No one is unfamiliar with the brand, but the company’s mechanics are new to most. And in many ways, the sports giant’s recruiting function is already operating in the future.

When it comes to hiring, Adidas is all about the future. Their former HR Head even had Futures in his job title. And wrangling 60,000 employees at one of the most recognizable brands on Earth takes some forward thinking. For Steve Fogarty, processing tomorrow’s best employees isn’t so much about fitting a person into a job title, but getting a new hire out of their comfort zone, oftentimes even out of their daily physical environment, to see where their untethered imagination might take them.

“We have 170 locations globally, and move people over the world,” said Fogarty. “There’s never a meeting at Adidas where you’re not speaking with people from five countries.”

What’s clear is that Adidas, and Fogarty himself, are in the business of storytelling, which for a company as successful as this German-founded multinational, is more akin to mythmaking. (Maybe that’s why Fogarty inserted the word “archetype” into so many of his sentences.) Let’s face it, when you’re talking about giving more creative design control to Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, it’s not about those three-striped pre-war soccer cleats anymore. And this evolution is essential to the company’s work culture.

“In the 50s,” said Fogarty, “people talked about jobs. In the 90s it was ‘careers’, and today we talk about purpose. This is front and center with our employer brand strategy.”

And as an increasing number of firms tilt towards that way of seeing – purpose with a capital P being inextricable with things like equality and diversity – the bigger players like Adidas can be even more creative in how these ideas are mainstreamed into corporate culture.

“For us,” explained Fogarty, “diversity goes beyond being just an initiative. We know it’s our secret sauce for creativity, and to be relevant and fast, you can’t have a few guys sitting in a room in Germany making decisions. We need to look like our consumers” – he does – “and make decisions that are relevant to them.”

Chances are, a summary of Adidas’ campaigns that have gone beyond core footwear products is not necessary here – there’s YouTube for that – but for all the lip-service companies pay to social awareness, the foundation eponymously named after company founder Adi Dassler, among other sports-led initiatives around the world, collects plastic waste from the ocean and molds them into shiny new sports shoes. “Actually,” notes Fogarty, “I should have worn them today.”

Hard to tell if that was an honest slip or an anecdotal flourish, but what Fogarty understands is that it’s all about the story, which makes sense, speaking not only to a gaggle of recruiters, but to our species, dubbed by author Jonathan Gottschall as “the storytelling animal”. Stories are what only we humans do (probably. At least with tongue-to-palate enunciation). And “storytelling,” explains Fogarty, “is not just the story, but how it’s framed, and even in setting up our employer brand, the story is always told in the context of the future.”

Everyone knows Adidas the sports brand as it presents itself from the outside, but given Fogarty’s insights to the internal mechanics of Adidas — the corporate ship with a Borgesian number of cogs — the main takeaway here was that far from being a binary, antiquated slog, there’s plenty of room for creativity in this hiring racket. Adidas’ ad projection of innovation seems to align fairly well with actual functionality. That’s something to shoot for. And given the technological advances we’ve all been talking about for the last year or more, making hiring more fair and unbiased, hiring more creatively is the way things are going, fast, so better get on board. If you don’t, if nothing else, you might miss out on a really good story.

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.

From humble sports shoe to world-dominating apparel brand, Adidas didn’t get to where it is by sailing close to shore, and manning the roster of who gets onboard and who doesn’t, is this guy right here.

When Adolf “Adi” Dassler cobbled a portmanteau of his name and founded his little German shoe company in 1949, he may have had quiet dreams of cleating the German national soccer team, but there’d have been no way for the fledgeling founder to imagine Adidas’ sports-straddling fashion reach in the 21st century, or how lending design reins to Pharrell Williams for a bit would be a good idea. (Oh to have a time machine and enlighten Herr Dassler on Run DMC and what they’d do for his marketing department in the Eighties.)

For all the creativity and risk needed to launch fresh designs for nearly 60 years of shifting culture, Adidas’ internal compass is just as tuned, and Steve Fogarty is not content coasting now that he’s helming things, as head of the talent acquisition futures team, at one of the world’s coolest companies.

Steve has said his department is “driven by a constant desire for innovation and its belief that anybody can and should be ‘a creator’”… From marketing to design, merchandising to logistics, Adidas empowers its employees to approach tasks and business goals without preconceived ideas on how they should be executed.”

For insight into how the world’s second-biggest sports manufacturer makes the most innovative hires, as well as dissection of past campaigns great and small, register early to join Steve and dozens of other speakers in San Francisco, March 12-14, at Hiring Success 18, where everyone knows the value of recruitment because, after all, you are who you hire.