In the first-ever SmartRecruiters Hackathon, customers tested the limits of the platform API and their own creativity in just 24 hours.

When the right tools for the job don’t exist you need to invent them. This sentiment captures the spirit behind SmartRecruiters’ first-ever Hackathon challenge, issued at the Hiring Success conference last March.

The feature-rich SmartRecruiters open Marketplace API offers development teams a platform to build applications for direct integration into the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite. To test the flexibility of the SmartRecruiters API, the Hiring Success Hackathon gave four customer teams a SmartRecruiters advisor and 24 hours to design, build, and implement new platform features that would offer value to users, and demonstrate innovation and creativity. With a $5,000 grand prize on the line the four teams quickly set upon their task.

At the end of the competition, the four teams presented their finished products in front of judges Bill Boorman, Steve Fogarty, and Ethan Medeiros, all of whom were beyond impressed with the final results.

“The one thing we were unanimous about was that we genuinely could have made any one of these products a winner,” said Bill Boorman. “That made it difficult to judge because they were all on the money.” Steve Fogarty continued, commenting that “every one of those products we found useful.”

“I was impressed with all of the teams,” said Ethan Medeiros. “Every one of them came up with an idea and a build-out in just 24 hours.” Boorman went on to praise the teams for their efforts, claiming, “I think the standard of product after 24 hours was better than I’ve seen at a Hackathon before. What you usually see is more buggy, and you have to imagine what the products will eventually look like.”

After a brief deliberation, the judges declared team Visa the winner for its internal candidate mobility add-on. With more companies focusing on promoting candidates from within their organization, the Hackathon judges recognized Visa’s solution to the rising demand for in-house talent. “The product that I’m being asked about most often is something for internal candidates,” said Steven Fogarty. “Right now they can search for a job and apply and that’s it. This next generation of talent coming through the door cares about transparency, their data, and what feedback people are giving them.”

*****

Team Avery Dennison
Avery Dennison, the global manufacturer and distributor of self-adhesive labels, apparel branding tags, and label materials, focused on creating a tool to optimize their recruiter tasks, as high-volume hiring is a key function of their business. The average time for a job posting is about 1.5 hours and can cost $37.50–$457.50 depending on the method. For companies like Avery Dennison that need to fill thousands of positions, recruiters and hiring managers spend too much valuable time manually publishing and updating their open job postings.

Rather than navigate a littered desktop of notifications and hastily scrawled Post-it notes, Avery Dennison built a Google Chrome plugin that allows recruiters to specify a date range for open positions as they input the job description and details. “As recruiters publish jobs, they don’t need to set a reminder,” says Mike Penny, TA Manager at Avery Dennison. “It eliminates some of that potential for error in forgetting to unpublish or pull the req down.”

To further automate the process, when a job posting expires, the feature deploys an email to recruiters and hiring managers with the total number of applicants and the top-match candidates according to the SmartRecruiters AI Recruiting Assistant.

Team Square

Square, the financial services company producing software and hardware payment products for mobile and tablet, looked to also reduce the number of non-value-added recruiter tasks by optimizing their interview scheduling protocols.

Square processes multiple candidate interviews every week, and manually coordinating six different schedules for the members of their hiring committees is inefficient. “That time cost from the recruiting coordinating side is extremely intensive,” says Stephanie Snyder, Recruiting Manager at Square, who estimates the company spends an estimated 240 hours per week on scheduling tasks.

Aiming to cut that time in half, the Square team built an application that assembles an interview panel of your choosing and schedules an interview time slot. Currently, panel organizers at Square toggled Google Calendar and SmartRecruiters to view team availability and schedule interviews, but the Square team predicts that a future version of their application would include a visual calendar UI that integrates these two functions in one dashboard to improve scheduling efficiency.

Once a panel is created, members can also access and revise notes about a candidate throughout the hiring process, a feature that eliminates the need to manually pull candidate data after the interview.

Team VISA

Visa, the financial juggernaut with over 12,400 employees in five major hubs worldwide, sought to answer the question: How can we retain our best talent after hiring? Visa’s answer was to build internal mobility add-on that makes it easier for employees to apply for new opportunities within the company.

Visa’s team of developers structured its strategy around three essential criteria that internal candidates seek:

1. More details, transparency, and information on the front end of the recruiting process.
2. Updates about the status of applications already submitted.
3. Where they are in the application process.

To encourage more internal candidate applications, the Visa team of developers designed their tool to be a seamless and transparent process, beginning with the login page, which quickly ushers internal candidates to the dashboard with a single-click sign in. To smooth the transition from Visa’s internal portal to the SmartRecruiters ATS, the team branded their dashboard, which automatically prioritizes newer internal postings on top of the feed.

When a new position is available, candidates can view the names of the recruiters and hiring managers for that position, and apply with just one click, as their user profile automatically fills in all relevant user data on the application. Candidates can view all jobs to which they have applied from the main dashboard.

Team SmartRecruiters

Riding the wave of excitement following SmartRecruiters’ spring release announcement, SmartRecruiters’ own team of developers couldn’t resist building their own new feature for the Hackathon. The SR team built an integration between Facebook Jobs and SmartRecruiters that allows companies to advertise their open positions in the Facebook Jobs page and give candidates the ability to view, share, and apply for jobs through their social profiles.

“This is all live, people can apply for these positions right now,” said Jem Sweeney, Product Manager at SmartRecruiters, demonstrating how the integration encourages candidates to share open positions among their network and answer screening questions all within Facebook’s platform. “You get a massive boost in your ability to get jobs in front of people and get referrals, as people can recommend jobs and apply immediately.” To attract applicants within certain industries or demographics, companies can also leverage Facebook’s native advertising and targeting algorithms to reach candidates without any additional effort or resources.

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.

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.