Leading a team through a major technology implementation is a career milestone. Implementing a new talent acquisition platform often involves months of preparation and focused coordination of internal and external resources.

Every day, the customer service managers and implementation consultants at SmartRecruiters are busy helping one of our customers get up and running—or helping them evolve their hiring practices to adapt to new conditions. Some of these customers are so happy with the results that they take the extra step of telling their company’s story with SmartRecruiters in hopes that others can learn from their journeys.

If you think the challenge at your company is insurmountable, let the talent acquisition leaders whose stories are shared below prove you wrong. Their can-do spirit helped them achieve wins that included building a TA system from scratch, transforming high-volume hiring, attracting and retaining new talent, and supporting the success of people initiatives. If they can do it, you can too! 

You Can Start From Scratch

When Marcel Rütten joined PACCOR, a global packaging manufacturer, as the Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding, the company had no system of record for recruiting. With careful planning, he used the time before SmartRecruiters went live to understand hiring practices in PACCOR’s 24 locations in 17 countries so that the company’s configuration and employer branding could be more effective. In PACCOR Builds Mature Recruiting Ecosystem in Less Than One Year, Marcel summed up the experience this way: 

[SmartRecruiters] gives recruiters and hiring managers everything they need to fill positions and track performance across channels.

 We have increased the maturity level within the whole organization so that everyone is capable and can use every available function. We have full transparency about our needs. We have a clearer picture of our target groups and what we need to say to them from an employer branding perspective. And we know what we need to budget.

Reporting on the full picture of hiring is a must for talent acquisition to have a seat at the table for talent decisions. Marcel’s thoughtful work in that first year set the stage for even greater maturity at PACCOR as the years progress.

You Can Transform High-Volume Recruiting

Frasers Group is a UK-based company that operates iconic brands such as Sports Direct, House of Fraser, Frasers, and FLANNELS. The company hires thousands of retail associates during the holiday season and throughout the year. Its previous system was outdated and not purpose-built for recruiting. Here’s what Adam Reynolds, Head of Talent Acquisition, said in Frasers Streamlines High-Volume Hiring with Automation in SmartRecruiters: 

We found it quite appealing that we could configure the [SmartRecruiters] system to suit all the different needs of what is, in essence, a sprawling estate: 22 countries, 30,000 employees, and 3,000 users of the system.

In the first year with SmartRecruiters, Frasers set a record of 20,000 new hires in one year. Adam added:

It was a game changer to have the templated job profiles, automated messages in our branding and tone of voice, and calendar integration. With the automation inside SmartRecruiters, we can move through high volumes of information from a high volume of candidates in a systematic way.

A great candidate experience is a hallmark of a strategic talent acquisition function. The automated and templated responses help Frasers maintain its reputation in a competitive hiring environment with candidates who are also likely to be customers.

You Can Improve Retention

When Ben Handyside, Director of Talent Management, joined Colliers EMEA, a global real estate services and investment management company, SmartRecruiters was already in place, but adoption had slowed since its implementation. Once he started digging into the metrics in partnership with his SmartRecruiters representative, “the lightbulbs started to go off,” he said in an interview. Over time, the data he brought to the table provoked discussions and moved the needle on behaviors that supported better hiring and ultimately improved retention. 

In conjunction with enhancements to its employer brand, Colliers experienced “a massive uplift in candidates,” Ben said in How Colliers EMEA Reduced Agency Spending with SmartRecruiters. The company began to attract talent from outside its conventional sources. The expansion of skillsets led senior executives to think differently about who Colliers hires, how they hire, and what the company could do to nurture that talent once they turned into employees.

The focus on hiring new types of talent resulted in a big win: Colliers EMEA saw a 25% year-over-year increase in retention for first-year hires. Ben’s experience sets an example for all TA leaders on how to maximize their seats at the table to achieve an overall talent-centric outcome.

You Can Support People Initiatives

Sustainability

Informa, a leading international events, digital services and academic knowledge group, puts a big focus on sustainability. To understand how the company’s credentials as a sustainable business factored into the choice to apply, Ben Wielgus, Head of Sustainability, set up specialized screening questions in SmartRecruiters. In How Informa Uses SmartRecruiters to Measure Sustainability Campaign Success, he said:

Because SmartRecruiters allows us to put the same questions to each candidate and rapidly deploy them to get results at scale, we’ve been able to get a much better understanding of how much our candidates care about sustainability, and how much of a difference it’s making in their choice to come to us.

DEI

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is another hiring topic on everyone’s minds, and CityFibre wanted to pave the way for more women and people from diverse backgrounds to work in its tech-focused roles. In CityFibre Hires for Diversity with SmartRecruiters, Richard Hutchinson, Head of Resourcing, explained the company’s data-driven approach:

We used [SmartRecruiters] Report Builder to create a DEI-focused report which helps us develop our attraction strategy, drive recruiter and hiring manager action, report on performance, and engage with our business stakeholders to present accurate and real-time insight into our DEI challenges and results.

