After a decade in the industry, SmartRecruiters’ Head of People, Sarah Wilson, shares why she still never misses a conference.

Sometimes I walk away from an event and think, “That was pretty good, I am glad I went,” and sometimes I skip out of the room thinking, “Holy shit I love my industry!” Our Toronto Hiring Success breakfast definitely fell into the “holy shit” camp. It was an early morning, a time of day that pairs poorly with jet lag and Toronto humidity. The struggle was real getting out of bed. Though the hotel was moments away from the venue, by the time I reached the slightly muggy room, I was already thinking, “This is going to be a long one.”

“HR is the coolest job, you get to impact everyone in the company.” Sarah Wilson @SmartRecruiters #RecruitingAutomation pic.twitter.com/ObMc8rKgmu

— RAS (@RAS_SF) June 14, 2018

Moments later, a few of my favorite Torontonians walked in – equally blurry-eyed – and that amazing thing happened when you remember why you love something. HR has always been about the people for me. The people we serve, but also our peers, our exhausted fellow practitioners who can make an early morning conference session fly by with insight and enthusiasm, and I wanted to share some of the top takeaways that sent me back to San Francisco still skipping, even after 10 years of doing this whole HR thing – and in ascending order:

5. Think of marketing and recruiting like peanut butter and jelly.

We’ve been talking about Marketing and Recruiting intersecting for several years, but now it’s really happening. The consensus from the room was that marketing (for now anyway) belongs inside the Talent function (ask us again in a year or two and see whether we change our minds), but we have a lot to learn from our marketing counterparts. At the top of the list is how to be data driven when we think about reach, response, and investment. The key to having a business case for marketing spend is built upon solid data. If you aren’t sure how to do that, don’t be shy about asking your friends in marketing.

4. Just tell the truth.

Not every candidate is going to get hired. In reality, 99 percent of the candidates you meet may never work for your company.  What’s important to them is that you keep them in the loop. Let them know if you aren’t going to hire them – gently of course – because all they really want is the truth from you. One of our panelists talked about rejecting a candidate over the phone because there wasn’t an open opportunity, but offering to chat casually with a few colleagues so the candidate would be top-of-mind when a position comes up. Taking accountability:   Making the candidate feel special:

3. Help hiring managers more.

Listen to their needs, learn from them, and lend them your expertise so they can pick the best candidates.

2. Never feel alone!

Every story prompted a chorus of nods. When we opened to questions from the floor, there was continuity in the flow of ideas. My a-ha moment that morning wasn’t so much a tactic I could take away and implement tomorrow,  it was that I felt a sense of community. Which leads me to my final takeaway…

1. Get together more often.

Talent Acquisition is a team sport. It’s an industry that gets better by sharing. Yes, the war for talent is real, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to win it for the industry as a whole. Of course we are a competitive bunch, but we are also a group of “people people” who gather energy from everyone around us. The people I meet at conferences inspire me, and push me to be better – and I know I can do the same for them. Who’s with me?

Join SmartRecruiters for Hiring Success 18: European Edition, being hosted September 19-20th in Berlin!

Find out what un-conferences are all about, as SmartRecruiters’ head of DACH sales development navigates one for the first time.

First off, let me explain the concept. An “un-conference” is not quite the opposite of a conference, it’s more like a free-spirited sibling. In both instances you go to learn, it’s just two different ways of going about it. Un-conferences are typically intimate gatherings which ask a lot of the attendees in terms of engagement – one does not attend an un-conference, one participates.

I arrived at HR Bar Camp a bundle of nerves, as I knew the first activity of the day would be picking our schedule. And not just selecting sessions. Participants would be creating our agenda in a whirlwind pitching session.

Nine am and 200 eager participants are ready to get started. After a quick introduction from our hosts Jannis Tsalikis, VP of HR for VICE DACH, and Christoph Athanas, managing director and senior consultant at Meta HR management consultancy GmbH, the pitching begins and anyone who has something they want to share, or burning HR questions they want to discuss can stand up, give their spiel, and hope their suggestion gets picked as one of the day’s sessions.

