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.”

The Winner of Hiring Success 18 – Berlin Edition’s Recruiting Startup Awards drives engagement from hiring managers and new employees by meeting both at their individual points of need.

As Recruiting Startup Awards heat up for Hiring Success 19 – Americas with over 100 startups vying to be one of the top five who will be joining us in San Francisco February 26-27 to pitch it our in front of an expert panel of judges and one-thousand plus TA leaders (voting ends February 4, click here to pick your fav!), we talk to the latest winner about their product and vision.

Enboarder wowed judges last September with an intuitive onboarding platform that helps candidates hit the ground running, boosting retention rates for employers.

Onboarding is a major struggle for most organizations. In fact, according to a recent a recent SHRM study “half of all senior outside hires fail within 18 months in a new position and half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days.”

The reality is Hiring Managers are busy and most lack the HR training to orchestrate new hire engagement in a meaningful way. That’s where Enboarder comes in. The name itself is a portmanteau of “engaging” and “onboarding”, and the mission is pretty much as simple as that – make onboarding engaging for everyone, including hiring managers.

We turn to partner strategist for Enboarder, Chris Cherry to learn more about how it all works, and the Enboarder’s vision for the future of talent acquisition (TA).

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

Enboarder is an experience-driven onboarding platform that guides new hires and their managers through the onboarding process. We enable HR to design beautiful, engaging digital content that delivers automatically along bespoke timelines, straight to mobile. New hire/managers choose their communication preference (text message, Email, Facebook, Slack or WhatsApp). Each message is sent with an embedded link, which opens in the device browser when clicked. No apps to download, no usernames or logins, and no training required

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

Enboarder is built from the ground up to solve the onboarding challenge from an engagement and experience perspective. From our choice of communications channels, the way content is structured and delivered, to the interface of the platform, no other product so holistically delivers on employee engagement.

Enboarder is also the only onboarding solution that solves the engagement issue from the hiring manager’s perspective. Managers have a major influence on a hire’s experience at their new job, but they’re busy, and don’t usually have in-depth HR training. Enboarder provides manager coaching, nudges and reminders to help even the busiest of managers deliver engaging onboarding experiences for their new hires.

Why is your product a necessary tool for Recruiters?

The TA challenge does not end with the offer letter. Given the cost and effort associated with getting the right person through the door, it makes sense to take steps to ensure you then retain that talent. Enboarder is the bridge that ensures a successful recruitment process is followed up by an engaging onboarding experience, guiding both new hires and their managers through the process from offer acceptance to day one, probation, and beyond.

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

There’s a few things, Enboarder…

• Enables recruiters to deliver an engaging new hire experience.
• Makes new hires feel valued, accepted for their individuality and welcomed to their new organization.
• Helps prevent issues such as no-shows, and reduce early stage attrition.
• Gathers feedback and prompts stakeholders to immediately address problem areas.
• Provides a consistent experience for all new hires and promotes positive engagement with their manager.
• Leverages advocacy from new hires to generate referrals and promote workplace reviews (e.g. via Glassdoor).

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

Founded in 2015, we have powered more than 100 thousand onboarding experiences via our platform. Our team is growing, with offices in Sydney, London and Austin TX. We are focused on major growth over the coming year, including expanding our international presence.

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

The human factor will continue to be the key to success in TA. Strong employer branding will need to be backed by real relationships, connections, and employee engagement.
At the same time, smarter technology will play a key part in helping busy employees and employers build these meaningful connections while balancing the other tasks that need to be done.

Enboarder will continue to evolve and innovate this intersection of technology and human experience.

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 biggest Hiring Success conference to date continues to drive engaging content alongside top-tier networking with over 1,200 talent acquisition (TA) leaders.

Are you a compliance wonk? A D&I devotee? An HR buff? Or, an HRIT connoisseur? Do you live recruitment, breathe TA, and are always thinking ‘what’s the next level for the industry?’ If so, get ready, because we are ready to nerd out with you at the fourth annual Hiring Success Conference, February 26-27 in San Francisco!