Talent acquisition demonstrates its true value by supporting the direction in which the business needs to evolve. With accurate and actionable recruiting data, companies can make progress on even the most challenging goals.

You Can Start Today

What these leaders have in common is a desire to do the right thing: provide an exceptional candidate experience, deliver top talent to the business, and analyze the results of their efforts. They’re on a journey of continually growing their strategic leadership skills as market conditions change. 

In support of your journey, we’ve created a resource to guide you to getting—or making the most of—your seat at the table. Download the ebook today.

How does a company’s talent acquisition function tie in with talent management? And can talent acquisition (TA) move the needle on transforming an organization’s overall talent strategy?

That’s the remit Ben Handyside, Director of Talent Management for EMEA, was presented with when he joined Colliers in 2020. The company had already implemented SmartRecruiters two years before, but its hiring practices were still inconsistent across its 119 offices and 42 countries in the region. “Everyone got excited in the first phase of SmartRecruiters implementation, but in the second year, usage dropped off,” Ben said.

In a quest to hire better people, improve retention, and help employees develop their careers in Colliers’ decentralized talent framework, the company embarked on a holistic effort to transform talent management. “Talent acquisition was one pillar of a broader group that was put in place to drive greater levels of consistency and maturity in talent management overall,” Ben explained.

After digging into the data, Ben and his team saw gaps in the company’s adoption of SmartRecruiters. Once he connected with his SmartRecruiters representative, the lightbulbs started to go off.  “I quickly realized that the power of the system is its simplicity,” he said.  “It’s easy to use. But when you combine that with the relationship and the ability to discuss and analyze the data, it enabled me to understand where we needed to go strategically.”

SmartRecruiters covered the more tactical pieces of the talent acquisition transformation in our success story, How Colliers Reduced Agency Spending with SmartRecruiters. That document tells the story of how consistent hiring practices combined with recruitment marketing, a CRM, and the company’s employer branding efforts resulted in a massive improvement in the company’s ability to make direct hires. But behind the scenes, the story is more nuanced – and profound. Yes, you want your company to save money, but you also want to make better hires because those are the people who will be driving revenue for the business in the future. 

Putting all the pieces together that contribute to making better hires requires a shift in thinking among executives, hiring managers, and recruiters across the organization. Here’s how the partnership with SmartRecruiters helped the Colliers EMEA talent acquisition team achieve an organizational mindset shift.

A Vision for Talent Acquisition

The most obvious gap was a need for awareness and education – but the need went deeper than that. “There was a need for consistency in approach, but also alignment to vision and an appreciation of what talent acquisition can deliver.”

With the vision in place, it became Ben’s mission to position talent acquisition as a strategic enabler for the business. “Talent acquisition itself can impact the bottom and top line,” Ben said. “People don’t think like that in many businesses. They just kind of think ‘why can’t you hire me someone? Why is it taking so long?’”

When talent acquisition is positioned at the center of an organization, hiring managers become more involved in making thoughtful hiring decisions. “Recruitment is an enterprise sport,” Ben said. To make true change happen, though, Ben’s team had to educate not just the HR community, but also the senior leadership team. Data proved to be the key to the success of the transformation.

Improving Data Literacy

Data has the power to educate, but people need to understand what the data means and how to ask more questions of it. Stakeholders may be experts in one type of data, but data literacy for talent acquisition is an acquired skill set that evolves over time. Stakeholders needed time to get up to speed and understand the impact of adjustments to hiring practices, and Ben had to slow down his expectations that change could happen overnight. 

Conclusions that may be obvious to an expert take time to land in others, especially if the data indicates a need to adjust old ways of thinking and behaving. After a series of monthly stakeholder meetings, Ben said, “The questions started to change and shift, which meant they were getting comfortable in their understanding.”

If recruitment is an enterprise sport, the work of a total talent transformation is another type of team sport — one that’s supported with compelling reports. “Data proved to be foundational in driving awareness and understanding where our gaps were,” Ben said. “When you talk to people and ask a lot of questions, you start to get interesting answers. You also start to see the big picture.”

Data Facilitates Accountability

Supporting the new vision of talent acquisition for Colliers requires that everyone using SmartRecruiters utilizes the system properly. “The philosophy of ‘do the basics well’ drives a different level of performance,” Ben said. Once utilization started improving, Colliers could see cost savings in terms of reduced agency spending. 

When people are held accountable, they’re more likely to adopt new processes. The immediate availability of data in SmartRecruiters, plus the regularly scheduled reporting meetings helped Colliers’ hiring teams see that their daily actions could add up to a big impact. “What fascinates me about SmartRecruiters is that you can go to the day, the hour, the second of an intervention,” Ben said. “It gives us the ability to understand the trends in our recruitment business, diagnose how well things are working, and identify where the opportunities sit. It’s also really intuitive, so you can’t get it wrong.”