Being my first unconference, I figure I should go all in. Why miss an opportunity for an intriguing conversation? I juggle a few ideas around CRM, job-matching, chatbots… but after a few minutes I know it has to be recruiting AI. We HR people are still trying to get our heads around this new reality that, until recently, seemed like science fiction, so I knew people would have a lot of questions: Will I be replaced by a machine? Will AI help root out unconscious bias?  

The timing couldn’t be better actually. See, SmartRecruiters recently announced the first native AI Recruiting Assistant, and this new capability helps discover candidates and checks bias while saving recruiters time. I teamed up with my colleague Camila, and 30 minutes later we were throwing our names into the ring as potential session leaders. Ours was chosen and we rushed to prepare for what turned out to be a full house.

There is a lot to cover and only an hour to cram in all this information, so we begin with one of the topic’s basic premises: candidate selection. How does the process actually work in most organizations?  Research shows that recruiters spend an average of six seconds looking at a resume and it makes you wonder – How many well-earned call-backs never happen? How many good resumes are lost among stacks of paper?

Most of our participants agree that six seconds is not enough time to make an informed decision on an applicant. Some even wonder if it’s worth it to look at resumes at all, as long as they can’t take the proper amount of time with each one. But that leads us back to the problem of volume. There’s no way to take five minutes with each application when you receive 300 for every opening.

Of course, there’s matching technology, “but didn’t we try that already?” a participant accurately points out, which is how the conversation proceeds to the difference between keyword matching and AI. In the former, if a resume lacks a certain vocabulary, or “keywords”, the system fails to identify a match. While the latter technology uses an algorithm based on clustering concepts to imply skills that aren’t mentioned explicitly.

Most of our group works in large companies and receive hundreds of applications daily so this solution really speaks to them, the general consensus being that an AI assistant surfacing relevant applications will enable the recruiter to spend more time on other parts of their job, like working with hiring managers or expanding their networks.

Our conversation about finding the best candidates incorporates two sources routinely overlooked, though they are perhaps the best resource for finding qualified people who are interested in your company already: internal candidates and former applicants. A native AI assistant on your applicant tracking system will assure those valuable prospects don’t get overlooked. Another great thing about recruiting AI is that it cuts way down on bias, inherent or unintentional, by providing a list of qualified candidates without the judgments that are likely to creep in with only a six-second screening.

Looking back, did we end up answering all the questions about recruiting AI? To tell the truth, we probably only created more. And that was my biggest takeaway about unconferences: it’s all about asking questions, and by asking questions, you start new conversations.

SmartRecruiters’ Hiring Success 18 is already set to be the defining HR and recruitment conference of the year. Taking place in San Francisco from March 12th-14th, Hire18 will consist of numerous workshops, firesides and presentations with some of the foremost speakers, thinkers and innovators in today’s HR space.

Below is the current list of confirmed speakers, and we will keep things updated as more speakers and their session plans for Hire 18 becomes available. To not miss out on any of these insightful experts, make sure to register today.

Lisa Wang – Founder/CEO – SheWorx

At only 29, Lisa Wang has already achieved a lifetime’s worth of accolades – featuring on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, attending Yale University and setting up a successful food delivery app, Fooze. If that’s not enough, she’s also won eight gold medals and two silver for rhythmic gymnastics at various international competitions, earning her entry into the Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 2014.

Now, Lisa is dedicated to helping other women achieve the same level of success with SheWorx – a global collective of women entrepreneurs striving to assist others gain the capital, knowledge and access they need to set up their own companies.

At an Hire18 fireside chat, Lisa will discuss issues concerning gender parity, in particular the biases and slights which often go undetected in various companies and sectors.

Tigran Sloyan – Founder/CEO – CodeFights

To the untrained eye, coding can often seem like an inaccessible and daunting field filled with jargon, double monitors and insanely fast typing. Luckily, Tigran Sloyan is here to make things much easier by helping aspiring coders develop their skills via fun games.

