SmartRecruiters Hiring Success EMEA 2024 – what you missed

In case you missed it, SmartRecruiters Hiring Success EMEA 2024 took place in Amsterdam’s iconic Eye Filmmuseum on Wednesday 11th September. 

Talent acquisition professionals gathered from far and wide to gain cutting-edge insights from sessions covering everything from around AI to the future of TA, with speakers from Bosch, Novartis, Udder, SGS, and many more.

But in case you weren’t lucky enough to attend, here are our top three sessions of the day.

ServiceNow: The accidental narcissist

Kicking off the day, Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, shared a startling stat: 82% of CEOs and senior leaders say that they expect AI to have a significant or even extreme impact on their business.

In fact, throughout Solis’ opening keynote, he discussed the need for organizations to adapt to AI’s capabilities, which he believes extends much further than just automation, innovation and creativity. 

He also highlights examples of companies, such as Uber, which is using AI to give consumers what they want in much better time than usual. 

He explains: “I call today’s consumer, today’s candidate, today’s employee, the accidental narcissist, because every app and device that they use tells them that they’re the most important person in the world. 

“They can have anything they want as quickly as they want. To the point where now they keep wanting more and they want it faster.”

Concluding, he highlights the next eight steps for HR leaders: developing AI literacy; advocating human oversight; maintaining personal connections; prioritizing candidates; enhancing soft skills; championing ethical AI practices; identifying critical skills; ensuring compliance has regulation; and leveraging AI as a decision-making support tool.

Finding a job is not cold, it’s personal

Recently taking on the full-time position as SmartRecrutiers’ CEO, Rebecca Carr took center stage at the event to not only reflect on her eight-year tenure at the company, but also, to discuss what she foresees for its future.

After starting her career as a recruiter, Carr soon trained to become a product manager, and, after seeing the vast amount of opportunity in the space, wanted to improve the hiring process to make it faster and smarter. Now, 15 years later, she’s implementing these improvements through SmartRecruiters.

“This is largely still an unsolved problem because of how quickly processes and technology are accelerating around us,” Carr explains.

“We are in a moment where a seismic shift is happening, and as specific to recruiting, I feel that every single day, when I speak to every single one of you, it is my job as a vendor and as a CEO to come to the table with technology that helps you through this moment.”

Summarizing her session, Carr shares the advice for audience HR leaders to prioritize their problems.

“Everything could be changed right now,” she says. “If you went to every single workflow, you could probably have a list of 15 things that could be better or more efficient or more automated. But asking what the most important ones are should be a priority.”

Then, she adds the importance of making space for experimentation, so businesses can focus on what actually works, and importantly, what doesn’t.

Concluding, Carr says: “Finding a job is not cold, it’s personal – it has to be human. Connection has to be a piece of this equation. 

“Understanding and communicating with people has to be a piece of this equation. Feeling personalized is important. So though it will make us better and faster, we can never lose that, and it will remain sort of a core principle of how we do business and how we show up.”

The cheat code for turning applicants into colleagues

Most, if not all, businesses were impacted by the Covid pandemic. But for Frasers Group, it created a mammoth task that would change the way the company did recruitment forever. 

As the group was gearing up for its busiest commercial phases to date, retail needed 10,000 employees hired in an eight week period – all remotely, of course. 

Hammering down the hatches, Adam Reynolds, Head of Talent at Frasers Group, organized a team of 50 UK-wide colleagues to do 25 interviews per day for eight consecutive weeks.

This led to 50,000 interviews booked, 33,000 completed, and offering little over 16,500 jobs. That equals a 65% offer to hire ratio with a 23-day time-to-hire. 

This experience is what led Reynolds to believe that a more efficient recruitment process is needed. 

“The balance of power had shifted,” he explains. “The candidates now had a choice. 

“We were no longer fighting a battle for talent with the store next door, but now hospitality, services, fast food, retail, call center, and so on. 

It was truly a race to the top in terms of salary and flexibility. Although this aspect didn’t surprise us, we were finding more candidates questioning ‘what’s in it for them’ while asking us for our values, flexibility, or sustainability stance, for example.”

Throughout his session, Reynolds outlined the key learnings from this experience (such as the necessity for in-person interviews with meaningful, light-touch feedback), while also highlighting the importance of pace, which he describes as the “cheat code in turning applicants into colleagues.”

Now, reflecting back, Frasers Group has now improved its time-to-hire from 23 days (in 2020), to now just nine days, with an offer being made to one in every two candidates.

What’s more, the business used to only 50% of the candidates that were booked in interviews, whereas now, this figure sits at 75% – not bad progress at all!

Want to know more about SmartRecruiters Hiring Success EMEA 2024? Well, stay tuned, as we have an exclusive interview with CEO Rebecca Carr coming up shortly.