Talent Acquisition Moves the Needle on Total Talent Transformation

Hiring people at a lower cost was just the beginning of the TA transformation at Colliers. Improvements in quality of hire and retention are where the real transformation lies. Colliers had already noted that its employer branding and recruitment marketing helped attract a different caliber of people to the business. The real result showed up downstream: Colliers saw a 25% year-over-year increase in retention for first-year hires. 

Starting with talent acquisition, Colliers achieved a total talent win: they attracted better people, kept candidates engaged to the point of hire, and successfully engaged them as employees.

People + Technology = Hiring Success

We asked Colliers how to summarize the factors that contribute to the achievement of hiring success. Ben’s first take was, “Ensure the product is simple to use because then people will use it.”  But it wasn’t just the system that facilitated a major change in the way Colliers attracts and manages talent. He explained, “the real value lies in the combination of people and technology.”

Mentioning his SmartRecruiters customer success manager, Ben continued, “As your relationship evolves, you start to talk a lot more about what really matters to your business and begin to formulate a workable strategy.” Sometimes you don’t know what’s possible until someone shows you — and sometimes, you need to know the boundaries of the system to make your efforts successful.

“SmartRecruiters is the best system I’ve used,” Ben said. “It’s a best-in-class system, and it’s backed up by support. That human, interpersonal relationship is really important.” 

Lessons from Colliers

Where your company starts and where it needs to go may differ from Colliers, but these lessons apply to anyone looking to save on recruiting costs, improve hire quality, and increase retention of new hires.

• Align talent acquisition with the overall talent strategy
• Create a vision for what TA can achieve
• Enlist a best-in-class talent acquisition platform
• Partner with your technology provider to get the most out of the system
• Hold stakeholders accountable with metrics to ensure system adoption
• Back up results with regular reporting to stakeholders
• Be patient as stakeholders gain data literacy
• Connect TA and HR metrics to measure the downstream impact

A full-scale talent acquisition transformation is an evolution – and we’d love to partner with you to get started. For a deep dive into how you can lead more strategically, download our ebook, A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function.

There have been a lot of clichéd phrases used to describe the “unprecedented times” we live in which we ponder what the “new normal” is and what will remain of the “past we’re leaving behind.”

While these expressions might seem a bit hollow, they do contain a very real truth: things are not the same and things are not going to go back to the way they were. That’s why, when the world shifted for us at TSA Group—Australia’s leading specialists in CX consultancy and services —we knew the time was now to make some major changes.

With the onset of COVID-19, our small team of 13 recruiters (seven full-time and six part-time) found itself in a high pressure situation. Our clients were coming to us asking for more support, as the volume of calls were steadily increasing.

As unemployment skyrocketed, we also knew that through supporting our clients, we were supporting the community by providing a positive candidate experience and meaningful work opportunities when it was needed most.

We were hiring for all types of contact center roles from team leaders to customer service representatives. Our current operation had worked for us for a long time, but the time had come to scale a contingent workforce rapidly. In order to take on the influx of volume we saw coming, we knew we needed to look externally for support.

That’s when I reached out to SmartRecruiters. 

We had to switch to a system that could enable a digital hiring process, handle the volume of placements we needed and still be cost effective. Because the change had to happen fast, the system had to be intuitive. In a normal scenario, we would have time to build a training program and roll out gradually. Now was not that time. We needed to work with someone who met deadlines and was able to deliver on time. You know… people who walk the talk.

In just nine days, we went live with SmartRecruiters.

I must give a huge shoutout to Ben Rynja. There were many nights on the phone with him and the SmartRecruiters team. We were learning how to use the system AS it was being built and implemented—building the plane while it’s in the air, so to speak.

There wasn’t time for a designed process—we instead augmented/updated it as we moved candidates through the pipeline based on feedback from our recruiters and our candidates. We both put in long hours and formed a true partnership while working together to make this happen.

Our success has been phenomenal. In just three weeks we’ve had:

• 16,135 applications
• 210 hires
• 97% Hiring Velocity (roles filled on time)

Most importantly, our candidate experience has only improved. You see, we are receiving a large amount of inquiries from people who are desperate to find a job right now. And TSA Group genuinely cares about people—whether you ultimately join our team or not.

We want you to find success. That experience starts from the first time a candidate receives a “Thank you for applying” message because we know that to receive acknowledgement is SO important right now. As is showing where a candidate is in the interview process. The automation available with SmartRecruiters makes it happen. 

It’s equally as important to go back in the timeline (at scale) and let candidates know if we are no longer recruiting for roles that are now on pause—without forcing our already labored recruiters to pick up the phone and be overwhelmed with that daunting task.