Tigran is the co-founder of CodeFights, a San Francisco start-up which aims to discover, build and and promote technical talent through core game mechanics. They are especially interested in supporting coders in finding new positions, introducing an ‘Interview Practice’ mode in order to help candidates grab top jobs.

During Hire18, Tigran will host a fireside chat discussing how, in a post-resume world, companies can add similar assessment levels to their recruitment processes, improving data and reducing bias.

Nick Macario – Co-Founder and CEO/Co-Founder – Remote.com/Dock.io

Nick Macario is dedicated to staying ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving world of recruitment and employment. He is currently founder to two San Francisco Bay area companies, Remote.com and Dock.io, both of which harness the latest technologies to pair workers with opportunities.

Remote.com uses artificial intelligence to locate freelancers and remote workers and connect them with employers, while Dock.io aims to use blockchain technology to create a decentralized data exchange in which information can be passed between apps seamlessly.

Byron Katie – CEO – The Work

Named by Time Magazine as “a spiritual innovator for the 21st century”, Byron Katie is leading spiritualist teacher specializing in reducing stress and harmful thinking. Her philosophy, named ‘The Work’, revolves around the idea that suffering is caused by believing our stressful thoughts.

Through international workshops and numerous books, Byron teaches new ways of thinking to reduce stress and improve efficiency and happiness in the workplace.

Andrew Blum – CEO – The Trium Group

After a successful career with Towers Perrin’s Strategy and Organization Practice, Andrew Blum now heads The Trium Group, a consultancy firm that operates on the mantra: “All strategy problems are leadership problems.” Armed with 20 years of consultancy experience, Blum’s expertise allows him to change the hard-entrenched thinking of business leaders, resulting in important breakthroughs for major companies.

Lee-Martin Seymour – Co-Founder/CEO – Xref

Having worked in recruitment for 17 years, Lee-Martin Seymour knew the industry’s damaging pain points all too well. That’s why he decided to set up his own company to tackle one of the worst: inefficient referencing.

With Xref, candidate referencing is taken from the long, convoluted and inefficient process of yesteryear into an all-encompassing platform that is quick, data-driven and secure.

John Sumser – Principle Analyst – HRExaminer

Since the inception of the internet, John Sumser has been wondering how the web could be employed to revolutionize recruiting and find the best candidates out there – a task which is becoming more important as technology moves ever more rapidly. His thoughts and insights are now central to leading HR newsite HRExaminer.

Most recently John released The Emergence of Intelligent Software: The 2018 Index of Predictive Tools in HRTech, an in-depth industry analysis on the emergence of intelligent software that is sometimes all-too-simply banded together under the moniker of AI.

For an in-depth Hire18 interview with John Sumser about the future of recruiting and AIs role within that, click here.

Matt Charney – Executive Editor – RecruitingDaily

An alumnus of Hiring Success 17, Matt Charney cut his teeth on the recruitment side of major corporations like Disney and Warner Bros… Later he would take on HR marketing roles for companies such as Monster and CornerStone.

Now, he uses all of that experience to run the daily editorial operations of RecruitingDaily, the number-one online resource for the HR and recruiting world.

Gerry Crispin – Principal and Co-Founder – CareerXRoads

An experienced and sought-after speaker, Gerry Crispin travels the world dispensing the unique sage advice that can only result from over 40 years in the recruitment business.

As well as his frequent seminars, blogs, and numerous published titles, Gerry also heads up CareerXRoad, a special invitation-only event in which competitive corporate hiring leaders discuss and share their insights and experiences.

Bill Boorman – Founder – #truEvents and @BillBoorman Ltd

Somewhat of a maverick renegade of the HR tech world (he never wears a suit for one thing), Bill Boorman’s aim in life is to put people in front of each other and get them to talk. To achieve this he founded #tru events, a recruitment conference which prides itself on being unlike any other. Instead of lengthy lectures in front of a Powerpoint presentation, #tru prefers intimate, smaller gatherings where practically anyone can get involved in discussions – making great contacts along the way.

