scalable sports agent leveraging a technology to get people where they need to go, as fast as possible.

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

MoBerries is rapidly expanding, already working with leading DAX companies, VC funds, and the majority of digital companies in Germany, as well as other European countries. Next step for us: Expansion to the US. We are driven by the mission to be the world’s leading shared talent platform.

How does your product compliment the SmartRecruiters TAS – philosophically and technologically?

SmartRecruiters and MoBerries share the same values, which are reflected in our talent acquisition (TA) strategies. Both of us see the market as an ecosystem within which we need to adapt. We are in the business of people, and people, as well as the greater marketplace, are in a constant state of change. To be able to keep up, sourcing tools & applicant tracking systems (ATS) alike need to be flexible and able to evolve to meet new market norms.  

Offering a smart and effective solution is not merely about finding candidates a dream job, but how technology can help them build their dream career. To ensure integrity, both solutions work in parallel towards a transparent, honest and feedback driven marketplace.

What led you to partner with SmartRecruiters?

HR is becoming more and more consolidated, and the best providers find ways to come together to form a recruiting stack. A company should be about how to integrate these various services seamlessly and provide the most robust HR experience. As a sourcing channel, we integrated because SmartRecruiters is all about the managing of talent and efforts of a company partner whereas we are about the analysis and optimization of talent sourcing. Not to sound cliche, but it really is all about people.

How long did it take to become integrated into the SR marketplace, and what were the obstacles or adjustments in that process?

From all the integrations we’ve run, this was one of the easiest. It took approximately 60 days.

What were some benefits of partnering with SR?

The main benefit is the consolidation of two tools for the end customers. By integrating our systems we provide a more seamless experience to hiring managers.

How long would it take for the average existing SR user to implement and take full advantage of your product?

The integration only takes seconds. You will have to be a member of MoBerries in order to take advantage of this integration and connect both accounts. For anyone interested in trying MoBerries we encourage you to reach out to us and your SR account manager. Once contacted you simply click a button under your MoBerries integration tab within your dashboard and you are ready to get started.

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

As the recruitment market starts to move at a more rapid pace, the onset of AI-based technologies are intended to work alongside humans in order to enable HR managers to focus their attention on the element of better marketing their firm and lasering in on the best fitting talent.

HR managers are becoming more like sports agents, understanding the importance of constantly reinventing the way they market their team, culture & vision. A technology stack allows them to focus on what they do best, and that is selling the brand to perspectives.

We want our B2B partners to hire faster by focusing their efforts on selling to the most suitable talent. We continue to build our technology stack around creating value for all parties, which in the end allows us to offer a smart and efficient online platform.

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!

Dutch startup Wonderkind has created an innovative job advertising technology that reaches both active and passive job seekers on media channels they use daily, like social media, websites and apps. This helps corporates and staffing agencies to create and execute the perfect recruitment marketing campaign, thus attract high-quality and happy talent.  

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.

Before bringing his innovative wares from the Lowlands to the Bay Area for Hiring Success 18, CEO Lars Wetemans lets us in on the thought process behind his wonder-product.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Eighty-one percent of all job seekers are passive, so why do we only target active job seekers in advertising? Wonderkind has built world’s first automated technology that advertises jobs anywhere on the internet. In apps like Tinder, Google or on social media. We reach 90+% of all internet users with the right ad, on the right channel at the right time.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

Before Wonderkind, my partner and I both had a social media agency. Nowadays, people spend an insane number of hours on their mobile and especially on social media. We found it strange that no one was recruiting where talent is actually active, especially because those channels have really advanced targeting options. We can target ads on demographics, geolocation, online behavior and interests. Sourcing is time-consuming and repetitive. What we do is automated sourcing through targeted advertising anywhere on the internet. Goodbye post & pray!

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

I am very confident that targeting, A/B testing and advertising on non-job platforms (like apps, social or any other site) is a logical next step in job advertising, and will set the new standard. Besides that, I believe that job advertising alone will not suffice when you want to attract passive talent. You need to tell them first about your company values (employer branding) before you can talk about the jobs at that company. We think a full-funnel approach is the only way forward when you want to win the war for talent. Automation is another necessity for scaling your recruiting efforts. Automated sourcing through programmatic and targeted job advertising is, therefore, the future.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

Have a complete insight into the ROI of your recruitment strategy. From the first touch point, a candidate has with you as an employer, to how a hire is performing at your organization years later. You need to know exactly when, where and how to reach top hires.

What’s the role of technology in hiring?

It’s the combination of tech and human skills that leads to magic.

If you want to talk about how far recruitment has come from the internet’s initial series of job boards, ask the guy responsible for one of the very first ones.

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.