This mass communication was received with an overwhelmingly positive response by our candidates. “Please retain my details and reach out to me when things improve” is the best kind of response to receive. 

COVID-19 is a time I won’t forget. For many reasons. This “unprecedented time” brought forth a new career highlight for me. I could finally give the amazing TSA Group recruitment team the tools they needed to supercharge their already incredible skills.

Candidates are getting tangible feedback giving them a level of confidence and trust in how they are progressing through the interview process. And the process is fair, fast and seamless. With SmartRecruiters, we were able to collaborate more effectively with hiring managers than ever before.

We had one operational manager per site delegated to working hand and glove with the team in assessing candidates, using SmartRecruiters. Being able to tag/comment within the system allows hiring managers the simplicity and flexibility they need to act quickly, interview fairly, and document the process well. By gaining feedback in real-time we were able to avoid unnecessary and costly delays throughout our process. 

Final Thoughts

It truly was a collaborative effort on all fronts that was transformational for both our TA team and our processes. This “unprecedented time” has allowed us to reevaluate our current position and leave a few things in the past. And we’re ok with that, because this “new normal” is something we’ve been wanting for a long time.

Find out how SmartRecruiters can partner with your company to transform your talent function and—like the TSA Group—achieve hiring success.

Our world is currently in a state of a disarray—to put it mildly. For many of us, all we can do is idly watch as events unfold, wondering to ourselves, “What can be done?” For government bodies across the world—like the state of Maryland—that question looms ominously, as well. However, for politicians and civil servants it’s a different beast altogether, for it’s accompanied by a sense of complete and utter urgency that few of us will ever be forced to reckon with. 

For those of us working in the private sector—despite our best intentions—there’s only so much that can be done. While there are some inspiring examples of companies springing to action, such as Mercedes Formula One building respirators for Covid-19 patients, the best thing the majority of us can do is to give our trust and thanks to the elected officials and public health workers who are toiling endlessly for our common good. Thank God for them. 

Considering this, we feel uniquely honored to have recently been able to offer our services in an impactful manner. In early April, the Maryland Emergency Management Agency reached out to SmartRecruiters’ partner, Allegis Global Solutions, asking for consultation to hire healthcare professionals to combat the outbreak of Covid-19—now and over the course of the next several months.
We partnered on a quick turnaround to support Maryland’s urgent need to build talent communities to attract physicians, nurses, clinical and non-clinical staff. Everything was discussed, scoped, designed, developed, and launched—including the training of program managers—in under 36 hours

Ordinarily, the size and scope of such a project would warrant a more measured approach. However, there’s almost nothing about the current state of affairs that’s ordinary. In those 36 hours, there was never a “we can’t do this” or “there is not enough time” moment. Everyone was engaged, supportive, and intent on putting a plan into action that would get the state of Maryland the personnel it needs to protect its citizens. 

A huge thank you to our partners, Allegis Global Solutions for giving us the chance to make a meaningful contribution in our allied effort to curtail this pandemic. Through the efforts and partnership, SmartRecruiters technology continues to help aid the fight against COVID-19 and plays a key part within Maryland Department of Health initiatives that are servicing communities across the state of Maryland.

To any other government and healthcare organizations in need of hiring support for the frontlines— we are standing by and ready to help. You’ll find our contact information for the US, UK, France, Germany, and Poland here. If there’s anything we can do to assist, please just say so. And if not, please know you have our full and unconditional support and gratitude. 

—

https://www.smartrecruiters.com/lab/marylandmednow/

For an industry in transition, recruiting is the secret ingredient for agility.

American Iron and Metal (AIM) is a fast-growing recycling company in Canada. With a footprint in six countries, they employ over 3,000 people and are looking to become the largest recycler in North America.

As the company seeks to expand, the talent acquisition (TA) team has grown from three to 12 in a year. And what these recruiters have quickly realized is that they would have to overhaul their hiring practices to facilitate the company’s growth and expansion goals.

At a time when the manufacturing industry has been experiencing many challenges such as outsourcing, automation, a trade skills gap, and low population density near factory locations. It is an industry in transition and AIM sees upgrading its hiring processes as the linchpin towards successful transformation.

To learn more, we talked with Caroline Boyce, the company’s director of TA, about her team’s strategic plans to source and hire in this new industry landscape.

As part of the ten-part series “Ten Things I learned at Hiring Success” we catch up with Caroline at Hiring Success 19 San Francisco, this is what we learned about American Iron and Metal’s overhaul.

Set the stage for us. What was hiring like at AIM previously?

We are a manufacturing company, so an easy application process is key to getting great talent to apply. However, the application used to take 30 minutes for someone who wasn’t used to working with a computer – the whole process was very heavy for the candidates. On top of that, our work was spread out through an applicant tracking system (ATS), job boards, and even spreadsheets.

