A brief recap of the closing day of SmartRecruiters’ 2019 European conference for talent acquisition professionals.

The enthusiasm and momentum from day one at Hiring Success carried over to Wednesday morning virtually uninterrupted. Shortly after 8 a.m., the Compagnietheater was once again brimming with conference-goers. The crowd chattered excitedly, their optimism buoyed by the scent of freshly-brewed coffee in the air and the resonating sound of the theme from Mission Impossible, provided by a trio of string musicians in the foyer. It was an auspicious beginning to the day, indeed.

The chorus of voices in the lobby turned to whispers, then gave way to silence as the attendees filed into the venue halls for the morning sessions. The lectures held throughout the day proved to be equally engaging as Tuesday’s, ending the conference on a high note. Here’s a glimpse at some memorable moments from the final day of Hiring Success EU 2019. 

Best of Breed Innovation

SmartRecruiters’ Head of Product Management, Natalia Baryshnikova, commenced Wednesday’s activities by presenting on the ways that technology enables Hiring Success—particularly compelling candidate and user experiences. 

Before unpacking her ideas, Baryshnikova took the opportunity to share an anecdote about the Dutch Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, an apropos reference given the conference’s location. In his prime, Van Gogh produced four paintings per week. His productivity, she noted, was marked by regularity and consistency.

What does that have to do with SmartRecruiters or Baryshnikova? Regular and consistent productivity are instrumental in her approach to product development. Baryshnikova’s team strives to release around five product updates every week. This allows for a product that’s agile and can quickly adapt to the needs of both customers and candidates, thus providing compelling experiences.

To illustrate her point, Baryshnikova, with the help of colleagues Kelly Fang and Rafal Szczepanski, demoed two upcoming product feature updates: 

• The addition of multi-language, automated and integrated SMS communication with candidates
• The ability for users to forward CVs from their email accounts directly to their SmartRecruiters accounts

These innovations may not be Van Gogh masterpieces, but they’re essential in the ongoing process of creating an ATS that doesn’t just help people with their hiring needs, but to achieve Hiring Success.

Become an Inclusive Leader

What does an Aikido master, who also happens to be the first ordained meditation master of African-American descent, and is now an advisor to Fortune 50 CEOs have to share? Albeit a rhetorical question, Dr. Steven Jones walked the audience through a captivating session on inclusive leadership, with simple and live exercises that showed how different perspectives, when managed well, yield stronger results.

We learned that the human brain isn’t wired to see things as they are; we see things as we are. Similarity signifies safety, and as such we naturally gravitate towards perceptions and concepts that we’ve grown accustomed to. Jones encourages us to constantly remind ourselves to see things from others’ perspectives.

“Diversity is about counting heads, inclusion is about making heads count.”

Dr. Steven Jones

So on the conference themes of Innovation and Inclusion, approaching work (and relationships in general) with a truly open and inclusive mindset builds trust. This ultimately drives productivity and performance. As Jones thoughtfully put it, “Diversity is about counting heads, inclusion is about making heads count.”

Reflecting on Freedom 

The final keynote speech for Hiring Success EU 2019 was delivered by Khalil Osiris, a speaker, educator, and activist. Osiris, a one time member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, found himself locked into America’s criminal justice system at the age of 17 and wasn’t paroled until his 40s. 

While in prison, Osiris corresponded through letters with one of Nelson Mandela’s daughters. He found liberation through these missives, as well as intense self-reflection. After leaving prison, he began to volunteer for a civil rights organization where he mentored children of incarcerated parents. Soon thereafter he co-authored a book on the psychological experience of inmates, which became a college course, as well as a DVD series. 

Osiris continues to work as an advocate for those from backgrounds similar to his, and works with them to find inner peace and mental freedom before becoming physically incarcerated. His story is an admirable example of the perseverance of the human spirit and the importance of devoting one’s self to purposeful work—whether in the office or the world at large.   

The above mentioned sessions only represent the tip of the iceberg that was Hiring Success EU 2019. We would like to thank all of the amazing speakers at this year’s event, the entire SmartRecruiters team, the staff at Compagnietheater, and all of our sponsors: 

SmartRecruiters announces a new corporate responsibility initiative (CSR), and three other moments worthy of a mic-drop.

This morning, merry conference-goers were greeted by a classic case of San Francisco rain and fog. Is it any surprise that the number one tourist purchase in San Francisco is sweatshirt? However, damp environs proved no match for attendees’ giddy spirit or the palpable enthusiasm of a giant dancing alien named Winston the Smartian, SmartRecruiters’ brand new mascot.

The revelries began at the crack of 7:30. As conference-goers rolled into Pier 27 and began catching up over delicious cups o’ quiche, they couldn’t help but notice our friends at G2 crowd collecting surveys from SmartRecruiters customers. For every completed survey, SmartRecruiters made a $10 donation to Defy Ventures, a non-profit organization providing career training and mentorship for formerly incarcerated people in the US. Forgive the shameless plug, but it’s for a good cause, people!

