The sun sets on our final day, and here are five learnings we’re taking with us from day two.

Riding high off the carnival treats from the last night’s SmartyParty, Hiring Success 19 attendees braved another misty morning in San Francisco as they congregated at Pier 27 for day two of panel discussions, breakout sessions, and the highly anticipated Hackathon and Recruiting Startup Awards ceremonies. Day one set a high bar for exciting content, but the crowd appeared ready for a second round after fueling up at the fresh donut bar. How could day two top yesterday’s activity?

Day one of Hiring Success 19 saw SmartRecruiters announce the launch of its new corporate social responsibility (CSR) program – Reverse Recruiting. This three-pillar approach to CSR includes SmartRecruiters donating one percent of the company’s equity towards a future foundation, making best-of-breed recruiting tools available to non-profits of all sizes through free and discounted products, and hosting Reverse Recruiting weeks across all global offices four times annually. And, for this last part, SmartRecruiters wants to invite you and your company to join in.

Learn more about Reverse Recruiting, and how to host your own event, here!

Now let’s turn our attention to today’s events to revisit the best reveals and takeaways for Hiring Success 19 – Americas.

1. New Hiring Success function to support customer achievement

Hiring Is Success laid out SmartRecruiters’ 2019 product roadmap, as well as a vision for the future of TA!

With the announcement of Rebecca Carr as SVP of Hiring Success comes a new branch of SmartRecruiters, staffed by TA experts (all of whom have previously held high-level positions in people functions) who will provide SmartRecruiters’ programmatic support in the areas of awareness, transformation, acceleration, and optimization.

Here’s what this support will look like on the ground:

Awareness – Business engagement around the metrics that matter, where the business needs to be, and how it will get there.

• Business Audit
• Implementation Success
• End-user testing and analysis

Transformation – Setting realistic goals for change in alignment with desired performance metrics & developing programs to support it.

• Product success
• In-product education
• Candidate and user Surveys

Acceleration: Differentiating against the competition with innovative programs, new technologies, and aggressive performance goals.

• Pilot programs
• Local events
• Business apps and integrations

Optimization: Consistent re-evaluation of existing processes and technologies to ensure your business is staying current against the market and competitors.

• Expert Workshops
• Hiring success dashboards
• Process and Technology Certification

2. What are the concrete actions you can take to turn good intentions into results when it comes to gender equality?

Gender Inequality offered solutions and insight into the microaggressions women experience through the hiring process and within company culture…

“It’s important to keep the channels of communication open, especially with the hiring manager. Keep explaining and re-explaining the actual needs of the role and how those need could be addressed by a diverse group of candidates.” – Sarah Blackmore

“Examine corporate values and how they apply to marginalized people. If you have a corporate value that says ‘assume good intent’, that value might tell someone that they have to assume that this person with more privilege is making a mistake for the first time.” – Margarett Quigley

“Having lived most of my life as a white male I never thought about privilege until my transition. Now, as a woman, I’ve lost my male privilege, I see that people generally treat gender equality as a woman’s problem, not as an everyone problem. People want to be themselves as at work, but women find it hard to simply do that.” – Joanne Lockwood

3. Optimizely sweeps gold at the 2019 Hackathon

Three teams locked themselves in a room for the last 24 hours to build on top of SmartRecruiters’ APIs for the grand prize of $5000 in this year’s Hackathon.

While each team competed admirably, Optimizely took the grand prize with Action Center, an app that solves for task completion lag time.

Right now, Hiring Managers have to search flooded inboxes for buried at-mentions, but what if all hiring tasks were in a dashboard that they could easily click into via mobile – resolving tasks in moments of free time throughout the day? Action Center does just that. Now, hiring managers have access to a task dashboard on the SmartRecruiters mobile app homepage where they can easily click into tasks and send digital nudges to other members of the hiring team to do the same.

4. Be a recession-proof recruiter

Matt Charney talked the long game in Recruiting in a Recession. Economy and labor trends are cyclical, and just because we aren’t in a recession now doesn’t mean there isn’t one coming. So, how should recruiters make themselves critical to business success in fat times so they stay competitive in the lean? Here’s the short answer…

• Treat recruiting like business school: ask many many questions.
• Make your hiring managers happy. Most recruiters rate their performance as stellar, while most hiring managers rate their recruiters as subpar – bridge that gap!
• Measure the metrics you, as a recruiter, control.
• Don’t spend budget just because you can – make sure it will affect P&L positively!