Jonathan Duarte is a 20-year veteran of the Internet Recruiting and HR Tech industry, having started one of the first job boards, GOJobs.com, way back in 1996. As a technologist and entrepreneur, JD has built companies, partnerships, and technology integrations with HR Tech firms across the recruiting, background screening, and workforce management spectrum.

His primary motivation in the recruiting technology market comes from his desire to connect the right employer to the right candidate at the right time. This is something we at SmartRecruiters can empathize with, and as Hiring Success 18 draws nearer, we asked Jonathan to give us a bit of a primer as to what we can expect to see when he rolls his latest startup, GoHire, into San Francisco, March 12-14.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

GoHire helps recruiters attract, engage, and hire, across multiple messaging platforms with award-winning chatbots. Our clients are generating 500% increases in candidate application rates, while leveraging the automation of chatbots to speed up the recruiting process. With text messaging, Messenger, and web chat, recruiters are automating manual tasks like candidate pre-screening and job interview scheduling, while communicating with candidates using their platform of choice, in a centralized and compliant way.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

For the last 20 years, I’ve been trying to solve the age-old problem of connecting the right company to the right candidate at the right time. This journey has taken many forms, from founding one of the first internet job boards in the 90s to building corporate career sites. However, while technology has helped move us from newspaper ads and a “Hidden Job Market”, where most job openings were never published, to a space where “all jobs are everywhere”, I don’t think we’ve solved many real, fundamental problems. In many ways, we’ve just substituted one set of problems with another.

Over the last couple of years, however, I’ve been in a unique position to witness the convergence of several technologies that I believe will significantly alter the future of recruiting and the job search process. For instance, in the first six months of 2016, Uber recruited approximately 600,000 drivers in the US. That alone is an incredible statistic. But if you dig a little deeper, it also means that they had to engage over six million potential drivers to start the recruiting process. To my knowledge, this was the single largest public or private recruiting campaign in the last 50 years or more. They did it by removing as many barriers-to-entry and friction points as possible, and only implementing human assistance when needed. If they required manual processes, like drivers filling out a 45-minute application, for example, they would have failed. One of the key solutions was text messaging and automated next-step reminders. And when you add chatbots, then you have the ability to automate and scale recruiting processes.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

I think the purest form of hiring success is recruiting the right candidates for both company culture fit as well as anticipating tomorrow’s requirements. Employee turnover is costing more and more each year, so the only viable way to make employees profitable in the long term is to hire the right candidates in the first place.

SmartDreamers is a social media and job marketing platform that helps companies reach the candidates that don’t spend time on classical recruitment platforms.

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.

Founded by Adrian Cernat, this is an app that has already helped companies like Uber, Vodafone, Siemens, Orange, and IBM to smartly recruit talent. Before Adrian brings his tech-baby to Hiring Success 18, we caught up with him to see what brought him to this point on his way to Recruiting Startup of the Year.

Hi Adrian, great to meet you. What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Integrated with the biggest ATS’s, SmartDreamers fits perfectly in the company’s recruitment software ecosystem and becomes the command center for recruitment marketing. Fortune 500 companies like Deutsche Bank, Amazon, Honeywell and many others use our product to streamline recruitment marketing.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

I was part of another startup, in the HR sector, where I was in contact with recruitment managers. They were all complaining about classical job portals, so I told myself there must be a better solution to reach candidates.

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting?

It has the perfect mix for startups: a large market with big problems.

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

Companies will have to treat recruitment like they treat sales. Although an approach like this does lead to a complex process. It is not that easy to advertise across the web, for example. We can see a growing market for automation of other types, and we see a growing market for recruitment marketing automation as well.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

Setting right the recruitment funnel: from first contact, to retention, to word of mouth and employer branding.

What’s the main role of technology in hiring?

Increased efficiency and a better experience in the recruitment process, both for recruiters and candidates.

What do you get when artificial intelligence meets human intelligence in a space where intelligence is meant to be quantifiably evaluated? This plucky startup may have the answer.

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.

In 2014, Andrew Buhrmann, an experienced product strategist and serial entrepreneur, founded this groundbreaking startup, with the goal of using artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence in the talent evaluation space. The result? Employers being able to automatically research and discover correlations between every job description and inbound applicant, in order to accelerate the candidate selection process.

Leading up to Vettd’s candidacy for our Recruiting Startup of the Year contest, we caught up with the University of Washington graduate to better gauge what we can expect to learn from Vettd at Hiring Success 18, March 12-14, San Francisco.

Hi Andrew, thanks for being with us. Real quick, what’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Vettd is an Intelligent Data Science platform designed to help enterprises develop and implement AI strategies to better understand the world of business and talent. Specializing in natural language processing, Vettd is able to combine disparate data into one universe where artificially intelligent agents work together to solve problems that were never thought possible.