But, enough of work. The sun is setting on our first day at the conference, and we’re all headed to the Smarty Party carnival, so let’s take a moment to recall some of the top moments of our first day at Hiring Success 19 – Americas.

When SmartRecruiters announced a new CSR: ‘Reverse Recruiting’ Invites Hiring Success Community to Give Back.

In the opening keynote by Jerome Ternynck, CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, attendees learned about the launch of a new corporate social responsibility program, Reverse Recruiting!

This CSR goes well beyond the SmartRecruiters business. It starts with SmartRecruiters pledging one percent of their equity towards a future foundation. SmartRecruiters also wants to ensure non-profits have access to top-level hiring technology through free and discounted services for organizations of all sizes, and ends with everyone (including your company) getting involved with Reverse Recruiting!

What is Reverse Recruiting?

On Reverse Recruiting days, recruiters no longer work for their companies — they work for candidates. They invite rejected candidates and previously overlooked talent to review their resumes, conduct mock interviews, offer suggestions, and assist struggling candidates in their job search. And guess what? Managers are invited as well! What a great way for everyone to give back.

SmartRecruiters will participate in Reverse Recruiting days once a quarter in all of our global offices, and the hope is your office will consider this as well. Sign up to learn more and receive a toolkit with all the materials you need to host your very own Reverse Recruiting session.

How to ‘backtest’ your hiring practice like the folks in finance do.

In today’s Select track, Are Purple Unicorn Hires Repeatable, Robert Coombs, CEO of Head of Business Operations at CredSimple, talked algorithms. It’s a word we hear a lot, and before today this author defined it as ‘the magical computer thing that figures stuff out for us lowly humans’. Now I know it’s actually as simple as a set of rules we use to problem solve. A low-tech example of an algorithm is a recipe. We can reasonably expect chocolate chip cookies when we put the right ingredients through the right preparation and cooking steps, but let’s get more specific.

An algorithm, whether it be for cooking or financial gains, has several elements in common:

• Inputs –  The thing that is applied: data, ingredients, historical trends,
• Outputs – The thing that comes out: transactions, delicious cookies, great hires
• Definite –  Clear, unambiguous, and feasible
• Finite – Must have an endpoint
• Effective – Similar inputs yield similar desired outputs

So, let’s look at a recruiting example. Take one of your really successful hires, and let’s reverse engineer the process to see if your recruiting algorithm is effective. This is called ‘backtesting’.

We took the example of Roy Baladi, head of the marketplace for SmartRecruiters. Say we want to test effective keyword searches — we look at the job description and start pulling keywords to search for candidates. Again and again, Roy’s name does not show up in the shortlist. What does this tell us? Maybe we need to revisit the job description (i.e. our input) and revise our wording to be more relevant towards the role.

Some people call this process ‘dogfooding’, which basically means internally testing your external processes to see if they are indeed effective. Have hiring managers test this on themselves to increase empathy and produce more accurate job descriptions!

Three recruiting lessons from teachers, that are scalable for your TA function.

Speaking on the Attract track, Brian White of the Auburn-Washburn Unified School District 437 asked everyone seated at the session Get Ahead of Seasonal Hiring Challenges to close their eyes and think of a teacher who made a positive influence in their life. For most attendees, it didn’t take long for inspirational educators to come to mind. Whether it was the math teacher who sat with you until multiplying fractions finally made sense, or the tutor who helped you master the past perfect in Spanish, the examples are practically infinite.

When we are asked to think of similar moments with recruiters, the examples are far fewer. So what can TA take from teachers’ best practices to boost candidate experience?

1. Learn what’s important to the student. The most effective teachers find out what motivates their students, what they care about, and use that knowledge to inspire learning.
2. Learn to communicate based on the individual. For teachers, this can mean catering to different learning styles. Brian’s team used this advice to create a texting line for job inquiries and implement a chatbot.
3. Understand the student is more than a number. Even with the incredible volume of students teachers interact with every year, they think of each one as an individual person. For recruiters this can be as simple as including a personal detail their outreach to show talent they really care.

The biggest myth is that anyone is normal.

In today’s hire track, during Mind Mix: Neurodiversity at Work’ Sara-Jane Harvey, an autism advocate who also is on the spectrum herself, helped our audience understand the prevalence and value of neurodiversity in our society.

The biggest mental health myth is that there is indeed a “normal”. Normal doesn’t exist. If your mind is a computer, then the way you process information is your operating system, and just because your computer doesn’t run Windows doesn’t mean it’s broken.

There’s no need to be ‘realistic’ when setting goals.

In today’s closing keynote, Colin O’Brady, four-time world record holding endurance athlete, reminds us how crazy his goals seemed when he first set them.

When Colin told his mother from a hospital bed in Thailand, where he was recovering from third-degree burns covering a quarter of his body, that he wanted to train for a triathlon, she didn’t say, ‘let’s set a more reasonable goal.’ Even with doctors saying Colin may never walk normally again, his mother took him seriously, and immediately got Colin small weights to start training.