5. Recruiting Startup Awards

Over 100 recruiting technologies competed for a chance to pitch their products on the  mainstage, but five finalists got the chance to pitch to the entire Hiring Success 19 audience.  This was a moment to celebrate innovation in TA, and, after deliberation from an expert panel of judges – as well as the audience – Candidate.ID took gold.

Candidate.ID’s software allows organizations to create genuine talent pipelines and easily identify candidates as cold, warm, and ‘hire-ready’​ in real time, claiming to reduce time-to-shortlist by 50 percent.

An increasing number of businesses are turning to more proactive hiring strategies to remain competitive in today’s job market economy. Reactive hiring no longer yields high-quality talent, Candidate.ID addresses this problem by zeroing in on pipeline automation, offering tools and insights that enhance hiring teams’ ability to source, discover, and nurture talent ahead of business needs.

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Thanks so much to all our attendees, and we hope to see you next time at Hiring Success 19 – Europe!

Virtual reality, instrumental jam sessions, live chat-bot battles, and everything else you would – and wouldn’t – expect from an HR conference.

Hiring Success 18 EU is here! 250 Talent Acquisition leaders from around the globe – including yourself, perhaps – have landed in Berlin for 48-hours of thought-provoking interactive sessions and live demos on three main tracks, #Innovation, #Inclusion, and #HiringSuccess, that will delve into the most important topical issues in recruiting today.

With over 30 sessions to choose from in only two days, we thought it wouldn’t hurt to recommend a few!

Have you hired a refugee?

#Inclusion

Is your company interested in starting a program to hire refugees? The first step is empathy and understanding. Hear from actual displaced persons about what it means to leave behind the life you know and rebuild everything from the ground up. The second half of the session invites informational Scientists from Humboldt University to participate in a panel discussion to deep dive into the programs available to refugees now, and how your company could start building its own.

Unlock potential with augmented and virtual reality

#Innovation

Explore the burgeoning fields of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, first through art, then though recruiting. Josephine Ackerman COO & Deputy Global Head Art, Culture & Sports at Deutsche Bank gives a live demonstration of how her company uses AR and VR to bring artworks to life in contemporary art exhibitions they support. These new technologies allow an artist’s intention and historical context to come to the forefront of the museum experience without dense wall text. Using only a smartphone, a static image or text can turn into a rotating font of information. Learn how Deutsche Bank and others have begun to apply the same principles to job advertising, onboarding, and training.

Battle of the Bots

#Innovation

Watch the leading chat bots battle it out in a live face-off. Leading recruiting chatbots will have a face-off in a live battle. Ask these virtual helpers questions to test the limits of their natural-language processing, get to know their unique personalities, and see how gracefully they fail. Your vote determines the winner at the end!

Accelerate revenue with TA

#HiringSuccess

Stop looking at TA as a cost center. Learn how the recruiting team at Microsoft were able to accelerate revenue for Azure Cloud during their digital transformation with heir Director of TA for EMEA, Elke Jorens. This workshop shows how infusing data from market and funnel-analysis contributes to the bottom line, so you can apply that same expert methodology to a project of your choice.

Synchronicity

#Inclusion

Whether you are a practicing musician or haven’t picked up an instrument since the recorder, this session is for you. Join the MIT grad and leadership expert, M Baha in an interactive jam session that uses the principles of music to promote the tenets of diversity and inclusion in a business setting.

Inspire your Remote Workforce

#Inclusion

While the draw of global talent is great, managing remote teams is still largely unexplored territory. Which is why we brought in Beat Buhlmann, one of the few people in the world who have a doctorate related to managing virtual teams, and the current GM for Evernote.  

Buhlmann lays out the benefits of employing a remote workforce and then shows how to address the challenges these offsite teams pose,  from both a culture and a tech standpoint. Walk away with the tools to sell your board on remotes hires, and the know-how of how to engage them throughout their tenure.