We were really excited to have one system that would allow candidates to apply with a few clicks and would have all the information in the same place, which is what we found with SmartRecruiters.

What would you like to see happen with the recruiting function within your company?

The biggest change is going to be to increase our hiring manager engagement in the process. Right now we are recruiting 1,000 people every year with only 12 recruiters centralized in Montreal. So, one of the goals is to decentralize our recruitment and get more internal ambassadors. This will help our hiring team become more involved with recruitment.

As a manufacturing company, do you hire for many specialized skills?

We hire for many specialized skills in maintenance and mechanics. Some of these positions include crane mechanics, labor workers, and even IT. We hire for everything in manufacturing.

How do you feel more hiring manager engagement will help make hiring for those specific roles easier?

I think more engagement will ensure a great candidate experience for all our applicants. We are also taking a three-pronged approach by investing in our employer branding, culture, and technology.  

Candidate experience is so important these days because most job searches are painful and stressful for the applicant. Nobody calls them back or employers are ghosting them. My wish is that we create a great candidate experience that applicants actually enjoy. So even if they have multiple offers, they say, ‘hey, it went smoothly with AIM, I love the culture, I want to sign with them.’

See more from leaders like Caroline in the next part of the blog series – 10 Things I learned at Hiring Success – where we gain insights into the future of recruiting with Tim Pröhm of Kelly Services. Also, make sure to join us at the next Hiring Success EU – Amsterdam that takes place, September 10-11, 2019.

How one Wall Street bigshot found himself in prison, and the company he launched after his release connects the formerly incarcerated with second-chance jobs.

Approximately one in three American adults have criminal records – that’s 70 million people, and nearly 75 percent of them are still unemployed a year after their release. With few prospects to cover basic expenses, many ex-offenders return to illicit activities. Unable to make ends meet, an overwhelming majority (89 percent) are unemployed at the time of their re-arrest. The stigmas surrounding people with conviction histories systematically exclude them from countless job opportunities, and the current state of affairs shows little sign of improvement.

Back in the late 90s, entrepreneur Richard Bronson found himself in a prison cell, wondering how he would turn his life around. A few years following his release, Bronson became the founder and CEO of 70 Million Jobs, the first national employment platform for people with criminal records.

Seeking to provide second chances for the one in three Americans with conviction histories, Bronson sees his company as providing “double bottom line returns”, doing massive social good as well as building big, profitable businesses.

To understand more about how 70 Million Jobs came to be, we talk to Bronson about his transition from prison cell to the C-suite. This is his story.

Twenty-two months into my sentence the anxiety kicked in. I was sitting on my cot in a federal prison with eight weeks left on my two-year sentence for securities fraud, and my impending freedom made me feel only one thing: dread.

I began working on Wall Street in the early 1990s, and after working at several of the largest investment banks, I made a career pivot into a small brokerage firm on Long Island, Stratton Oakmont. You may know this company better as the infamous Wolf of Wall Street firm. I did so well there I quickly became partner.

My ambitions were greater than Stratton Oakmont, and after a year I left to found my own financial services firm. Our success was swift; in 18 months, I had 500 employees, and was generating $100 million in annual revenue. I was getting very rich very fast.

As portrayed in Wolf of Wall Street, our success came from conducting business the wrong way—the illegal way. I knew my behavior was wrong, but I told myself “everyone’s doing it.” I wish I could say it was a mistake or they got the wrong guy, but none of that was true. I was guilty of securities fraud. So, despite having paid everyone back, I was still—rightfully—punished with a prison sentence.

I came out of prison destitute and nearly homeless—thank God for a sister and her couch. I wanted to put the past behind me and live an honest, productive life. However, accomplishing this proved more daunting than I ever expected. Old friends deserted me and new acquaintances feared I was “radioactive”. Once they learned about my incarceration, many kept me at arm’s length. Over the next several years I went from one bad situation to another. I thought I fully learned the lesson of humility, having scrubbed toilets for hundreds of inmates, but class had just begun.

I eventually ended up working at Defy Ventures, a prominent non-profit in the reentry space. I loved the opportunity to help my brothers and sisters as they struggled with their transition to freedom. It was deeply rewarding work—very good for my karma—but over time I became convinced that reentry was ready for disruption, specifically with a for-profit approach.

So I launched 70 Million Jobs, not knowing if large, national employers would be willing to pay to access our large community of job seekers. We got our answer almost immediately: while we don’t sell them all, the vast majority have been highly interested in our work, while many have discovered that hiring folks with records is not only a great way to fill jobs but also a powerful step in asserting their leadership as fair-chance employers.

The real heroes are our job seekers. Studies show that many of them become an employer’s best hire. For the simple fact that they have few alternatives, they know they have to perform well to retain their job. And they know that their employer took a chance in hiring them. So, unlike many in our workforce, they typically reward their employer with greater retention. Great performance and retention is a home run for any HR professional.

