Historically we’ve tracked and measured hundreds of metrics in our customers’ hiring activities inside the SmartRecruiters platform. This year, we have distilled that number down to 15 metrics that have the highest correlation with the health and performance of talent acquisition organizations as witnessed by our previous analysis. 

These metrics reflect our customers’ hiring performance in 5 important categories: Hiring Team Engagement, Recruiting Team Performance, Candidate Experience Management, and Company Internal Engagement.

Additionally, we have focused on metrics that are least impacted by variables such as company size, industry, type of roles typically hired, size of hiring teams, etc. 1) For each award, we use a combination of 3+ metrics that measure different aspects to support the selection. 2) We normalize the metrics with interfering variables to prevent favoring any particular type or company size.  

The winners will be selected from customers with the best performance across those metrics from Jan 1, 2019, to Dec 31, 2019. 

Most Compelling Candidate Experience Award

Candidates say the No.1 frustration during the overall job search is the lack of response from employers. The Candidate Experience Award applauds employers who take the time to continuously communicate status updates to their candidates at all stages in the hiring process. The award measures three factors: the response rate to all applicants, the response rate to interviewed and rejected candidates, and the speed of the first response. 

Most Productive Recruiting Team Award

A recruiting team’s success requires a combination of timely hires and systematic pipeline management. Successful recruiting teams make more hires on time and manage their candidate pipelines with intention. The Recruiting Team Award measures three important aspects of recruiters: their ability to fulfill the companies’ hiring needs, their efficiency, and their management of the candidate pipeline. 

Most Collaborative Hiring Team Award

Hiring the best talent takes a tremendous amount of teamwork. The Hiring Team Award recognizes a highly structured, efficient, and collaborative hiring team. The award measures three important factors: the level of involvement from hiring team members, the robustness of the hiring process, and the efficiency of individual interviewers.  

Most Active Company Award

Achieving hiring success takes more than the hard work from talent acquisition practitioners. The Company Award is measured by three important factors that gauge company-wide involvement with recruiting: how successfully employees are engaging with internal opportunities, the relative size of active user base, and the product usage level and user feedback in helping us build a better product.  

And without further ado the winners for 2019!

Most Compelling Candidate Experience

1. Equinox

Equinox prides itself on being the best of the best when it comes to high-quality fitness clubs. With such a top tier customer experience, Equinox needed a way to create the same experience of excellence when it came to candidate experience. Equinox uses a decentralized system for recruitment in which local branch managers conduct their own hiring based on their requirements. This approach utilizes around 20 full-time recruiters supported by over 300 local hiring managers who also often carry out many other Equinox activities on a day-to-day basis. SmartRecruiters decentralized systems to enable Equinox to increase speed and communication between hiring teams and candidates. 

2. Home Instead 
3. Devoteam
4. Wipro Digital 
5. RLH Corp 
6. Colliers International
7. Uncommon Schools
8. Dungarvin
9. International SOS
10. Allstate

Most Productive Recruiting Team

1. Public Storage

Public storage knows how important a productive recruiting team is to business success. With over 2,000 locations public storage needs to move quickly in order to meet the high growth demands of the company. Nathan Tan Head of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Analytics at Public Storage notes how velocity and cost metrics allow you to analyze whether the hiring processes in place are efficient and effective and adapt accordingly.

2. The Nature’s Bounty   
3. WAREMA
4. Evolution Gaming 
5. Uplift Education
6. Arkadin  
7. BlueScope
8. Uncommon Schools
9. Leidos
10. Abercrombie and Fitch Co.

Most Collaborative Hiring Team

1. Astreya

Astreya understands the importance of hiring the right people and to get that done requires communication and collaboration across hiring teams. Priding itself on providing both its clients and employees with unwavering happiness, Astreya relies heavily on hiring collaboration in order to assure a robust and fast-moving hiring process. 

2. Marc Jacobs 
3. BlueScope
4. Education Development Center 
5. Numberly 
6. City of Philadelphia 
7. Play Octopus
8. Jack Link’s Protein Snacks
9. Broadridge
10. Merkle Inc.