I’m not sure if I’ll remember any of that. Anyway. What gave you the idea for your startup?

As a recruiter, back in 2008, the need to be educated objectively about why candidates did or didn’t matter became increasingly necessary to gain a competitive edge internally and against outside players. If something was able to normalize information in a way that I could better understand, it would have transformed my ability to perform at an even higher level on any position I worked on. Given that this technology could then be applied to multiple cases, it only increased its attractiveness to build and felt like a worthwhile goal.

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting?

Everyone can benefit from a better understanding of how to maximize their professional opportunities, whether they are able to do that themselves, or have someone do it for them.

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

Recruiters and analysts will be able to create AI in their own image to solve problems or gain insights into areas they deem valuable and won’t have to succumb to the limitations of big box solutions or a lack of coding abilities.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

That a person has a choice in where they work and that both employee and employer are honest about their opportunities with each other.

In this new digital world, what’s the main role of technology in hiring?

The role of technology in hiring is that it needs to educate and enlighten. Automating tasks is helpful, but it doesn’t make us better. There will never be an easy button in hiring and people need to understand that AI won’t 3D print their dream candidate.

Having trouble finding all the staff you need? Perhaps it’s time you started treating candidates like customers? HeyJobs can help you with that.

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.

To give us a better idea about his vision, HeyJobs CEO and founder Marius Luther answered our questions about his startup and how it came to fruition.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

HeyJobs is a cutting-edge marketing solution that brings the best candidates to companies. In a challenging and changing job market, HeyJobs partners with you to make recruiting successful again.

What gave you the idea for your startup? Is there a particular experience you could point to?

In our previous company, Memorado, we were always faced with not being able to hire fast enough. We tried all available means: jobboards, agencies and came up short. In the end, we started applying exactly the same logic and methods we used to acquire customers: data-driven online marketing on all available channels, highly converting landing pages and a lean funnel. The result was that more than 90% of our hires in that year came through our own “talent acquisition machine”. So we took the idea, “productized” it and now more than 500 organizations recruit with the HeyJobs recruiting solution.

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting?

We believe connecting the right talent with the right opportunities helps people live a fulfilling live. Employment has a very positive impact on wealth, peace, security and health of any society and we are proud to make an impact in this way.

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

In the same way, Google and online marketing changed the “customer acquisition” landscape. Recruiters and organizations will abandon the previous world of gut-feel based selection of jobboards, paying for listings and not being able to measure results. “Talent Acquisition” teams will form and use technology and data to maximize ROI on recruiting spend, measure results and create predictable success. HeyJobs serves as a “Google Adwords for Recruiters” which enables recruiters to steer their whole recruitment marketing from one place, rely on our machine learning technology to increase efficiency and use our software products to increase conversion rates.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

The ultimate success is hiring people who will do a much better job than you could ever do it yourself. Finding, attracting and developing talent to become the next generation of leaders and ultimately be good enough to make your own job redundant.

What is your favorite interview question and why?

“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.

What’s the role of technology in hiring?

I see technology as an “enabler” to help me do things I always wanted to do but never had the time to do. Post hundreds of jobs automatically to 100+ channels and adjust budgets daily based on how many candidates each channel delivers? What would take days to do manually, can now be done in seconds. Schedule interviews in seconds instead of writing forth-and-back a hundred times?  I am very critical of technology “replacing” human analysis and intuition in individual cases. For example interviewing is already such an individual and difficult task for humans that computers and machine learning will come up very short in this area.

Providing a great candidate experience for every single one of your applicants is often a goal far beyond even the largest hiring departments. Luckily, jobpal have the latest tech to help you with that.

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.

Luc Dudler is the founder of jobpal, a recruiting startup specialializing in developing sophisticated chatbots to fulfill your recruitment needs. With jobpal’s bots, you are able to automate a large element of your recruitment processes, meaning no candidate goes without being answered. He took some time to answer some questions for SmartRecruiters in order to let us know the impetus behind the idea.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Personalised candidate experience — at scale.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

We were already working on a recruiting product that wasn’t — let’s say — going through the roof. When Facebook Messenger launched chatbots on their platform, everyone was speaking about customer service and how chatbots (AKA automated messaging) were changing the communication and relationship between brands and consumers. We were thinking whether there’s an analogy to recruiting and how chatbots can change the communication and relationship between employer brands and jobseekers and talent. Turns out there was, and we’re very excited about the use cases we’re working on with our clients together.