Sometimes it’s hard to discern which benefits are trendy and which will actually improve employee quality of life. We talk with PayScale to learn the difference.

This year Seattle Business Magazine named PayScale the top place to work in Seattle. No easy feat in the Emerald city with competition from tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon, and the siren call of San Francisco and Silicon Valley constantly ringing up the coast. Tech talent is scarce and flighty, but also most crucial to a company’s success, according to a recent report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So how do you not only attract, but keep, this sought-after talent?

The answer for PayScale is work-life balance. “We see our employees as whole people,” says Caitlin Williams, the company’s senior talent acquisition partner. “All our benefits are designed to benefit people as people, not people as workers.”

“Yes!” agrees Chris Stiemert, director of talent acquisition. “Most of what we do is listen to our employees and learn what they need and want.”

For PayScale, employee empowerment is the north star, and they are relentlessly experimenting to see what works. Almost more interesting than the benefits they keep are the ones they leave out – and why!

How do you make sure your programs are meaningful, and not just trendy?

Chris

I’ve worked at companies that had free soda, food, you name it, but you start to realize that the underlying purpose of these perks is to keep people in the office, working. We try to focus on what will actually move the needle in terms of retention and quality of life.

Caitlin

I totally agree. I think a lot of companies focus on things that are really fun to hear about at the outset but, in the end, aren’t about genuine care for employees, or long-term productivity and wellbeing. “We Hire Whole People” isn’t just a tagline for us, and we try to carve out benefits that speak to “a person” rather than an “employee”.

Caitlin, what makes PayScale the top place to work in Seattle?

I’ve worked in several different areas of the tech industry – biotech, ecommerce, software as a service, etc. What stands out to me after three years at PayScale is how it invests in its employees in two essential ways: career/professional development, and overall health/well-being.

• Professional/Career Development: We offer an array of development courses, and we also employ leadership and career coaches that help our employees uplevel both hard and soft skills.
• Health and Wellness: This last year we opened a gym on the basement level of our building for PayScale employees. We host free weekly yoga classes and stock the office with fresh fruits and sparkling waters. The other piece of this health and wellness initiative is “Independence week”, where this year we experimented with shutting down the office for the entire week of July 4th to give folks a great mid-year reset that most workers only get during the winter holidays.  

Chris, why does PayScale take employee happiness so seriously?

We start from a place of believing that happy employees ultimately means better business. All these things—happy hours, decorating the office for Halloween, providing snacks, and offering workout facilities follow naturally from this idea and create an environment where employees feel safe and happy so we can have transparent conversations around all aspects of work.

There’s always going to be a new opportunity in this tech market. We’re competing with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Dropbox, and Snapchat, and many others. So, of course, we need something unique, but it’s more than that – we really feel that treating employees well is the right way to run a business. Our ability to source and retain talent just proves that point further.

Founded in 2004, Tipico is the leading sports-betting provider in Germany. The company has quickly grown and employs more than 600 people, thanks to their Talent Acquisition Team. Meet one of the Managers behind the charge.

For Antonio Arias Lopez, becoming TA Manager at Tipico last October just made sense. He’s a football fanatic and a total HR head. How often do those two passions intersect? Since his appointment, Lopez has been hard at work with his most notable contributions being the reduction of time to hire by 50 percent year over year, hiring 40 percent more staff with only a 15 percent bump in hours-worked by his team, reducing agency hires by 80 percent, and quintupling the number of tech applicants.

We sit down with him following his “All the Ways to Assess” session at Hiring Success 18 Europe. Read on as Lopez opens up about the strategies that yielded such incredible results for his team, how he implements tech, and why he thinks the future of recruiting lies within the gig economy.

You joined Tipico last October, what about their employer brand made you want to work there?

Three reasons: Number one was football. I’ve always been a massive fan (I am a proud holder of my Real Oviedo season pass since 2003). Two, the great work was done by Jonathan Pace, our HR Marketing man, which made Tipico really attractive with videos of the beautiful offices in Malta, fantastic employee events, and really high Kununu/Glassdoor scores. Three, SmartRecruiters. In my previous role, I had done a deep analysis of all the systems available in the market and SmartRecruiters was at the top. So, when I saw this was the system the role was hosted on, I knew that I would not need to spend months getting budget and implementing a new ATS.

What is your favorite part about working in HR, and what would you say is your specialty?

I’m a recruiter, through and through. I get people good jobs in the most efficient and fastest way possible while making sure both candidates and hiring managers are happy.  To me, the best part of the job is working with people and making an impact in their lives.

Everyone has his/her hiring success stories. It’s motivating to remember when I enabled someone to go from a boring job to handling experiments in the international space station – or to take people out of long-term unemployment into senior engineering positions.