Most Active Company

1. Visa 

 With over 19,000 employees in 2019, it’s no surprise that Visa deals with a massive volume of candidates. SmartRecruiters ATS allows them increased engagement and collaboration across the board. With a high rate of user adoption at Visa, hiring teams have been able to achieve fast turnaround rates that increases the offer acceptance rate.

2. Biogen 
3. IKEA 
4. BlueScope
5. Square
6. FireEye
7. Mitie
8. American Iron and Metal
9. The Warehouse Group
10. Expeditors

The Methodology for Hiring Success 20 Awards is as follows. 

Methodology Used to Determine the Winners:

1) Most Collaborative Hiring Team Award

Metric 1 |Percentage of Jobs With at Least 1 Assigned Interviewer

Why: This metric reflects how structured the interview process is.

Metric 2 | Average Time to Complete a Review 

Why: This metric reflects hiring managers’ efficiency at completing their tasks to move the hiring process along.  

Metric 3 | Average Number of Distinct Users Involved per Interviewed Application 

Why: This metric reflects the hiring team’s level of involvement and the robustness of the hiring process. 

Metric 4| Percentage of Interviews With Ratings Submitted 

Why: This metric reflects hiring team’s participation at completing their tasks to move the hiring process along.  

2) Most Productive Recruiting Team Award

Metric 1 | Percentage of Candidates Moved out of New Stage 

Why: This metric reflects how well recruiters manage the candidate pipeline. 

Metric 2 | Completion Rate 

Why: This metric reflects the recruiters’ ability to fulfill the companies’ hiring needs. 

Metric 3 | Percentage of Positions Filled on Time

Why: This metric reflects both recruiters’ ability to hire and their efficiency (hiring on time). 

3) Most Compelling Candidate Experience Award

Metric 1 | Percentage of Applicants Who Receive a Response

Why: This metric reflects the experience of all applicants in terms of the company’s responsiveness. 

Metric 2 | Percentage of Rejected Candidates Who Receive Rejection Messages 

Why: This metric reflects the experience of candidates that do not move forward to be hired, but have at least one personal interaction with the company.  

Metric 3 | Average Time to Reply to a Candidate 

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of wait time. 

Metric 4 | Percentage of Candidates That Are Still in an Active Stage

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of closure and notification. 

Metric 5 | Percentage of Abandoned Candidates 

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of followup and closure. 

4) Most Active Company Award

Metric 1| Percentage of Hires That Are Internal Candidates OR Referral 

Why: This metric reflects how actively and successfully employees are engaging with internal opportunities. 

Metric 2 | % of User Base That Are MAU 

Why: This metric reflects how active the user base is on SmartRecruiters platform.

Metric 3 | UserVoice Upvotes and Requests

Why: This metric reflects the employees’ product usage level and their support of getting us to build a better product.

Congratulations to the winners! Be sure to tune in next year for the 2021 Hiring Success Awards!

Hiring Success is just 25 days away! As always, we’ve assembled the finest lineup of talent acquisition leaders to present on topics that will expand your horizons—professionally and personally. Join us for what’s going to be the most memorable recruiting event of the year.

Attending Hiring Success is a bit like visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The available content is exquisite; however, it would be next to impossible to try and absorb all of it in a single visit. There’s simply too much. It’s best to focus on quality over quantity. That is, of course, unless you’re into the whole conference fatigue thing. 

For the rest of you, we advise coming up with a shortlist of sessions tailored to your personal interests ahead of time. To help you do so, here’s our second roundup post of this year’s speakers. 

Albert Loyola: Accenture, Artificial Intelligence Lead in TA and HR

Albert Loyola is a technology and AI HR enthusiast, currently employing his talents at Accenture. Previously, he worked in talent development and HR for major corporations such as Duke Energy, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, PepsiCo, and Ignite.

In addition to artificial intelligence, he is an expert in the following areas: machine learning in employee training, RPA & intelligence automation in recruiting, design thinking, employee experience, and enterprise transformation.

Loyola will be leading the following session on day two: Reimagine Recruiting in the Age of AI.