SmartRecruiters returns, once again, to San Francisco’s storied bay for Hiring Success 19, where TA leaders from around the globe will come together for two days of interactive sessions, the latest recruiting tech innovation, and top-tier networking that will define the future of recruiting.

Register now until January 18 for last chance on early bird pricing!

With 50 sessions, 100 speakers, and over 1,200 attendees #HIRE19 will be our largest event to date.

Participants can look forward to the scenic views at  Pier 27 that overlook the San Francisco Bay, where floor to ceiling windows and contemporary design gives a refreshing indoor-outdoor experience that will promote presence throughout the marathon of learning that is #HIRE19.

Recruiters on the front lines of today’s talent scarcity know firsthand how digitization is pushing everyone – from candidates to employees – to constantly sharpen their skills and stay abreast of the latest innovations. Hiring Success 19 helps practitioners do just that. TA practitioners share their experiences, learn from industry leaders, and workshop challenges with their peers.

Hear from practitioners like Sam Sepah, Organization Development Program Manager at Google, Anita Grantham, Chief People Officer at Pluralsight, Tara Strebe, Senior Director Global Talent Acquisition at Visa, alongside industry thought leaders like Lou Adler and Bill Boorman.

Three tracks help you create your own learning adventure. Mix and match to meet our expert content at your point of need. (full agenda to be announced shortly!)

• Innovation: Understand the latest recruiting tech and see how these digital tools will actually affect you and your practice.

• Inclusion: Stories of success and inspiration from hiring practitioners that will help you create the business case for a diverse workforce and inclusive work culture.

• Hiring Success: The case studies and hiring hacks from practitioners who have #BeenThere and know your pain points.

Two fan favorites return this year: Hiring Success Hackathon and Recruiting Startup Awards.

Hiring Success Hackathon Grand Prize: $5,000

This year we are excited to announce our second annual Hiring Success Hackathon. Teams will challenge themselves to build innovative features on top of the SmartRecruiters talent acquisition suite in just 24 hours. Inspired by our commitment to innovation and usability, we invite developers to join us in testing the limits of our Public API – and their own creativity.

All are welcome to apply! Submit your idea and list of participants to hackathon_team@smartrecruiters.com by January 15.

Recruiting Startup Awards Grand Prize: Gold Sponsorship for #HIRE20

Over 100 recruiting startups leverage the power of their networks to earn a spot as one of the final six teams who will pitch it out for the grand prize in front of our expert panel of judges and the entire #HIRE19 conference. Vote here to decide who makes it to the final round!  

See the latest recruiting tech, from AI job boards, and in-depth analysis tools to chatbots with big-personality and even bigger functionality. Be amongst the vanguard when it comes to TA innovation alongside the dreamers, makers, and entrepreneurs disrupting HR tech.

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Finally, networking: the exchange of ideas that only comes from being together with your peers (and heroes) in person. As much as we all value planning and strategy, there must always be room for the spark of spontaneity that happens when we unwind and digest all the learnings of the conference with other people who speak our TA language.

At #HIRE19 we leave space for you to make connections and follow up with presenters. Catch-up during one of the networking breaks, or meet during the Smarty Party while we all relax with food, drinks, and entertainment.

Be sure to follow us @smartrecruiters for agenda and speaker announcements.

Register now until January 18 for last chance on early bird pricing!

Lou Adler won’t stop working until the war for great talent is won, and with 40 years of experience, his radical recruiting strategies continue to disrupt the industry.

When you think Lou Adler, one phrase comes to mind, “performance-based hiring”. Since he started his career over 40 years ago (pre-internet and pre-job-boards), he’s been asking himself the same question, “what does the person who fills this job need to do?” – not “what skills do they need to have?” – This simple philosophy has been the foundation for everything that has come since, from authoring two Amazon bestsellers to founding his own company, The Adler group.