In your opinion, what is the role of technology in HR?

It’s an enabler, not a threat. It may replace “tasks” but not many people. I don’t understand people who are afraid of tech. In every team I’ve managed we became more productive thanks to tech, and no jobs were lost. On the contrary, people could develop themselves and we could spend more time doing what recruiters need to – be out there talking to people about jobs.

What is something your HR department does you think all should?

I put a big emphasis on my teams getting together. I have ten people spread across four locations, and we make quarterly meetups where we look at ourselves and bring experts in to train us. It takes money, but it shows good ROI. The flow of communication is better and team members work together to solve problems unprompted. Our team is at the point where I can get a Maltese recruiter to fill a Munich job, because they know each other’s roles.

What do you think the next big thing in talent acquisition will be and why?

For business and recruiters, it will be a shift towards filling skills gaps, not just seats.

Whereas before, someone who needed an excel expert for four hours would look at an expensive training for an already burdened employee, now, the global gig economy posits a new solution to that problem – just hire an excel expert for four hours!

We need to lose the fear of using freelancers, and find a way to bring freelance recruitment in-house.

What started as a misadventure to grandma’s house turned into the car-sharing app that’s taken over the EU. Frédéric Mazzella tells us how he did it.

Have you ever looked beside you on the highway and noticed another lone driver and thought, “What a waste?” That’s what happened to Frédéric Mazzella while riding with his sister, and it happened again and again, as car after car whizzed by with no passengers, and those countless unfilled seats began to haunt him.

So this three-time Masters holder and researcher for NASA put his mind behind the issue of how to put those untapped vacancies to work. The result? BlaBlaCar, the ride-sharing app that goes beyond city jaunts to take, otherwise carless urbanites, to the farthest reaches of the sprawling countryside, and the EU is smitten. The company has expanded to 22 markets and 60 million people in its 12-year lifespan with no sign of slowing down – unless it’s to pick up another passenger.

We sit down – stationarily – with Founder and President Mazella to discuss how he got to where is today, and what advice he has for growing companies.

(Catch Freddy at Hiring Success 18 September 19-20th in Berlin!)

The idea for your company came with a bit of a eureka moment, didn’t it?

The idea dates back to Christmas 2003, when I wanted to get home to my family in the French countryside. I had no car and the trains were full. As a last resort, my sister made a detour to pick me up. When driving down on the highway, I noticed that the roads were full of mostly empty cars. That was my eureka moment: I realized that there were millions of available seats, except they weren’t in trains, they were in cars. If only we could match drivers with passengers heading the same way! From that moment onwards I have been on a mission to build a people-powered transport solution, where drivers can offer their empty seats and passengers share the cost of the ride.

How many people does your company employ now? How long did it take to reach this size and what are your future growth plans?

We are 350 globally today, serving 22 markets. We used to double the hiring figures each year, and we are still hiring, but as of now, we’re concentrating both on key market growth and tech talents.

How have your hiring needs changed over the years?

Talent acquisition is key to our growth, especially in the scale-up phase where we needed to hire the best people, and fast, to reach a sustainable growth and expand our business. We are now hiring for more senior profiles, whether in terms of management or on key specialties (market, technology, etc…)

What were the first positions you needed to fill? Which ones were the easiest/most difficult?

As we were building our marketplace, we needed tech/developers, but also marketing and communications talents. Today, tech talents remain the most difficult ones to hire as they are scarce, and we see a global talent war.

How important should hiring be to a CEO?

In the early years, convincing complementary talents to join the adventure and help you turn the vision into reality is key. A huge amount of my energy went into finding the right co-Founders, and bringing great talent onboard. Second, as your company grows, you also want to retain a strong culture to go in the right direction, and keep everyone motivated with a strong sense of purpose.

What would be your advice to your younger self-starting the company?

Find strong business partners with skills complementary to yours, as you can’t be great at everything. Hire people better than you in their area of expertise, and when hiring, never compromise on culture for skill.

When a growing management consulting company needed an applicant tracking system to handle its global business, there was only one choice for the HR Tech that could meet and surpass their myriad needs.

Co-founded in 1999 by Matthieu Courtecuisse, the firm started out in Paris in the financial services industry before developing expertise in energy, telecommunications and media, transportation and logistics, and government. 

From day one, Sia Partners’ ambition has been to become a global consulting firm, working on cross-border engagements. Their first-ever assignment was with the World Bank, for a project in West Africa. In 2006 they opened their first international office, and have always pushed forward innovation. As the pioneer of Consulting 4.0, Sia welcomes the disruption of AI, invests in Data Science, and develops consulting bots. As a firm with a strong entrepreneurial spirit, Sia Partners launched its investment fund, Studio, in January, 2017. Their current portfolio includes Big Moustache, Livsty, and Cleep.