Eighteen months later, Colin entered the Chicago marathon — and won! He continued to set outrageous goals, and continued to check them off like items on a grocery list. Climb the seven highest peaks in the world in a record-breaking 132 days – check! Be the first to cross Antarctica solo and unaided – check!

“I don’t think everyone wants to go walk across Antarctica,’ said Colin, ‘but I know that people certainly have challenges in their life. Everyone has reservoirs of untapped potential inside of themselves and can achieve really incredible things.”

From her unique perch in TA marketing, this CEO has an unparalleled view of the industry that you’ll want to see!

HR tech marketing is a pretty small niche to land on but for Maren Hogan, CEO and Founder of Red Branch Media, it just made sense. This “dyed in the wool” marketer was introduced to the burgeoning world of talent acquisition (TA) through her spouse, who was starting a recruiting agency back in 2008. Though that year turned out to be a most inauspicious time to start a company – need we recall the Financial Crisis of 2008 – the adventure did set Maren on her path towards becoming one of the leading experts in the HR and Recruiting Tech industry.

She laughs while reminiscing how Red Branch Media was intended to be a small-scale operation that would allow her to tweet from the couch. However, demand proved otherwise, and eight years later Red Branch has become a full fledged agency with 50 employees and presence at most major TA events.

Now, Maren brings her expertise to Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco both a judge for the Recruiting Startup Awards and as the host of her own session, The Innovation Quadrant: How to Align You with Your Company. We talk with her today about what she has in store for us at the conference, and the role of brand in sourcing.

Can you give us a preview of your session?

My session, The Innovation Quadrant: How to Align You with Your Company, comes from my deep interest in what drives innovation within companies. I began looking at different types of innovation and building a quadrant for companies and individuals to map themselves based on the Global Innovation Index.

In our 30 minutes together, I’m going to give a simplified version of the innovation questionnaire I’ve developed, and attendees will grade themselves on a scale of A-to-D in each of the four quadrants: management, leadership, inspiration, and individual contributor.

You’ve said recruiters need to sell a job brand – not just employer brand. Could you explain the difference between the two?

Anyone who has worked at a large company knows the culture will vary in different departments, branches, or teams within the company and that’s why it’s important to get specific.

On a super high level, employer brand is the company’s value proposition and culture. I think of it as the promise a company makes towards all levels of its employees from VP to janitor. On the other hand, the job brand will speak to the unique culture of a group within the company, and the responsibilities of the role. It’s something that you have to work more closely with the hiring manager to figure out, including understanding what type of person does well in that role.

Why is it so important to get so specific when it comes to brand?

Maybe it’s my Omaha sensibility, or just my marketing standpoint, but it doesn’t make sense to me that a company would make a commitment to hiring someone without being sure they were the right person for the job. The average salary in the US is about 62k. That’s the cost of a house here in Omaha. I wouldn’t make that investment without being sure.

Talk to me a little bit about some new sourcing channels.

Obviously, sourcing channels are always evolving, the ones that were new and innovative a couple of years ago are no longer as relevant today. When I try to discover new sourcing channels, I put myself in the candidate’s shoes. Who am I? Where do I hang out, in person or online?

When people think sourcing, they generally think ‘online’, but sometimes it works to go super old school. I had one client sourcing college students and what worked there was posting signs in bar bathroom stalls.  

Another sourcer I know just kept a pile of candy on her desk and gave out a piece to anyone who delivered a name and number. It honestly worked more effectively than any $100 referral bonus program I’ve ever seen… I guess because of the immediacy?

It just depends on who you’re looking for aka your ‘candidate personae’ and where that personae will be.

You talk a lot about candidate personae, is creating candidate personaes something that is becoming more popular now?

Anecdotally I would say yes. I’ve been talking about candidate personaes for over five years now. It used to be when I asked a group who had candidate personaes for their job no one raised their hand, now almost everybody does.

Hear more from Maren Hogan on why she’s coming to Hiring Success 19 – Americas in her video below!

Meet the leaders who will make you sit up, lean in, and question everything you know.

Look forward to two days of learning and inspiration, throughout our 50 plus sessions including more than 100 speakers – these are just a few of the leaders joining us for Hiring Success 19 – Americas.  

“We’re bringing together business leaders to shape the future of recruiting,” says SmartRecruiters Founder & CEO, Jerome Ternynck. “Organizations now lean on talent acquisition to provide the competitive edge it takes to win. The Hiring Success conference arms practitioners with the latest in recruitment innovation, strategy, and best practices.”

February 26-27, over 1,000  TA leaders from global brands like LinkedIn, VISA, and Google join SmartRecruiters to define the future of recruiting. Three tracks – innovation, diversity & inclusion, and Hiring Success – allow attendees to customize their own learning adventure.

Meet seven of our fan favorites returning this year to share their stories of growth and perseverance.

