When a young business analyst decided management consulting wasn’t her calling, she found it difficult to find career advice that spoke to her as a millennial job-seeker.

Given the average adult in the US changes jobs around 12 times between the ages 18-48, with the majority of those transitions happening in the first six years of their career –  it seemed strange that no one had created a platform to locate expert career advice, surface unexpected opportunities, and guide young people to success.

In 2011, former business analyst Kathryn Minshew became a founder and CEO when she made her dream resource a reality with The Muse website, a non-traditional job board focused on fit, culture and career advice for job seekers.

And 50 million millennial professionals visiting the site to date says ‘job well done!’

Kathryn has become something of a career guru for millennials, authoring the Wall Street Journal bestseller “The New Rules of Work,” and acting as an operating partner at XFactor Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in the next generation of female founders.

Kathryn recently spoke at the Hiring Success Conference in San Francisco about the effect of candidate experience on employer brand in an era of full transparency.

What does the concept of Hiring Success mean to you?

Hiring Success is about creating meaningful fits between companies and candidates. At The Muse, we think more about experiences than jobs because jobs can box people in, whereas experiences set people on a path for learning and growth. But, in order to build a satisfying career—or a progression of experiences over time—both companies and candidates have to be more aware of making considerate and purposeful choices. When that happens, a meaningful fit is made, which leads to quality hires and better retention.

Where on a CEO’s list of priorities should ‘recruitment’ be?

I’ve always felt that recruitment should be a top priority because it’s so intrinsic to company culture. You have to know who you are as a whole so you can hire people who will add value and keep your culture strong as you grow.

We hired The Muse’s first internal talent acquisition manager when we had just 25 people because we knew were going to grow pretty quickly and we wanted to make sure our culture never faltered. Bringing the right people on board is imperative when it comes to reaching your growth goals, and recruiters can help you attract and engage the best-fit talent.  

What do you think will be the defining feature of recruitment in five years?

Work is about connections and it’s full of commitments. The best companies understand this and create a work experience that’s centered around some of the most fundamental relationship dynamics (values, trust, vision, effort, and selflessness). Ideally, recruiting in five years will no longer be transactional, with applicants applying through a job board and hiring managers sifting through stacks of resumes. Hopefully, companies and candidates will feel empowered to make intentional decisions about what makes a meaningful fit.

You have traveled the world extensively. Did you gain any insights which have played into your approach to employer branding and recruitment?

I’ve traveled or lived in over 60 countries in the last 15 years, and I’ll say this about both travel and employment: they’re highly subjective. Whether something is a one-star or five-star experience depends on whether your expectations and needs match with reality: what were you looking for, and did you receive it?

Travel rating sites work because we can assess the type of environment we’re seeking, and then we can rate a property or experience based on those expectations and parameters. It’s unbelievable to me that we have no common language to talk about types of company cultures. I’d like The Muse to change that.

You speak often about millennials and job branding. What do you find millennials want to see?

Authenticity. Millennials want to see that your employees’ experiences are in sync with the message your employer brand is putting out there. So if you say you support learning and development, or value work-life balance, they want to see those statements reflected in company reviews or validated by employee testimonials. They want to know that what they see is the real thing.

How can companies better appeal to millennial candidates?

Millennials want to feel like their career has real purpose, so when they look at potential employers, they’re looking for a place where the mission and values match their own, or where the learning opportunities are substantial.

For companies, this means using your employer brand to authentically show candidates what you’re committed to as an organization. It’s also an opportunity to encourage employee advocacy by asking your workforce to share their stories—even if it’s something as small as posting about an exciting work event on social media.

In terms of company culture, what are the most common mistakes companies make?

Trying to be everything to everyone. When companies aren’t being authentic, it creates a ripple effect in the culture, so this really goes back to hiring, because every new person who joins your team has the power to change your culture.

It’s OK if your company and culture aren’t for everyone. Know your audience and appeal to those best-fit candidates.

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

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

Inclusion

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

Innovation

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

Candidate Experience

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

Global Scale

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

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

It’s going to be a busy three days at Hire18. How is a TA Leader supposed to prioritize what to see to get a company’s money’s worth? Relax. We’re here to help.

We feel you, apathetic TA folk. You’re an office dweller, and have been since before you realized your real dream was to be a cruise-ship captain. You’re good at your job, but with all this hot new HR Tech rolling around, you’re worried it’s only going to increase the crushing power your three-generations-old laptop has over you, which represents the inverse amount of power you seem to have over your development as a human.

Never fear, wayward recruiter and fragile earth cadet stuck somewhere in Montana. We know what we’re doing, and we know what you need.

First, let’s be honest, you’ll want to be able to talk about the big brand names you learned something from. And for that, we have reps from Adidas and Equinox to tell you how they built out some of their most memorable recruiting campaigns and storylines, all the while staying tightly on brand.

Second, and still on the future-brag big brand bandwagon, learn how IKEA and Bosch deployed their recruiting systems in over 90 countries, which will either make you feel like an irredeemable underachiever or put some fire under that ass to show Missoula, Montana how you do things in Bute.

Third, take a break from being so selfish and see how some of the attendees are giving back. Take Ava. and app that allows the hearing impaired to communicate with those who are sign-language impaired.

Fourth, let’s take it back to you, but the you that has to show your boss that sending you to San Francisco was worthwhile. For this, may we suggest taking a notepad to listen to Kathryn Minshew, CEO of TheMuse, where she’ll show you how to elevate your recruitment brand.

Fifth, to pretend that there is some kind of professional research justification for going on Facebook at work, you’ll be able to learn about the impact Facebook Jobs will have on its network of 2 billion people, and whether bigger really is better and if that’s a threat to you.

Having completed this mandatory checklist, feel free to mingle, hobnob, network, cavort, etc. Just avoid Instagramming any extra-curricular activities that tend to take place later in the evenings after these sorts of things. We know you’re never in San Francisco and it’s an exciting place and you want to celebrate, but you know your boss will be watching, and they probably want to catch you in a compromising position even less than you want them to witness any of your untoward behavior. So our last piece of advice would be to practice restraint, or at least leave your stupid smartphone at home and get into some analog trouble like you did in the old days.