Internal Career Pathing

#HiringSuccess

Companies unanimously recognize the value of employees who have experience in more than one department, yet these high performers remain an anomaly rather than a matter of course. The abstract promise of great return on investment (ROI) in hiring, never seems to be enough to push internal mobility initiatives to the top of the to-do list. So we bring you the director of people for Native Instruments, Laura Moreno Salinas, and the Director and Program Lead Accelerate One HR at Coca-Cola European Partners, Sanam Moayedi-Stummer to demonstrate the success of their internal career pathing programs and help you get started on your own.

Recruiting Startup Awards

#Innovation

Step into the future of TA technology with our Recruiting Startup of the Year Competition, where the newest and most daring startups in HR pitch it out on our main stage. The winner will receive €9,000 in sponsorship and an article about them written by a leading TA influencer. The contest began July 1st, when these fledgling startups leveraged the strength of their social network to be voted into the top five, who will now convince the expert panel at Hiring Success 18 they have what it takes.

It’s the hottest HR topic not directly related to tech. But to achieve true diversity and inclusion at work we must overcome pesky traits like unconscious bias, and to assure that reality, there is Natalie Mellin.

Natalie Mellin has gained experience from innovative tech companies like Spotify and King, and has played a central role in creating workplace awareness around diversity and inclusion over the last decade. She is one of the pioneers who helped reshape the conversation, and behavioral science inspires everything she does. With cross-functional research, she creates practical tools like process nudges and strategies to help both individuals and organizations make an impact.

With her vast experience from working both in-house and as well as consultancy, she is known as an influencer, dynamic speaker and we are honored to welcome her to Hiring Success 18 Europe in Berlin, September 19-21.

What does hiring success mean to you?

We need to change our hiring structures and processes to make better hires, which in the end, creates better and more sustainable business success. For me, this means identifying where you have the most bias in your process, redesign the steps to mitigate this, and cultivate diversity and inclusion.

How have attitudes towards diversity and inclusion changed over the last while?

Despite years of diversity training and anti-discrimination policies, one could argue we’ve not come very far. In fact, the World Economic Forum reports that the gender gap is widening in their 2017 report. McKinsey’s also reports in their 2017 Women in the Workplace study, that women represent only 18 percent of all c-suite roles. That number compares to 12 percent for men of color and only 3 percent for women of color. This is despite the fact that McKinsey’s 2018 report, ‘Delivering through Diversity’ reinforced the link between diversity and positive company financial performance.

Our brain gets hit by 11 million signals at any given moment in time. But we can only consciously process 40 of those. This means a tremendous amount of signals get processed using prior knowledge and patterns. This is unconscious bias. We need to focus on nudging our unconscious minds to mitigate more of the racist, sexist, and such behavior, and I believe we can do that through behavioral economics. Another way of saying it, my view has changed in the terms that I no longer believe we can train away our bias. We need to design it away.

What do you tell companies the biggest advantage of diversion and inclusivity are?

Besides the fact that it’s the right thing to do, it makes business sense.

1. Driving business success and profits – a McKinsey report on public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 33 percent more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 21 percent more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
2. Drive innovation – Leaders who give diverse voices equal airtime are nearly twice as likely as others to unleash value-driving insights, and employees in a ‘speak up’ culture are 3.5 times as likely to contribute their full innovative potential. HBR
3. Understanding our consumers and essentially making us smarter – In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: non-homogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different than you challenges your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking, which sharpens performance.

What kind of resistance do you get from organizations, and what do you do to get on board?

Nowadays it’s mostly about ‘how’. Something I completely understand, but we have years and years of research showing that diversity is correlated with both profitability and added value. Even so, for some companies or some executives, even the most compelling data seems to require additional rounds of convincing. Probably shouldn’t surprise me either. after all, research has proven facts and data don’t actually change people’s minds. But I found this quote the other day and thought it was quite good.

‘The house burned in front of them but they wanted the data to prove it. That is the audacity and ridiculousness of making the business case: convincing one of the obvious. If the smoke doesn’t alarm you, the fire certainly should.’ – Bernard Coleman III

What are behavioral economics?