Lou Adler

Lou’s life as a recruiter began in 1978 when he walked into a hot wheels manufacturing plant to hire a production manager and said… “Forget the job description, walk me through the plant, tell me everything that’s wrong, and I’ll find someone who can fix it.”

And to this day he lives by the same credo – hire someone who can actuallly do the job. He calls it performance-based-hiring and it’s the foundation for everything that has come since, from founding his own company, The Adler group to authoring two Amazon bestsellers.

Read our full interview with Lou Adler, and learn why this simple philosophy continues to disrupt the TA industry to this day.

Saumya Chopra

Have you ever tried to implement new tech and instead of making everyone’s lives better, the chaos of transition brought your team to a grinding halt? Saumya feels your pain. As People Technology Product Manager for Square, she’s been leading teams through system changes for seven years, successfully!  

Through all these implementations, integrations, and transitions she’s learned one thing: it’s not just about finding the right tech solution but getting everyone else on board.

Read more about Saumya Chopra, and how to make your end user the center of tech adoption.

Bill Boorman

Recruiting’s “man in the hat,” Bill Boorman is the harbinger of new tech and the creator of recruiting’s merriest meetup, #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!

Learn more about Bill and why he was dressed as Father Christmas the first time we met.

Robert Coombs

Over the last decade, Robert’s career has hit every note in the tune to success. The current COO for The Class by Taryn Toomey, has advised top government officials, held events at the White House, testified before the US Congress, spoken at TEDx, and had initiatives featured in The New York Times. So he thought finding a new job should be easy, he was wrong.

After a frustrating couple of months of being screened by bots, he decided to flip the hiring process on its head by building a bot to apply to jobs for him.

Learn the end result of this little experiment and what it means for TA.

Sandi Lurie

As Sr. Director of Global Recruiting for the digital experiment platform Optimizely with over 25 years of experience, Sandi isn’t afraid of a little trial and error. And she expects the same adventurous spirit from the recruiters she works with.

While she’s always trying new things, one constant is her firm belief in empathy as a recruiter’s most powerful tool, and the proof is in the pudding. Optimizely was voted 4th best place to work in Silicon Valley in 2018.

Understand how Sandi and her team have helped foster an environment of support and why it’s the best thing they could have done to boost candidate experience.

Hung Lee

The creator of recruiting brainfood (the talent acquisition newsletter eagerly awaited by over 9,000 people weekly) is always asking questions. How do I reach the right people? What is my mission? How can I do it better?

If you follow him on social media you’ll see Hung is constantly gathering feedback from his audience and actually incorporating it! Maybe that’s why he has been able to build an audience that’s not only large, it’s active!

Get inside this influencers process, and start engaging your crowd today!

Jo Lockwood

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 in businesses and other organizations.

Learn more about the obstacles trans candidates face and how your organization can step up.

The second day of the SmartRecruiters first-ever European conference rolled out another full schedule of sessions, assembled a massive “crowd-sourced” band, and crowned another Recruiting Startup of the Year.

Day two began by looking towards the future of SmartRecruiters’ TA suite, in the opening keynote from Rebecca Carr, SmartRecruiters’ VP of Product. “Competition is fierce—we’re living in a talent economy,” she said, speaking to the packed conference hall in a converted warehouse in East Berlin. “It’s important that we deliver to you tools that are going to give you the capabilities to find and nurture talent well before the point of application.”

With many of the upcoming product updates taking years to develop, it’s clear that anticipating and predicting the needs of users is driving future innovation. Along with a design overhaul and new functionality that improves the first-time candidate experience at every stage of the hiring process, SmartRecruiters also revealed its plans to embed more intelligent features into the product, including the robust SmartJobs, which allows hiring teams to take the guesswork out of job advertising, placing your ads in front of the best candidates for the right price.

“SmartRecruiters doesn’t want to be a replica of the old system you used to use,” said Carr. “We want to be thinking farther ahead in terms of what we can be building and developing. We foresaw problems that you may encounter given how the talent economy is changing around us.”

Navigating change often requires the wisdom and insights of those who have already lived it, especially when it comes to achieving hyper-growth for you organization, chief among which is the ability to embrace failure. “In hyper-growth there is no room for perfectionism,” said Noor van Boven, Chief People Officer at online bank, N26. “You need to be able to make decisions quickly. If you are a true perfectionist you will fail.”

And hyper growth isn’t just a concern for company executives, as “being a leader in hyper growth means everyone can have an impact,” said Jeri Doris, Chief People Officer at Delivery Hero. “You’re building a brand, a product, and a company. That’s not just for leaders, but for recruiters—you are part of that company story.”

One of the most creative and surprising moments at Hiring Success Berlin was the participatory jam session, “Synchronicity”, led by Mehmet Baha, founder and senior consultant at Solution Folder. “We’re going to explore diversity and inclusion through music,” said Baha, who is also a percussionist, as he distributed shakers, drums, and other implements to a bewildered crowd. Baha then led the newly formed Hire18 band through a series of musical exercises, drawing parallels to how each has real-world implications in the workplace.