You can usually find this recruiting vet sharing his wealth of knowledge on his social media channels, or in person at conferences like SmartRecruiters’ own, Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco.

In 1978,  Lou Adler was a fresh recruiter with a background in finance and engineering, just trying to find a new production manager for a hot wheel manufacturer.

It was the “Beach Boys era” as he describes it, and in the spirit of youthful defiance, this California native wanted to try recruiting a little differently.

Imagine, I walked into this hot wheel plant on my first recruiting job and told them to forget the job description, walk me through the plant, tell me everything that’s wrong, and I’ll find someone who can fix it.

It may seem like a counterintuitive way to recruit, but 600 or so job placements later, Lou still works this way. According to him, making lists of desired skills and experiences is not only arbitrary and inefficient, it’s counterproductive.

When you find someone who can do the work – which is what you really need anyways –  you open yourself up to the best and most diverse talent pool in the world.

And forty years later Lou’s hunch is proving true, axing the requirements list is a great way to improve diversity in your candidate pool. According to LinkedIn’s 2018 Global Recruiting Trends Report, the majority of women only apply when they meet 100 percent of listed skills, vs. men, who apply with just 60 percent.

Just ask Lever, a company that recently achieved a company-wide, 50/50 gender parity (a seemly impossible feat in Silicon Valley) partially through doing away with the ‘requirements’ sections of their job ads.

It makes you wonder which of Lou’s current theories we’ll be hailing as revolutionary in 2058.

Read on to find out how Lou got his start and how hiring has changed from then ‘til now.

So Lou, if you don’t ask about skills, how do you determine if someone can actually do the work?

Simply ask, ‘What single project or task would you consider the most significant accomplishment in your career so far?’

The candidate will usually take two or three minutes to answer, and then you, as the interviewer, can use the rest of the time to delve into the particulars of how they accomplished the project and what obstacles they faced.

Now you have everything you need to know to determine whether or not that candidate is suited to the position.

Who taught you the importance of hiring great people?

I’m dating myself here, but my first managerial job was in 1972. I was fresh from my MBA at UCLA working 12-hour days in Michigan of all places, and the reason I was there was Chuck Jacob, my then supervisor. This guy was seriously a genius. A Harvard whiz kid who, at age 29, was the number-two financial guy at a two-billion-dollar company.

So anyway, I have a big financial report to complete and present the next day when Chuck calls me up to help him with some interviews. I try to turn him down because ‘I have more important things to do’, but after a brief pause, Chuck blasted in my ear the phrase I will never forget: ‘There is nothing more important to your business success than hiring great people. Nothing!’

He continued by telling me to ‘get your ass over here’ and right after he hung up, that’s what I did. We interviewed 20 candidates that day, took eight out to dinner that night, and eventually hired three.

We returned to the office at 10 pm and Chuck and I began the financial report that took until three in the morning to finish. It was handwritten, and kind of a mess, though to our credit, the information was all there.

When we explained to the board why we had forgone the formatting, they agreed, ‘there is nothing more important to your business success than hiring great people. Nothing!’

What’s the hardest part about being a recruiter today?

These days there are too many people in the churn. Technology makes it really easy to change jobs, so now a job is a commodity rather than serious business decision.

To change jobs, used to be a real hassle, a person would have to spend half a day with me at my office filling out paperwork and answering questions. So believe me, no one would bother with it unless they were really serious.

What is the role of technology in hiring?

Technology directs you quickly to the right people. Thirty years ago it took weeks to do the sourcing I now do in a couple of hours. It’s great to save that time and money but I would consider all these tools enablers, not solutions. At a certain point, you have to get people on the phone or in person. Otherwise, you are wasting your time.

What’s one mistake you made at the beginning of your recruiting career?

I wanted to challenge myself so I started taking assignments I knew nothing about. However, I came to find that just as a salesman has to know his product, so a recruiter must know his industry. If not, then you’re misleading people. You have to consider that recruiting is a big responsibility, bigger than most recruiters even realize. People spend most of their life at work so you need to try and make sure it’s a good fit.