Bridgette Corridan: Speaker, Talent Strategist & Coach

With over twenty years of experience as a talent strategist, speaker and coach, Bridgette Corridan is passionate about building talent strategies that support employee engagement, transparent cultures, customer satisfaction and stellar business performance. She deeply understands the importance of building and connecting leads that connect with a deeper purpose, bringing enthusiasm and positivity into the work environment.

Her areas of expertise include talent acquisition strategy, behavioral interview training, executive coaching, and talent systems architecture. She has worked closely with leading brands such as Apttus, Marin Software, Eventbrite, Open Table, Restoration Hardware (RH), and Stella & Dot.

Corridan will be co- leading the following roundtable discussion on day one: Candidate Experience. 

Ellis Briery: Triplebyte, Head of Talent

Ellis Briery is the Head of Talent at Triplebyte, a technical recruiting company that “helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort.”

Briery has been in the recruiting space since 2012; for four of those years he held the title of CEO and founder at T3 Intelligence. A San Francisco native, Briery is committed to scaling and evolving teams of top talent to meet the ever-growing needs of startups. He is an expert in creating full-cycle recruiting processes that scale. 

Briery will be co-leading the following roundtable discussion on day one: Employer Branding.

Jason Paradowski: Bosch, Head of HR Service and Talent Acquisition, Americas 

Jason was named Executive Director of the HR Shared Services team for Bosch in North America in 2013. He now serves as the Regional Head for HR Shared Services; servicing over 42,000 associates in North, Central, and South America. The Bosch Group is a leading supplier of technology and services with over 400,000 associates in some 70 countries in four business sectors: Mobility, Industrial Technology, Consumer Goods, and Energy and Building Technology. 

Paradowski will be leading the following session on day two: Slicing Time-to-Hire From 80 to 30 Days.

Elena Valentine: Skill Scout, CEO/Co-Founder

With the war for talent reaching new heights, Elena Valentine is on the frontlines of employer branding. Elena is an expert in leveraging video storytelling in talent acquisition, citing the medium as a much-needed antidote to poorly crafted, uninspiring job requisitions.

With the motto “you cannot be what you cannot see,” Elena started filming jobs as a way to get young people excited about the world of work. Since then, her team at Skill Scout has built a world class media company. Their films have helped clients like Nike and American Airlines engage candidates and employees alike. 

Valentine will be leading the following session on day two: Recruitment Video Storytelling.

Jonathan Kestenbaum: Talent Tech Labs, Co-founder & Managing Director

Jonathan Kestenbaum is the Co-Founder & Managing Director of Talent Tech Labs. He is a lawyer by education and an entrepreneur and investor by trade. Kestenbaum can be found at HR technology conferences all over the world as a sought-after speaker and panelist sharing deep insights into the evolution of the talent acquisition ecosystem. His company Talent Tech Labs operates as an innovation hub, fostering technological advancement that improves the way talent is sourced, engaged, selected and hired. 

Kestenbaum will be leading the following session on day one: Talent Acquisition Landscape: Attract

Ellen Kapoor: ITW, Talent & Leadership Development

Ellen Kapoor is a human resources professional with a passion for leadership and attracting, developing, and retaining the next generation of talent. She is currently the Director of Talent Management & Leadership Development at ITW. Working as part of corporate HR, Kapoor helps ITW by providing key leadership and support in ITWs candidate pipeline. She works to raise awareness of ITW as an employer of choice and ultimately enhancing the quality, depth and diversity of the company’s leadership pipeline.

Kapoor will be co-leading the following roundtable discussion on day one:  Employer Branding.

Laudine Vallarta: ETSY, Global Head of Talent Acquisition

Laudine Vallarta is a strategic people and talent acquisition leader with 14 years of expertise in the technology, retail, and network television industries. At Etsy, she is responsible for the talent acquisition roadmap, ensuring the company is in the best possible position to attract, retain and develop talent.

Among other things, she’s in charge of global recruitment employer branding, internal mobility, D&I recruiting and referral programming. She is an expert in building strong relationships with leadership and executive teams as an internal consultant to continuously collaborate and advise on the day-to-day as well as forward-thinking strategies.

Vallarta will be leading the following session on day one:  Interviewing Rubrics.