“Active listening is a crucial part of an inclusive work culture,” said Baha, instructing people to close their eyes and hear how each instrument’s unique sound worked together to create a unified composition.

To close out the conference, SmartRecruiters brought five companies on stage to compete for the title of Recruiting Startup of the Year. With only a few minutes to pitch their company to a panel of expert judges, the startup competition is now a central tenet of every Hiring Success conference. Find out which of the five finalists won over the judges and earned the shiny trophy tomorrow on the Hiring Success Journal.

But before we close the book on the first edition of Hiring Success EU we have to celebrate with an authentically Berlin party experience. Conference attendees who still have the energy will move up the banks of the river Spree to Säälchen, on the grounds of the renowned nightclub Kater Blau, where Berlin’s top techno and house DJs will share the stage with a ten-piece pop brass band, spectacular acrobatic performances, and a surprise guest performance.

Check out our day one conference wrap-up to read more about the sessions and speakers you might have missed.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and check back with the Hiring Success Journal for more #Hire18 insights coming soon.

SmartRecruiters’ first conference in Europe kicked off today in Berlin, with founder and CEO Jerome Ternynck setting the tone for two days of innovation, inclusion, and hiring success.

SmartRecruiters’ latest Hiring Success conference was inaugurated this morning by CEO Jerome Ternynck, who took the stage at the Glashaus, a former industrial space on the Spree river in East Berlin, promptly at 9:30am.

“Hiring success is a truly universal thing,” his voice reverberated throughout the hall, to 400 attendees, “and you are all here representing over 200 organizations from all over the world.

“All you recruiters, TA leaders, innovators, system owners, optimizers,” listed Ternynck, “all of us who’ve dedicated your career to helping companies find talent, to help people find jobs—we are critical to companies’ success.”

As HR Tech gets more sophisticated by the day, so does our community become truly global, as evidenced by the diverse crowds at conferences like this one. Plugging into the future of recruiting over the first of two session-packed days, speakers represented stalwart European players like Deutsche Bahn, Zalando and Lidl, as well as institutions as notorious as CERN and Humboldt University—represented by information-scientist duo, Dr. Juliane Stiller and Dr. Violeta Trkulja, linked hiring to one of the great issues of our age: forced migration.

Not everyone knows what it means to leave behind the life you know and rebuild everything, from the ground up, in an alien city. The scientists did a deep-dive with guests from Bayer and a Deutsche Banker, who is a Syrian refugee himself, into the programs available to refugees now, and how your company could start building its own systems to help integrate into the workforce talented people who need and deserve our help.

“Employers are insecure about the skills and language abilities of refugees,” said Stiller, “and applicants have a tough time knowing the systems for applying. Employers can help by accepting applications without cover letters, offer mobile recruiting, and embracing diversity.”

Another essential topic covered was how technology has changed when and where we work, and to assure this new world of remote work runs smoothly, Beat Buhlmann, one of the few people in the world with a doctorate related to managing virtual teams, the current GM for Evernote laid out the benefits of employing a remote workforce and relayed how to address the challenges created by managing off-site teams, from both a culture and a tech perspective. “It may sound simple, but if a candidate isn’t comfortable with video conferencing or sharing their screen,” he said via Zoom, presumably to prove a metatextual point, “it’s going to be a nightmare.”

To close out the day, Robindro Ullah, TA consultant and author, and Artur Skowronski, software engineer, Virtus Lab, ask the audience: What do Tinder, Amazon, and Alexa have in common?

Answer: they were repurposed by corporate recruiters to source quality talent. The keynote speakers shared some of the most innovative recruiting campaigns ever put together, and led an interactive workshop challenging left-brain functions to raise the bar on workplace creativity.

All this boils down to the premise that brought everyone together, from thousands of miles apart, for these two days: that hiring is the frontline of business success, and the more companies understand that, the better things will be for everyone.

“Who you hire defines your company more than any other activity,” stresses Ternynck. “It defines your outcomes as well as your culture. It defines your success as well as your failures. Who you hire defines you as a leader.”

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and check back with the Hiring Success Journal for lots of #Hire18 insights coming soon.

Hiring Success 18 Europe bedrocks itself on the three topics your TA team should be most thinking about: innovation, inclusion, and hiring success.

No longer powered by fax blasts into the great unknowable aether, Talent Acquisition has become an industry at the crossroads of inclusion, technology, and business strategy. A place of organizational importance unimaginable to the backroom resume-shufflers of yesteryear is now our reality. We asked for a seat at the table, we got it, and now we have to bring it.

Business leaders now have begun to view the people-function of their companies as a strategic asset, as they should. The challenge then becomes to keep abreast of the ever-shortening cycles of innovation, and that’s what Hiring Success 18 Europe, September 19th-20th in Berlin, is all about. Two days of non-stop workshops, demos, interactive presentations, and collaboration for practitioners to engage with the latest in best-practice for tech, diversity, and on-the-ground recruiting.