Has your hiring system begun to atrophy while you’ve been lost in the minutia of the day-to-day? Perhaps it’s time to take the broad view of your recruiting process and press update on your people function.

Change is scary. Anyone who’s updated their iPhone knows this.

One day you’re merrily swiping between apps when a notification pops up asking if you’d like to upgrade your OS and ‘yes’ of course you would and then, with one blithe tap of your finger, everything falls apart.

Your touch-unlock no longer works, in fact, the whole screen seems to be unaware of your desperate tapping – you feel ignored –  which only increases the speed and pressure of your frustrated jabs. The battery now dies at 50 percent and for some reason half your contacts are gone.

Something that was supposed to make your phone better and more functional has actually made it impossible to use. We can expand this scenario to when we try and overhaul the structure of a department within a company, these revolutionary revampings often leave teams more confused and less efficient than before.

That’s where people like Saumya Chopra come in. As People Technology Product Manager for Square, she’s been leading teams through system changes for seven years. And one thing she’s learned after all that time in the HR Tech sector is that it’s not just about finding the right tech solution but getting everyone else on board.

Saumya will be returning to  Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco. Check out her session from last year and learn how hiring teams are using technology all wrong.

What’s the role of technology in hiring?

Technology helps make our people more efficient and reduces the administrative burden of hiring, leaving time for the more human elements of the hiring process.

What are three ways people wrongly use technology in hiring?

• Implementing technology without understanding the true need of the end user and the business.
• Using technology for the sake of it. There are lots of new tools available today, but being selective in investing time in the tools that solve the real problems is extremely important.
• Not using the right technology where available.

How do you convince nervous clients that change is good?

Show them what change can bring, and stress that it’s inevitable. Also show them that resistance to change will eventually cause more issues than adapting to change.

What does the concept of Hiring Success mean to you?

Hiring Success is being able to make a great hire through a smooth and efficient process, that results in a great experience for the candidate/hire and the recruiting team. It means ensuring costs are at a minimum and we are leveraging our technology to its maximum potential to support this hiring process.

Where on their list of priorities is “recruitment” for most companies? And where should it be?

Recruitment is undoubtedly one of the most important functions of an organization. It’s critical to get the right people in to make a great organization. Unfortunately, a lot of people consider it a cost instead of an investment, and it is not always top-priority for most companies.

I think recruitment should be at the core of every employee’s job, whether or not they’re on a hiring team. It’s important to be on the lookout for people you want to work with, and to encourage them to apply to roles at the company. That’s the best way to leverage employee networks, and it is possible to make it part of an organization’s core culture, but it requires effort and vision.

Tell us your favorite interview questions.

A question that has become my favorite is “What are you not?”, and I like it because it opens up the realm of possible responses and really helps gauge the candidate’s thought process.

When you started out in HR, what is one mistake you made and what did you learn from it?

I made many mistakes when I started my career. It was a time of learning and a time when making mistakes was expected. All mistakes are learning experiences and it would be an even bigger mistake if there was no learning or action plan to address the issue if it ever came up again.

Sandi Lurie, Sr. Director of Global Recruiting for the digital experiment platform Optimizely – knows, when it comes to recruiting, sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error.

When Sandi Lurie started out as a recruiter she was turned down three times before getting the job she wanted. Call it ‘having a vision’ or just sheer stubbornness, but she knew what she wanted and kept at it. Today, she expects the same from the recruiters she works with.

And now, after more than 25 years in TA, she’s not as green with her errors but she certainly hasn’t backed off the ‘try until you succeed approach.’ She’s just taken her experiments to a new level.

As Sr. Director of Global Recruiting, Sandi walks the walk of her company by continuously experimenting with her own practice.

February 26-27 she brings what she’s learned working with Optimizely – the startup who has made a name for itself enhancing the consumer experience of digital products – Hiring Success 19 – Americas, in San Francisco! Register now!