In addition to this, Bill has worked to advise and consult on recruitment with various companies and corporations, especially in relation to the implementation of new technologies.

Ethan Medeiros – Senior Talent Acquisition Partner – Jane.com

As one of the fastest growing online retailers, Jane.com needs recruiters and hiring managers who know their craft in-and-out – especially when brand is central to their success. That’s where Ethan Medeiros comes in.

With over 10 years worth of experience in recruiting in the online and technical sector, Ethan brings insightful hands-on everyday operational experience to Hiring Success 18.

To find out how Ethan achieves hiring success at Jane, head over to our pre-Hire18 interview, here.

William Tincup – President – RecruitingDaily

A compatriot of Matt Charney, William has hundreds of articles, HR conferences and podcast hours under his belt – making him one of the foremost authorities on the emerging technology and issues of the recruitment world.

As well as writing and presenting, he also works closely with startups to provide bespoke HR tech advice and consultancy across areas from marketing, to sales, to brand, and beyond.

Kyle Lagunas – Research Manager – IDC

As the head of IDC’s Emerging Trends in Talent Acquisition and Staffing research department, there are few people better placed to elucidate the technologically complex world of the next few years of recruitment. Whether it’s blockchain or artificial intelligence, Kyle will help you understand how the changes on the way to the HR tech world and how your company can successfully navigate them.

Ilit Raz – Co-Founder & CEO – Joonko

Named after the first woman to summit Mount Everest, Joonko is a firm which can actually deliver results on your diversity training. Ilit has created a firm which looks at your internal data to locate unconscious bias within your structure and operations and then suggest meaningful responses.

Scott Johnsen – Design Manager, Brand & Design Systems – UserTesting

Need to test your product but don’t have a viable target audience handy? Well, that’s where UserTesting comes in. Whether its a website, app or even a physical product, UserTesting can give you video, audio or written feedback from the people you want to turn into users. At Hire18, we’ll have Scott Johnsen, the manager responsible for devising UserTestings own UX experience.

Robert Merrill – Head of Global Talent Acquisition – Ephesoft

With intelligent document capture software company Ephesoft looking to expand its workforce by 100% in the next year, they’re going to need a recruiter who knows how to get the best of the technology available. Luckily, they have Robert Merrill on their team, a highly experienced recruiter with reams of experience in diverse companies.

Helping Ephesoft scale up! After recent funding, our profitable company is doubling in the number of employees worldwide over the next year. I’m here to help lead the charge. I enjoy working with this scrappy, fast-paced, cutting edge team. They are true visionaries in this valuable, yet unseen industry of intelligent document capture.

Steve Fogarty – Senior Director Talent Futures – Adidas

A veteran of sports wear giant Adidas, Steve Fogarty has been the brain behind the behemoths recruitment for over 10 years. Having worked in establishing its worldwide recruitment brand, Fogarty now heads up the Global Talent Futures Team, a division tasked with keep Adidas’s talent acquisition ahead of their rivals through innovative, data driven and digital solutions.

Lou Adler – CEO & Founder – The Adler Group

A giant of the recruitment industry – and a Hiring Success 17 alumni – SmartRecruiters is proud to invite Lou Adler back as a speaker for Hire18.

Having founded one of the business biggest and most respected recruitment consultancy and training firms, there are few personalities in HR with a resume to match Lou’s. Furthermore, using his Performance-based Hiring model was inspiration, Lou has penned a series of best-selling tomes, including Hire With Your Head and The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired.

When he’s note writing books, he is also a frequent and notable contributor to LinkedIn’s influencer program, as well as Inc. Magazine, Business Insider, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Eva Muller – Managing Consultant HR Transformation and New Work – Promerit

Need someone to revolutionize your companies recruiting? Well, you’re probably looking for someone like Eva Muller, one the leading HR brains behind one of the most highly regarded recruitment consultancy firms, Promerit.

Having gained crucial experience from some of tech’s biggest names – including Siemens, IBM and Hewlett-Packard – Eva now heads up a wide range of varied projects, such as HR Strategy, HR Transformation, Digital HR and Talent Attraction and Acquisition.