We’ve broken it down into three most challenging topics facing TA today, check out our full agenda here!

Innovation: big data, bots, blockchain, and AI.

In our exploding age of hyper-data, learn how recruitment advertising is poised to take over traditional job posting in “The Future of Job Advertising.” Watch chatbots battle it out live to answer your questions and prove their language-processing chops in “Battle of the Bots.” Will blockchain create a new gig economy, and how can this crypto-tech be the answer for data security compliance? Find out in “Blockchain in Recruiting.” Talk AI, or demo rather, with interactive presentations that illustrate just how far we’ve already come in “The March of Artificial Intelligence.”

Also: augmented reality, assessment, and analytics!

Inclusion: leverage social media, refugee candidates, and remote work.

Sure, you have candidates, but how do you turn this random group into a community? Find out how in “The Art of Community Building.” Tap into marginalized talent markets with “Have Your Hired a Refugee.?” If you are short on candidates, maybe your bias is blinding you: in “Ageism at Work” recruiters learn to root out irrelevant judgments so they can hire the best people. Go remote without losing engagement with these tips in “Inspire Your Remote Workforce.”

Also: why unlikely applicants make great hires and gender parity!

Hiring Success: leadership strategy, employer brand, and zainy campaigns.

Get on the same page as leadership in “Aligning the Board with Your TA strategy” and anything is possible. Your company is great to work at, so make sure the candidate knows it too in, “How to Pitch Your Company.” Or get inspired by the innovative recruiting campaigns in “Creative Recruiting Combinations,” spoiler – someone uses Tinder.

Also: hyper-growth, scaling through IPO, recruiter brand, and internal mobility!

Are you ready for the future of recruiting? Get to know some of our featured speakers here!

Let this HR veteran share some wisdom, drop some knowledge, and guide you down the daisy chain of f***ing up.

It’s not often one contemplates the philosophy of failure. Likely due to an ingrained dialectic that success is good and anything less is bad. But think a little harder and it becomes clear that failure is the only thing that gives meaning to any accomplishment. Yet just as everyone wants their life to reflect their shiny online persona, every business wants to sing its own paeans of market domination.

“Everyone is always coming to events and telling their success stories, and that’s great,” says Jeff Diana, an ex-Atlassian HR head, consultant to high-growth pre-IPOs, and man enough to admit he’s made some mistakes. “But when you stretch yourself, when you try to innovate, you’re bound to fail, it’s inevitable.”

After decades of on-the-job learning brought him to the tables of several advisory boards, Jeff definitely has the experience to hold court on the subject, and with “management consulting” as his current central role, something as inevitable, as essential as cocking things up should be part of the package. And yet, “we don’t hear a lot about failure as part of the process,” he says, “so in talking about it, hopefully, we can inspire people to get out of their comfort zones and take some risks. Failing is still an undervalued activity across the board.

“Read Eric Reis’ book, The Lean Startup, and you realize no one has a perfect strategy that they then go execute. You learn as you go, and it’s that continuous learning that creates the innovation. We are going to stub our toes, we are going to look back and see things we could have done better, but that’s all part of it.”

Far from orating early concepts for his own future tome – Chicken Soup for the Recruiter’s Soul, or something – Jeff knows where companies fail most because he knows what it’s like to be the one doing the failing. The most notable of which, Jeff says, “have skewed towards one of the two extremes, either moving too fast and not bringing people along, or trying things out but waiting too long to implement, which lessens the value. Figuring out that timing is an art.”

In my first 30 days I ended up firing every HR leader at every site I had.

Jeff’s first major blunder came early on, when he was hired by Safeco Insurance, “which is a couple-hundred-year-old, well-known insurance company. It was my first head HR job, it was a public company, and in my first 30 days I ended up firing every HR leader at every site I had. It was the right decision, they didn’t have the skills for what I needed to do, but I didn’t build enough credibility before I did that, so we saw a bigger dip in our performance before we turned back up.

“When I was with Atlassian, we had a lot of things work, but if I look back, we should have implemented certain things sooner, but we waited and lost opportunities. You know when you have an idea, a good one, you want to wait until it’s crisp, until you have all the buy-in, but then there’s a chance you miss the window.

“We still try and execute a lot of stuff on our own, when we should leverage the c-suite more.” On one Atlassian project, “we were doing ok, but things weren’t moving as fast as I wanted them to. We’d built an incredible recruiting function, but we had a lot of trouble hiring designers. We didn’t want to give up and go to an outside firm but we had to. So once I got the CEO involved, he saw that our hiring strategy was ‘mission critical’ and stuff started to move.

“Not looking for that kind of collaboration has a little bit to do with the ego – it’s about when do you check yourself and just ask for help. There’s a humility that comes with that. You have to have the self-confidence to be ok with that. You have to know what you don’t know.

“We talk a lot about culture and what we want our people to do in an organization, because we have to lead by example, and part of that is putting something out where you fail, and that failure isn’t really failure, it’s just part of the process that leads to the right answer. It’s a process to the solution, it’s not a point-in-time failure, and knowing this frees you up to take a few more swings. But leading well creates friction, if there isn’t friction you’re probably not leading well enough. And by that it’s implied you’re going to screw up.