I will again borrow the words of a much wiser person; “…the best way to think about behavioral economics is in contrast to standard economics. In standard economics, we think — we assume — that people are perfectly rational, which means that they always behave in the best way for them. They can compute everything, they can calculate everything and they can make, always, consistently, the right decisions. In contrast, behavioral economics doesn’t assume much about people. Instead of starting from the idea that people are perfectly rational, we say we just don’t know, but let’s check it out. So, what we do is we put people in different situations to check how they actually make decisions. And what we find in those experiments is that people often don’t behave as you would expect from a perfectly rational perspective. So, in essence, it’s an empirical and non-idealistic way to start looking at human behavior. And because we find that people behave differently than expected, often irrationally, it also leads often to different conclusions about how companies should be created, what the government should do, and, of course, what individuals should be doing.”  – Dan Ariely

Was there a eureka moment that made you want to address diversity and inclusion full-time? How did that happen?

Well, my mom tells me that I was questioning gender equality as a young kid. Then I took gender studies at university. This was an eye-opener in many ways. I found out about intersectionality, that we are more than one thing and that the power structure today will hand me a completely different experience as a white, middle-class woman compared to a woman of color from a lower socio-economic background. After being inspired by behavioral economics, I got angrier that we weren’t making enough progress in the space of diversity & inclusion in companies. And I thought everyone was tackling it wrong. I couldn’t understand why no one was using cross-functional research to make progress faster.  So I started to get involved. First, it was a project, then it was 10-20 percent of my job, until it took over all of the time I spent at work.

What is one thing even well-intentioned organizations get wrong about diversity and inclusion?

Many companies believe it’s too hard a problem to solve, or they focus too much on how to ‘speak’ to our conscious minds when trying to create change. I hope that more companies will learn from behavioral economics and embed D&I philosophy into the business strategy. It works best when a CEO truly thinks about D&I as a strategy for business success.

What about starting your own firm, how did that come about, and what can you do differently on your own that you could have with your previous employers?

It grew primarily organically. I started getting requests a few years ago, but sadly didn’t always have the ability to help while working in-house full time. This spring I decided that I needed a new challenge, and in the near future, I want to develop a free tool to help companies who may not have the funds to drive change. It’s a very exciting time. I get requests right and left. This is key as we will never succeed here as one, we need to create community and drive change on a bigger scale. That’s what I hope to do with my company.

In a world where 47 percent of jobs are susceptible to automation, growing your skill set as job security is no longer enough. So how do you stay ahead of the machines?

“Your future job probably hasn’t been invented yet.” Who among us didn’t hear a version of this forecast as a bright-eyed schoolkid?

And while the prognostication ended up true for many, it wasn’t the full story. There are plenty of unchanged job titles, but the skills required would have been beyond the imagination of that childhood you. And this is where recruiting stands today, the job that once required people skills and a penchant for organization now asks it’s practitioners to be financial, data, inclusion, legal, and IT experts – all while the revolution of HR Technology creates expectations of hyper efficiency, leaving no space for practitioners to set aside time for development in their day-to-day.

It’s a recipe for burnout. Businesses need to start thinking like Apple and Google and reposition themselves as “learning organizations”. That means being a company in a state of constant transformation. They must provide employees the training they need to be the best person for their job two, five or ten years down the line.

What we know about adult learning, from research pioneered by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in the 1980s and carried on to the present day by the Center for Creative Leadership,  is that it usually happens socially, informally, and on-the-go. Seventy percent of what we learn about our job is from, well, doing our job, 20 percent is from our networks, and 10 percent is through formal presentations.

It’s in that last 30 percent where things get interesting, when people come out of their silos to discover the best practice of tomorrow, engage and expand their networks, and gain automation-proof skills to keep them relevant. That’s why, even in the digital age, it’s imperative to attend conferences, learn, and share ideas with the experts who put the newest learning into context.

That’s why SmartRecruiters has seized opportunities to dissect and discuss our industry with practitioners on the ground, and this summer, we take our Hiring Success Conference series global.

On September 19-20, we land in the heart of Europe for two days of seminars, product demos, and networking with 250 top talent acquisition executives, thought leaders, founders, investors, and the hottest recruiting startups.

Watch a live chatbot showdown in “Battle of the Bots,” where the audience asks these virtual helpers on-the-spot questions to test their functionality. Learn to inspire a remote workforce and leverage flexible employment options to increase diversity and productivity. Join the movement for gender parity by learning to recognize and mobilize talent without bias.

Join us this summer as we explore the latest in innovation, inclusion, and hiring success.

Check out our agenda here!