What parts of the world is Sia Partners the most active, and which industries are most prevalent in those regions?

The Group has an international presence with 20 offices in 15 countries, and employs people of over 40 nationalities. The two biggest markets are France—with offices in Paris and Lyon—and the US, with offices in New York, Houston, and Charlotte. Our international expansion has lead us to innovate our recruitment process, and we have developed several international programs to attack and retain new talent.

We created the first-ever international Gap Year Internship program in the management consulting industry, which gives students the opportunity to do their one-year internship in two locations. First, a six-month period in Paris, then New York, Hong Kong or Dubai for another six months. Our consultants also have the possibility of international mobility through our Associate Program, which allows consultants the possibility to work for three years in three different Sia Partners offices (one office rotation per year).

How long was it before the focus became truly global, and what did that do to your hiring process?

In a certain way, Sia Partners has always been a global-focused company. Since its internalization in 2006, we’ve recruited employees in each office through the VIE contract.

For VIE programs :

Collaboration between Paris (HQ) and offices for the sourcing and screening steps and, later, within the recruitment process to link each stakeholder

Impacts on the hiring process :

• An increased exchange of information between offices to build a global vision of recruitment
• Becoming global helped Sia Partners to develop international mobility thanks to new international programs. We moved from a local vision of recruitment where each office handled its own process to a collaborative approach.
• New opportunities for our consultants: Sia Partners developed a structured yet dynamic international mobility policy through innovative programs such as our Open Track, Associate Program, and International gap year for students.

What was the TAS/ATS you used before SmartRecruiters? Can you walk us through what your sourcing and hiring were like before?

We had no TAS/ATS before going live with SmartRecruiters—every step of the recruitment process was done manually.

1.      Job Posting: manually post the job opportunities on various job boards (around 20 job offers for France): LinkedIn, JobTeaser, CareerSite, and university websites.
2.      Screening/Sourcing: a generic email address gathered all the applications. When a candidate applied, he or she received a confirmation by email. Regarding the number of applications received, we were not able to respond to each applicant individually when the application was declined.
3.      Selected candidates’ profiles were shared by email to the Partners.
4.      Interview steps: once again, interviews were manually planned by email. There was no shared agenda to help recruiters through the process. As a consequence, a lot of time was spent checking each stakeholders’ availabilities by email, and the candidate experience was negatively impacted.
5.      Job offer internship: when the offer was accepted and the contract drawn up, all the information was transmitted by email. Recruiters, the HR team, and Partners used to discuss the details regarding the new employee and its arrival by email.

Joining the SmartRecruiters community was a huge and major step towards increasing our efficiency. We were able to gather all the information regarding our candidates and easily share them with our community and coworkers. The ability to post multiple open positions contributed to making Sia Partners’ presence on job boards continuous and more efficient. In fact, recruiters spend less time posting job opportunities and are able to focus on high value-added tasks.

What Smartrecruiters did to our hiring process :

• Help the recruitment team build a complete automation of the multiposting process
• Increase each recruiter’s autonomy and visibility on their scope
• Improve candidate experience in various aspects:
  • Thanks to the SmartRecruiters portal, candidates can apply for a job, refer friends, modify and even withdraw their profile.
  • Every candidate now receives a reply to their application—and the response can be customized
  • An increased responsiveness to candidates’ solicitations

• Data centralization, which helps Sia Partners to be compliant to new regulations (GDPR, for instance)
• Ability to create and track analytics
• Create a real community: all stakeholders are highly engaged along the recruitment process
• Reinforce the collaboration between offices: recruiters are able to share candidate profiles and information between offices

What was the process of implementing SmartRecruiters?

Sia Partners went live with SmartRecruiters in November 2016, in France and also in our 20 offices across 15 countries. We worked in collaboration with the SmartRecruiters team, who helped us construct a personalized and intuitive tool that was implemented seamlessly within three weeks. Every user (around 100) was trained during that same period in France and in every Sia Partners office around the world. Sia Partners’ team developed communication tools to gather everyone around the implementation process as fast as possible.

The major result, by far, is the time saved posting job offers, and having centralized all information on a unique platform. Thanks to Smartrecruiters, the recruitment process became smooth and engaging, not only for recruiters and managers but also candidates who are now able to fully take part in their own process. Since November 2016, more than 40,000 candidates have applied through SmartRecruiters. Last but not least, SmartRecruiters also increased collaboration between offices and made the global hiring success at Sia Partners a reality.

What is something unique to hiring for Sia Partners that SmartRecruiters has made easier?

We significantly reduced our time spent on the overhaul recruitment value chain, which helped us to be focused on more added-value projects. As an intuitive tool, SmartRecruiters engaged everyone in the process and created a relevant recruitment track for candidates. Finally, it allowed us to share information and optimize processes that increased stakeholder reactivity.