“Sometimes our biggest mistakes actually arise from a desire to help the business. We can plan a recruiting team’s capacity, we know the model, but what typically happens is a manager comes along and says ‘hey can you take on these extra couple of recommendations?’ and we do, we try to stretch, but it waters down everything we do. We slow down, we lose focus, and because we’ve moved away from a model of ‘our recruiter can hire this many people in this amount of time’ for example, when you need to ask for more resources or investment, you go to management and they want you to 20 more. You say you can’t, and they say, ‘but you made this exception over there, why can’t you do it here?’

So whatever your good intentions, feel comfortable in sticking to your guns…

“So whatever your good intentions, feel comfortable in sticking to your guns around your model. It’s not to be inflexible, but to allow the business to resource you the right way. You can say ‘oh, you want to hire 50, well we can only do 40, so who are the very best 40?’ The by-product of those constraints is prioritization in the company around what you go after. In the end, you hone in on the jobs that are most important.”

It’s only being comfortable with the bungling that leads to that kind of self-confidence, and for better or worse, it is perhaps the title of another self-help book that best encapsulates Diana’s professional philosophy in one mouthful, which is to Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better.

The big day is coming up fast and proceedings are only getting bigger. But don’t be overwhelmed. Here’s the Who, the Where, and the Why You Need to Hear Them.

As Hiring Success 18 approaches, the more speakers confirm and the guest list grows, so a thematic focus tightens, and the optimal alchemy for our wide variety of panels begins to coagulate. Across the HR Tech industry, certain issues reveal themselves as universal and remain key.

Inclusion

As HR technology matures and holds humans more accountable in the process, how companies can become as inclusive as possible is no longer a matter of hopeful idealism, it’s a reality. The first stop on the inclusion train is gender parity in the workplace, and SheWorx will expose gender biases and explain how they’re helping to level the playing field. AARP will help identify ageism, in the hiring process, in ourselves, and offer tools to help combat the problem. On the physical side, ava.me will showcase their new app to let us experience deafness and how tech is bridging that communication gap, while BeMyEyes aims to do the same for blindness.

Innovation

Inherent in all these efforts at inclusion is, obviously, innovation, and to focus more on what ground needs to be broken to succeed from the tech side, Dock.io and StormX will reveal how they built a candidate app and how to innovate in the gig economy, while Tigran Sloyan, math olympian, will hold court on the science of learning and developing skills. To put tech into a real testing ground, Battle of the bots will entail 4 chatbots answering live questions from the audience in a contest to crown the last bot standing. IN a larger contest, Recruiting startup of the year finalists will pitch on the main stage to over 1000 recruiters, all eyes on the $5,000 prize.

Candidate Experience

In our focus on candidate experience, Nina Mufleh will share the story of her viral application when applying to Airbnb, and Rob Coombs will tell us how he created a bot to apply to 3000 at job at once. Adidas will share how they build storylines and campaigns that fit their brand, Equinox will let us in on how they extend their company brand to attract candidates, and TheMuse will open the books on how they scale their company branding.

Global Scale

Taking our session scope to a global scale, industry veteran Lou Adler will reveal his formula on how to materially improve quality of hires, IKEA will show how they deployed a recruiting system in 90+ countries, Bosch will teach us how they scaled their systems across the globe, and Square will detail how they built a recruiting function from the ground up.

All this would keep even the most sponge-brained attendees occupied with enough food for thought to get through the harshest mental winter, but we’re not done yet. Stay tuned for more announcements as Hire18 continues to burst at the seams.

Invention and innovation are at the heart of our economy and our democratic society. They’re one of the drivers of the American Dream (flagging as it might be), catapulting lives, changing businesses and shaping our national image. America was founded on a certain brazenness and ingenuity. So we should be good at this, right? Innovation gets a lot of lip service, but success remains stubbornly out of reach for many among even our best and brightest companies.

In my work studying how consumer research can improve enterprises’ innovation processes and improve their chances of success, I’ve come across innovation management research that focuses on how companies can succeed by making their businesses innovation ready.

In 2007 Uri Neren, Innovators International, was commissioned by The Mayo Clinic to research the best practices of companies that most often succeed at innovation. His challenge was to build a curriculum for improving Mayo’s own innovation process. Along the way, it became much more than that.

After working with Mayo, Neren continued his research, working with consultants, CTOs, R&D folks, social scientists, innovation experts and economists to refine his findings and arrive at 27 commonalities among organizations that get great results. In this article, I’ll focus on the top five that serve as a guide to Neren’s broader findings.

As companies around the world already know, innovation is an elusive goal. Nuren believes that’s because most organizations are programmed to standardize their practices. They value predictability and control, letting those benefits elbow out innovation. So how do successful companies avoid the predictability trap? According to Neren, you’ve got to “structure your organization to allow innovation to flow through it.”