Find out what happens when you replace guesswork with evidence-based results and learn why it hurts business success to view HR as timid.

If you could go back to your first job and give yourself one piece of advice what would it be?

I would tell myself that your best learnings will come from the mistakes you made.

Speaking of mistakes, we heard finding your first recruiting job was pretty rough, tell us about it.

My first agency recruiting job was given to me by Joan Castelli… after she turned me down three times. Each time she said no, she would invite me to check back with her in the future. I continued to follow up and after three months she finally made me the offer.

Later, she told me that it was my tenacity that made her give me a chance even though I was so green. I ended up working for her for five years and looking back she is my biggest professional influence.

How has that experience informed your job?

When I’m interviewing recruiters or talking to aspiring recruiters, I look for that same tenacity and persistence. You won’t be as successful or enjoy the work you do every day unless you want it bad enough to be turned down three times.

What does the concept of Hiring Success mean to you?

Who we hire, has a direct impact on the quality of the product we create and our ability to sell it. So, to me, Hiring Success is synonymous with business success. One doesn’t exist without the other.

What is one overlooked aspect of recruiting?

Recruitment is key to bringing in talent, relying only on inbound applications and employee referrals won’t scale your company. Having a team of recruiters that are only good at managing the hiring process won’t get you the top talent needed to be successful.  Recruiters need to be great salespeople, know how to hunt and evaluate great talent and understand how to close the best candidates.

Do you think experimentation is underused in recruiting? Why do you think that is?

Yes! We are gaining great insights just looking at the analytics around quit rates on our site. It is helping us create our new careers page and recruitment marketing work.  I don’t think it’s been easy or a priority for companies to build experiments into their career sites. I am lucky to work at Optimizely where our platform makes it easy to create and measure experiments in real time.

Does the fact that you work in HR for experimentation company change the way you do your job? In other words, how do you practice what your company preaches?

Working at Optimizely has allowed me to expand my thinking of what is possible. It has enhanced my job as I can quickly gauge if something is working or not and make quick changes. We are just scratching the surface of the different types of experiments and what we can measure.  Whenever someone has a new idea, the culture says “Let’s run an experiment” it’s very freeing and allows us to keep trying new things.

What is an experiment you have run in your department, what did you learn and how have you changed?

We just kicked off an experiment on conversion rates through each part of our careers site.  We are creating multi-variations to be tested and will use this data on a rebrand we are working on to launch later in Q1.  We have learned that our site is too long and are working to keep everything up top and easier to navigate.

What is the role of technology in recruiting?

I am going to start with an old-school answer that says, picking up the phone or walking to someone’s desk overrules technology every time. We have gotten to a place where we don’t leave our desks or have the live conversations that are critical to building relationships and creating a real business partnership.  Having said that, technology is key. We are constantly evaluating new tools and resources to make us successful.  Whether it’s a new sourcing site, using SR as a sourcing tool, running experiments on our careers page, something to build our diversity pipeline or getting survey data to improve candidate experience we need to stay up to date and leverage the tools to make our jobs.

HR is often thought of as a timid branch of business, do you agree with this perception?

I don’t’ agree. The coaching that comes out of HR to all levels of the business has a direct impact on their results. There are companies that don’t leverage that opportunity but I think it’s incumbent on the leaders to keep HR at the C level.  Where it is timid is when HR acts as a business partner to the Executive Team, not the company.

How do we keep recruiting human and personal in the digital age?

It’s all about personal relationships. If you only work via digital means, you lose your ability to influence in a meaningful way. You are managing a process along. If you want to be thought of as a strategic partner you have to learn how to speak up in meetings, offer your opinions when making hiring decisions and build trust with the business.  I have a rule with the team that if you are about to reply to a reply on an email you have to pick up the phone and call or walk to the person’s desk to have a real conversation. This also applies to an email that can’t be read without scrolling down on your computer or phone.

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?’”