Marie Kofler – Global Project Leader – Bosch

Working for one of Germany’s biggest and most internationally recognized brands is no easy gig, however Marie Kofler has made her mark on the company, rising from a Junior to Senior level. Now she leads up Bosch’s HR IT projects, making sure the team at Bosch have all the right tools to achieve Hiring Success. Perhaps it’s no surprise, they prefer to use SmartRecruiters ATS.

Thibault Duchemin – CEO and Founder – Ava

San Francisco based entrepreneur Thibault Duchemin is a man on a mission to break down barriers in communication – for everyone. He founded Ava, an app which provides communication and conferencing software for deaf and blind users, allowing to to seamlessly become involved in any conversation they like. The idea took off, winning numerous awards including the Phillips Innovation Award.

Now he’ll put that mind to helping to solve today’s recruitment issues at Hire 18.

Paige Cherny – Project Expert – Recruitment Technology Consultants

If you find yourself sitting near Paige at Hire18, expect to get involved in a deep conversation about Talent Acquisition. Paige loves talk and learning from professionals, experts and basically anyone she meets. She marries this gregarious nature with years of experience with major companies – such as T-Mobile, Amazon and SAP SuccessFactors – in order to deliver technical and organizational solutions to recruitment challenges for all manner of customers.

Angie Verros – Founder – Vaia Talent

You know those dull emails you constantly receive from companies? Well, Angie Verros probably didn’t write those. Instead, she has forged a reputation for approaching recruitment with a unique flare and humor. Over here 13 years in recruitment, she has used these assets to build high successful social and brand awareness campaigns, eventually forming her own company, VaiaTalent.

Lisa Hu – Senior Vice President – Blippar

Imagine a future where you can interact with any physical product in the world from the comfort of your desk. Well, actually don’t bother imagining it, because that’s something you can do right now. Blippar is a world’s first visual search engine allowing its users to interact and experience products via the wonder of augmented reality.

Blippar’s Senior Vice President, Lisa Hu, will be joining Hire18 to discuss how this revolutionary technology could change the recruitment world, as well as our day-to-day lives.

Sophie Huss – Global Director of Talent Acquisition – Arkadin

Sophie Huss is a talent acquisition veteran who understands that, in the modern world, recruitment is marketing. And if she says this, you should probably listen, as Sophie has worked for over 25 years in both BtoC and BtoB marketing with major corporations such as FujiFilm and Coca Cola. Now, she knows HR is where her heart is and is bringing all her accumulated experience to bear at Hiring Success 18.

Chassidy Rellinger – Director TA & Global Implementation Lead – Avery Dennison

There are few areas of human resources that Chassidy hasn’t made her mark in, including HR management and research and development. More recently she’s made the move to talent acquisition, successfully heading up the recruitment efforts of the global packing solutions brand Avery Dennison.

Gaurav Dosi – Product Manager Facebook Jobs – Facebook

No one’s entirely sure what the impact of Facebook Jobs will be, although Gaurav Dosi is probably in the best position to make an educated guess. As Product Manager for Facebook’s newest endeavour, Gaurav holds all the secrets HR managers the world over want to get their hands on. Although, unfortunately, we can’t expect him to spill all the Facebook Job beans at Hire18, you can rest assured his presentation will be a must-see for anyone curious for what Mark Zuckerberg has in store.

Sandi Lurie – Senior Director, Global Recruiting – Optimizely

Having previously worked with some of the biggest names in tech and HR – including Salesforce, LinkedIn and Google – Sandi is bringing a thirty-year in the making treasure trove of wisdom to Hire18. Now, she heads up the full cycle recruitment, talent acquisition, analytics and initiatives for Optimizely, an innovative platform that provides a safe, experimental proving ground for businesses and developers the world over.