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

For employers looking for new talent it’s crucial to stay in touch with people in a meaningful way — no matter, whether it is completely new people, candidates ‘waiting’ in your database or people you’ve rejected before. Chatbots can help companies to engage with talent, help them before, after and during the application process, stay in touch with people and automate many of the repetitive tasks recruiters have to do on a daily basis.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

Hiring success for us means that the candidate enjoyed the experience regardless, whether they got the job or not and also that a recruiter has more time with fewer, more relevant candidates.

What is your favorite interview question and why?

As a 1st 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.

What’s the role of technology in hiring?

I love this quote from a recent New York Times article: “In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,’” I think it’s spot on and I also believe that technology will soon be everywhere in hiring, but the challenge is not that tech will replace recruiters — the challenge is how they can work together well.

If jobpal sounds like a great idea to you, why not give it your vote in our Recruiting Startup of the Year competition?

As hiring tech continues to grow, one startup is hedging its bets not on how wide a base their software can coral, but how small. This is talent.io, the next big thing in boutique recruitment. Vote here!

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.

A selective tech recruitment platform, talent.io is one of the many startups looking to win big at Hire18. We spoke to CEO Ivo Betke, a software engineer, entrepreneur, blockchain enthusiast and startup mentor with over ten years’ experience in Software & Tech Recruitment. He started off as a freelance developer and later on founded webcrowd, a Berlin-based freelance agency and recruitment company, which he successfully sold to talent.io.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

Each week, we handpick and highlight 100+ great software engineers that companies can contact without a middle-man. Companies and candidates all get a personal Advocate to help guide them through the process. All of our candidates are strong and available right now, meaning that talent.io is the fastest way to recruit a programmer in France, London, and Berlin: average time to hire is 17 days.

Where did your startup begin?

talent.io was founded in March 2015, when two Stanford graduates that just sold their first startup to TripAdvisor, met a French entrepreneur and recruitment specialist. When scaling their former startup in the Valley, the Stanfordites needed tech talents, but realized a real lack of such candidates. Candidates were either unavailable, unresponsive, or just not good enough. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Frenchman had noticed that “selective marketplaces” were gaining traction across the world and that Europe was missing a major player. He then started working by himself on adapting this concept to recruitment in Europe. One day, as he was talking to a VC friend of his, he learned about two SF entrepreneurs working on the same idea. Having a “friends at first sight” type of experience, they joined forces after one Skype call.

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

Explaining our business model to clients, I often use the metaphor of ordering food at home. A few years back you looked at a flyer, chose a pizza and placed your order. No one does that anymore, everyone uses a mobile food delivery platform. We aim to achieve the same for recruiting: Instead of wasting your time and money on job ads and unsolicited applications, selective recruiting platforms allow you to talk to pre-qualified, actively available candidates that fit your needs. You can hire in days instead of weeks.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

Hiring Success is more than just filling up your open position with suitable candidates. Everyone hiring should aim to provide an outstanding experience that treats candidates as customers. Companies should provide sufficient insight before people decide to apply and provide an engaging and diligent process that enables both parties to come to a conclusion, after all, your ultimate goal should be to transform every applicant into a promoter of your brand and company, even if you don’t hire them in the end.

What’s the ultimate role of technology in hiring?

Technology should not take over hiring but enable it. It should support all parties involved to reduce operational overhead, so one can focus on getting to know the human on the other side of the table. Tech should enable hiring companies to understand what works for them, and how they can optimize their hiring process.

What are your employees saying about you? Could your company culture be in need of improvement? Ratedly is a new startup that gives you a heads up before things go too wrong.

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.

With over 20 years of experience in the online recruitment space, Joel Cheesman is a man who knows employer brand is critical – especially in today’s information world. That’s why he founded Ratedly, a recruitment startup that automatically monitors anonymous review websites, giving you back time, and perhaps a new perspective on your business.

What’s your company’s elevator pitch?

We’re LifeLock for your employer brand. We monitor over a dozen anonymous employee review websites automatically, so you don’t have to.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

Employment brand managers, HR execs and CEOs spend too much time manually visiting sites like Glassdoor, Indeed and others everyday. I wanted to automate this activity and give employers their time back.

Is there a particular experience you could point to?

A CEO I use to work with would painstakingly visit Glassdoor multiple times a day, and I thought, “What a waste of resources; there has to be a better way.”

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting?

Each year, the line between marketing and recruiting blurs. Monitoring your employer brand is just as important as a consumer brand.

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

A recent iCIMS study says half of millennials have declined a job offer because of poor anonymous employee reviews. This means reviews have real world implications for recruiting, which makes monitoring all the review sites online more and more important.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

Retention.

What is your favorite interview question and why?

“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.

What’s the role of technology in hiring?

Giving back time, our most valuable resource, to hiring managers. The best tech supports humans instead of replacing them.