During my interview with Neren, he described the five business practices that help make innovation repeatable and reliable:

Belief Systems

Getting everyone on the same page is a day-one activity. And for business, defining innovation is the place to start. We all think of innovation in a slightly different way. Through his research, Neren established a two-part benchmark definition:

• Innovation is “focused on breakthrough, transformative, far end of the spectrum innovation as opposed to the incremental” types of change
• Innovation is engaged in the “bigger picture, issues outside your walls, creating human behavior change.”

From here, each company needs to define innovation to fit their own mission and goals. The definition must be understood by the entire organization. That was the case at Medtronic, where even a maintenance worker purportedly answered the question “What do you do?” with the simple response, “I save lives.” Companies where the mission was bigger than profit inspired passion for and deep knowledge about the company culture throughout the employee ranks, and allowed those organizations to grow without needing top management in on every decision.

In addition to agreeing on how to define innovation and on what it means to your company’s mission, you need to change your team’s perspective, shifting from thinking about innovation as a “risky endeavor” to it being an exercise in risk management. In short: Innovation is something to be managed, not something to simply throw money at.

Structure Equals Commitment

Four findings stand out for how to structure a repeatable, reliable innovation process.

• Commit to the percentage of growth that the business expects from innovation and stick to it. Structure this commitment to be the catalyst for growing your top line.
• “Obsolete yourself.” Reward engineers and R&D for building, designing, or concepting the next innovation that will act to “obsolete” one of your products or processes before the competition does it for you.
• Create a set of “agreed to metrics, and a decision process by which products or services will be funded or killed.”
• Incorporate CEO ownership. Innovation teams should report to the CEO or COO and not just for the short term.

Johnson Controls made the boldest structural move Neren has seen by a public company. “They publicly announced that they would grow by 50% in one year, and they did it.  They knew that organic growth would take care of a portion of this, that expansion in Asia another percentage, and they left the remainder to a new innovation team that looked not only for new technologies but for new business models that would make their old models obsolete – before the competition could do it to them.“

Process that Leans on Research

Most innovation processes start with discovery, move to invention, followed by improvement, socialization within the company, and then go to market. Teams tend to spend most of their time in the invention stage, developing great solutions. No wonder; it’s a fun and exciting area. Instead, substantial time must be spent in the discovery phase, at the front end, understanding the behavior and drivers of your intended audience and the problem you are trying to solve. Unless you design a really solid consumer research phase as a foundation, you won’t really understand the question. This also helps to keep the project more “objective and follows Einstein’s philosophy and Kettering’s quote ‘A problem well-stated is a problem half solved’.”

Who’s done it right? Wine and spirits maker Pernod Ricard has an especially robust Market Opportunity discovery process and structure in their Breakthrough Innovation Group led by Alain Dufosse.

Talent Encouraged and Rewarded

“89% of CEOs say that talent acquisition and management will determine the innovation outcome.” But Neren’s research doesn’t show that to be true. It’s more important to put the right people with the right skills in the right spots with the right team. Then get out of the way. “All people will generate new and successful ideas given the chance.” Much has been written about the prescribed mental free time that some companies give their employees. And it’s true, according to Neren’s work: Simply assigning innovation to employee scorecards, then rewarding and recognizing them is the opportunity and motivation employees are naturally geared for. Daniel Pink says that “the secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishment but that unseen intrinsic drive, the drive to do things for their own sake, the drive to do things because they matter.”

Connected Culture

Neren admits that this last section — culture — is a hard one to study. But the one thing that keeps showing up is that innovation success is not dependent on whether the company culture is open to new ideas or requires strict work and substantiation for potential innovations. What matters most is that the culture is connected, so that people have access to one another and their ideas, and that all the contributing parties are recognized and rewarded. 3M had a rule that only one scientist’s name could be listed on a patent. As a result, the scientists were less likely to share information and work as a team to develop ideas and solutions. So 3M changed the rules to allow all the contributors’ names on the patent and scientists started sharing and generating ideas. It’s essential that individuals and teams have access to what and whom they need.

Each one of these sections, Neren says, is like the tip of an iceberg. There’s a wealth of information, insights and diversity that ladder up to these 5 practices.

At the end of our conversation I asked Neren what critics ask most often. He said that many say “innovation is harder than this.” And he agrees. It takes true dedication and the right leadership. Others say that you can’t structure innovation because the structure will kill it. But after years of study, he disagrees with that. Over hundreds of interviews and studies these are the practice areas that have proven to be the foundation for successful innovation. They are, of course, adapted and executed in many different ways to be consistent with company goals.

Lastly, I asked about the point at which innovation most often fails. His answer? Execution. Products or ideas often aren’t executed well because the originators of the idea were not as involved along the process as they should be. The inventors should be involved all the way to the “to market phase”, not simply running a process but representing the soul of the product.

And that speaks to my — and every — entrepreneurial heart.

This article was written by Mary Meehan from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.