Tracey Allison – Director Global Talent – Avery Dennison

With an impressive resume spanning Vodaphone and Microsoft, Tracey established the talent acquisition infrastructure for packaging materials giant Avery Dennison. Additionally, Tracey is a master of graduate hiring, having assumed the responsibility for scouring the world for the best up-and-coming talent.

Remember, you’re only going to be able to take advantage of our speakers’ experience and knowledge if you have a ticket. So make sure to grab one early while you still can.

After 36 years in recruiting, the creator of Tru Events knows what this industry needs: conferences that are fun and robots that do 80 percent of our work.  

Bill Boorman, aka the king of social recruiting (don’t call him that to his face though), will be joining us February 26-27 at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, in San Francisco. He’s the guy who breaks all the rules and always wears a hat. You’ll see him hosting Battle of the Bots or poking in and out of sessions looking for the next crazy, interesting thing to bring to the world of recruiting. You definitely can’t miss him and here’s a little preview to show you why.

It started, like any good story, at a recruiting-fest in Toronto. Bill looked around the hot, noisy venue, which was actually a university lobby, and decided he needed some fresh air.

“I’m going outside to sit under that tree and talk about recruiting,” he shouted, “anyone who wants to join me can.” And with that, he made haste to the tree. As it turned out, he wasn’t the only one who needed to get out of the stuffy room because 100 of the 140 attendees followed.

As Bill shared his recruiting wisdom from beneath that tall arbor, it made him realize that this informal session was how he wished every conference could be: the opportunity to mingle casually, to talk shop, and more often than not, the best conversations he had were post-formalities, over a beer.

So that’s the day Bill decided he wanted to make an event that felt like more like this casual, informal moment beneath the tree, which he dubbed an ‘unconference’. No over-managing, no speaker applications, no speeches. Just discussion, connection, and some drinks.

This idea grew into what are now called Tru Events, which can take place anywhere in the world, wherever someone wants to collaborate with Bill to make one.

Although I see a schedule posted for today’s Tru Berlin Unconference, held across the grounds of the Deutsche Telekom startup incubator Hub:raum, Bill assures everyone that they can come and go as they please:

“The point of a Tru Event is to make it right for the attendees, so people can really make it right for them and in the spirit of the city they are in. You see us here in Berlin: 4 pm, full Christmas garb, everyone drinking gluhwein. That’s perfect for here. For another city, it might be different.”

Bill is dressed like a superhero version of Father Christmas. A red floor-length cape instead of a traditional jacket catches the wind as we walk outside. The white faux-fur trim highlighted by the moonlight makes for a dramatic picture as he leads me into a breakfast nook where we begin our chat, we are settled between two ongoing sessions – one a roundtable on technology that can help people find jobs overseas and the other a discussion on inherent bias in recruiting.

The participants are lounging on oddly shaped and uber-cool ergonomic furniture that has become the hallmark of startup workspaces. We are all wearing Santa hats and holding gluhwein. Everyone is chatting happily but, as I look around the merry group of cap-wearing HR heads, I begin to worry that a forced icebreaker is imminent.

Bill starts off with his vision of how people would participate in a Tru Event:

“Let’s say someone wanted to come to the conference and just hang out at the cafe and network without going to a single session. Perfect! Equally, if someone wants to go to every session, take notes, and not say a single word, that’s ok, too.

People can have the experience they want. You don’t need to come in and moderate because the groups sort themselves out. We want to create an environment where people can be themselves and participate in a way that’s meaningful to them.

If you can’t think of something worse than being made to participate in an icebreaker, no one is going to make you stand up and say two truths and a lie.”

Relief. I wonder if he can sense a weight has been lifted from my soul knowing I won’t be subject to any forced corporate merrymaking. I begin to feel at ease with this wisecracking Kris Kringle, who can balance a mug of hot spiced wine comfortably on his knee while waving away the shushes we’re getting from the sessions on either side:

“Listen, take notes, speak, lead a session – do what you want. There aren’t any speaker applications. People will vote with their feet..”

That means speakers don’t have to be approved by the conference chair, instead, someone can simply sign up and they are given a time and a space. If their subject is compelling enough, people will come.

