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.

Anna would be the worst HR director in the world. She said so herself. She wants to break your system, burn your CVs, and if you don’t like it you can talk to the chatbot because she’s not asking permission.

In an industry known for its meekness, Anna has made a name for herself by being anything but.

A 17-year recruiting veteran, she’s found her niche at hub:raum, a startup incubator for Deutsche Telekom, helping fledgeling companies experiment with HR Technology. And who wouldn’t want to be her guinea pig? Anna has a way of getting people excited. If she had a superpower she would be Momentum Woman ( pending). She doesn’t ask, she does.

And she has a name for time-wasting office bureaucracy: the beast. She doesn’t feed the beast. She fights the beast. One day she decided there would be no more CVs at hub:raum and that was that. No more CVs.

In her spare time, Anna runs a secret society. The “Secret HR Society”. An invite-only club where HR heads can talk shop and swap stories of horror and success.

That’s the other thing about Anna, she wants people to be heard. The little things that waste your time at work? The ones your friends are sick of hearing you complain about? These are the ones Anna wants to help you fix.

Where are you speaking to us from today?

I’m in London for a job boards conference. I haven’t seen anything yet, you know I go to all these beautiful places and never get to see anything. This time I decided to stay the whole weekend so I can really explore.

Job board conference sounds interesting, what will you be doing there?

I’m here to speak at the European Job Board Summit. It’s a charged atmosphere because these legacy systems are here to figure out how to survive. They are at the point of realizing that throwing money at job postings is not a longterm solution. HR needs to embrace new technologies in order to have a future. That’s where I come in, I tell this room full of old men about the technologies I’ve tested and the things I’ve learned and hopefully pull them into the 21st century.

Give us a teaser. What kinds of technology are you going to hit them with?

Chatbots! Everyone knows I love them and they really are a game changer. Over the past year, we tested a chatbot that runs through Facebook messenger with extremely positive results. The chatbot acts as a job board and initial application. A candidate can ask if there is an opening in a certain region. Let’s say there’s not, then when a position does become available the chatbot will initiate a conversation. If the candidate finds a job they are interested in they can ask questions like ‘can I bring my dog to work?’ or ‘do you provide lunch?’ Things that wouldn’t be in a job description but maybe you’d like to know. It’s such a time saver and candidates like it too.

What have you learned about chatbots in the past year?

I got a great deal of insight into candidate behavior. Salary. That’s the number one thing people type into chatbots. No ‘hi’, no ‘how are you’. When people know it’s a bot they cut the niceties and get to the point. It’s a safe space because it’s anonymous. Usually, the hiring manager controls the information flow but when you use a chatbot candidates have more agency which I think is good.

It’s Sunday night and your average passive candidate is chilling, watching Game of Thrones, just scrolling through job ads to see what’s out there. They scroll to an intriguing post but they have to know it’s going to be worth the trouble of applying. We’re talking compensation. Salary isn’t something we usually disclose on a job ad but it is something a chatbot could tell an interested party to turn them into a very interested party.

Best career advice you could give?

Ask for forgiveness, not permission. HR people should be more disobedient. If your company would truly fire you for being innovative then you know what I think of your company. Stop feeding the monster by giving into the bureaucracy and red tape. Be bold, be blunt, just do it and apologize later.

HR wasn’t the sexiest profession when I started. People would be like ‘ aw you weren’t smart enough for marketing’. Technology has changed that perception little by little. We need to spearhead the tech advances that change the way we do our jobs instead of just execute them. Tech innovation is what keeps HR relevant so we need to be on the frontline.

Give us an example.

One day I just stopped using CVs. I didn’t ask anyone or write a memo, I just stopped. There’s no real connection between the probability of your success and what’s written on your CV. Is school what got you where you are today? Great! Or was messing around on the computer? Also fine. I don’t care I just want to know how you are going to find solutions in this role.

We tried anything but CVs – video interviews, test questions, chatbots, you name it. And it worked. We hired great people. Now I can go to our parent company Deutsche Telekom and show them the positive results from getting rid of CVs at hub:raum and maybe they can start to adopt the practice. Corporations take longer to adopt new practices but one day we could live in a world where you don’t ever have to read or compile another CV. That’s the dream.

Very interesting.

I just tried something innovative without permission, I learned something, and I didn’t get fired. Come to think of it, I probably wasn’t radical enough given how smoothly it went. Next time, I’m really going to break something.

You are a total HR head. Does that mean you’re a people person?

I don’t think HR people are generally ‘people people’ they’re more ‘people collectors’, and that’s what I do. If someone new comes to the coworking space I’m at I have to go over and say hi and learn about them and add them to my ‘pile of people’. then I keep them in my mind to connect with other people because that’s what I like to do.   

How’d you find yourself in HR?

Getting kicked out of kindergarten meant that I finished school a year early. I guess I liked to break things even back then. My idea was to go corporate in my gap year so I could save money to travel abroad. I landed a spot in HR. It was terrible, but I made great connections and got involved with startups which was crazy cool back then and still fascinates me today. I’m a geeky, techy person. I’m lucky I found my niche.

Artificial Intelligence. Real, or just a buzzword?

What I see a lot are companies trying to pass off machine learning as AI. I saw it at HR Tech World Amsterdam and I don’t like it. The thought of a less savvy HR rep buying into it makes me sad so I hope people stop trying to pretend their technology is something that it’s not.

What’s wrong with hiring today?

Often in hiring, we think of finding the perfect stranger when really you should focus the potential you’ve already aggregated. Think about growing the employees you already have or encouraging former interns to return. It’s so much easier to hire for a junior job so it makes sense to hire into junior positions and cultivate them into senior roles over time.

Spraying job ads everywhere is ineffective. Most job descriptions are just crap. They don’t actually describe the job and often times they contain a lot of unintentional bias.

Tell us about your event ‘Tru Berlin’?

Tru Events are the kind of thing you get addicted to. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t gone why they need to go. The only way I can describe it is to say you get all the inspiration from one day at a Tru Event to keep you going in your day-to-day job.

There’s no hierarchy. No, ‘you’re in the crowd and someone important is on stage with a Powerpoint’. No Powerpoint allowed. You go there and discuss your projects and share ideas in a way reminiscent of networking, but much more organic than your typical mixer.

It’s Berlin so there will be beer and pizza. We’ve already sold 50 of 70 tickets so far. The price is by donation and we were delighted to see the average donation to be around €10 which I think speaks to how much an event like this is needed.

*Tru Berlin takes place December 7th, 16-22:00 and tickets are on sale now*

Who is the most valuable person in your network?

Bill Boorman, founder of Tru Events, and total non-conformist. I would say half my work every year outside hub:raum comes from him. You look at this tattered guy and you wouldn’t know it but there’s a genius under there. Part of the reason I wanted to host Tru Berlin was to welcome him to the Berlin scene and you can definitely look forward to a Santa appearance… I have to remember to pick up that suit when I get back.

If you could have a robot take over one part of your job what would it be?

I’m happy because I already have a chatbot that handles all the stupid questions from candidates. If I could be spoiled I’d want a video-bot that could take basic footage, turn it into a job description and disseminate it to the world. That would be cool.