It seems simple so why don’t more conferences subscribe to the Boorman method? Bill points out that for some, an unconference is a hard sell:

“After a traditional conference, people will leave with five or six really clear things they want to execute once they return to work. Whereas an unconference value is harder to quantify. You’ll leave with a lot of leads both in terms of people and ideas. You’ll have new topics to explore and people you actually want to connect with in the future.”

Bill has been called “the king of social recruiting” by China Gorman, the managing director of  Unleash, one of the best-known HR Festivals in the world which welcomed 9,000 attendees globally last year. It’s a title Bill says is unearned, even embarrassing, although this modesty is dubious given that the appellation is prominently positioned in his LinkedIn bio.

“I never even used the term social recruiting,” he insists. “It’s just recruiting. Recruiting used to happen in my office with a pen and paper or maybe through the newspaper. Now we’re in the mobile age and moving into the data age so now recruiting happens online. Wherever the people are, that’s where you want to be.”

Despite the pitfalls of throwing HR-world caution to the wind, Bill would like to see a little more of what he likes to call the ‘explorer attitude’ from his colleagues in the recruiting industry:

“I like to try things I don’t think will work first, so I at least dismiss them. Instead of ‘best practice’, I do ‘test practice’.

I want to feel like a pirate or an explorer, trying new things, and these unconferences give me that opportunity.”

The unconference attitude of experimentation and individual experience is catching on, even the big conferences like Unleash and HR Innovation & Tech Fest have pivoted towards tailored experiences for each attendee with roundtables, panels, and group discussions.

“I think Tru events and unconferences have made the attendee experience a key factor in conferences success. Basically, we made the idea of having fun at a conference mainstream.”

So you’re welcome, HR! Because when Bill started in recruiting at the age of 16 (36 years ago if you’re counting) there were just trade shows and lectures, a far cry from the interactive expos with hands-on demonstrations and hipster baristas we enjoy today.

Bill hopes these innovations in how we share information as an industry will lead to changes in how our industry actually works. Because despite all the new technological tools he’s seen come and go the way HR and recruiting is done seems to be stuck. Bill elaborates:

“A good example of how the industry of recruiting and HR has been pointedly unimaginative is the way we test the quality of matching algorithms. Companies would ask their best recruiters to fill 30 jobs from 500 CVs, and if the algorithm for the matching technology chose the same list as the real-life recruiters it was considered good.

So what we are getting from tech is not better, we’re just increasing scale and speed. The actual outcomes are the same.”

He’s got a point. If we make the matching algorithms imitate the human recruiters we’re just imbuing our technology with the same inherent biases, and what’s better about that?

“We should judge technology as good if it makes different decisions than us otherwise we’re just making the same mistakes faster.

Applicant tracking systems are essentially just bigger filing cabinets. The main thing we’ve done with technology is increase the number of people in our system.”

I didn’t imagine such a bleak view coming from such a jolly man. Perhaps sensing my disillusionment, Bill does offer some hope:

“Well ages are getting shorter and shorter and with each new one, there’s an opportunity for change. I consider the last age to have ended when we moved from desktops to mobile devices. Now we are moving into the data age and the question is how are we going to use this massive amount of information.

All the data that’s been created can be used for good or bad. Will we use it to make people’s lives and jobs better or will we use it to separate people and control them? – that’s the challenge we have now.”

His solution? Let the machines take over:

“Right now, we could automate 80 percent of the hiring process if we knit together all the available tech. So if you have 100 recruiters and I can take 80 percent of their work away, I can either fire 80 recruiters and get the same job done with 20 or I can give 80 percent of their time back and see what they do and I think it would be much more about networking and building relationships.”

With nowhere to hide in busy work and paper pushing Bill foresees some growing pains in the industry.

“It’s not a palatable truth to say ‘this machine can select better people than me and I’ve been doing it for 20 plus years. Its natural to be wary, no one wants to be replaced. What they need to do is to start looking around at the busy work like scheduling and sourcing and say ‘how much better would my job be without all this shit?’”