Last week, over 1,000 talent acquisition professionals converged in New York City for Greenhouse OPEN 2019. This year, we celebrated Talent Makers - the people who have figured out how great hiring drives business growth. The conference consisted of two jam-packed days of fireside chats with TA leaders and CEOs talking about how they champion great hiring and ways they are driving their businesses forward. It was great hearing from so many awesome Greenhouse partners during the two days, and here are a few of our favorite sessions/takeaways from the event!
How Great Hiring Builds Great Companies – The Warby Parker Story
It's always great to hear successful stories from our clients and Dave Gilboa, co-founder and CEO of Warby Parker, did not disappoint. Dave sat down with Greenhouse CEO, Daniel Chait, to talk about why they formed Warby Parker and how they embraced the four principles of great hiring to attract highly sought-after talent and built a great business. Daniel takes an active role in hiring and shares, "Business leaders need to be responsible for hiring...every hiring manager needs to take ownership." It was great to hear how passionate Warby Parker is - not only in candidate experience - but also in employee experience, and the ways in which they ensure all employees are engaged; from their corporate office to their store locations around the country. To celebrate their employees' two year anniversaries, Warby Parker sends them to any of their locations to meet other team members and puts them up in a hotel for the weekend to enjoy some time away as well! Warby also utilizes their employees to help their diversity initiatives by prompting them to help build out referral programs based on previous colleagues.
Elevate Your Talent Brand: How To Leverage Marketing in Recruiting
Tim Sackett, President of HRU Technical Resources, led this panel discussion with leaders from HIRED, Stripe, Uncubed and Thomson Reuters. In this session the panelists discussed how companies of every size are thinking big to attract candidates and engage at scale. The starting point of the discussion was that every company needs to build their employer brand, and implement an effective recruitment marketing strategy. The best employer brand will attract AND repel; you want to attract the right talent -- those that align with your company's mission and values and at the same time repel those that would not be successful in your organization. The group also touched on the importance of updating your job descriptions based on the fact that 70% of job descriptions are written in a male voice. Just think about who is NOT applying to your jobs based solely on that. Overall, it's key for recruiting teams to start borrowing tactics from their marketing teams and develop a recruitment marketing strategy that will help them accomplish their hiring goals.
5 Strategies to Deliver Great Candidate Experiences
One of our personal highlights was this session, where our Founder & CEO, Danielle Weinblatt, joined Saul Weiner of One Medical for this panel led by Andres Traslavina, Director of Global Recruiting at Whole Foods, to discuss the impact of great candidate experience. They covered five strategies for delivering great candidate experience, and also the impact a negative experience can have -- both on your hiring results but also your company's bottom line. Danielle shared the value of a good candidate experience, "If a candidate has a negative experience, they tell six or more people. If they had a good experience, they’ll tell two or more people." And that it will affect your bottom line, "46% of candidates who believe they have had a 'negative' overall experience say they will take their alliance, product purchases and relationship somewhere else." The biggest takeaway from this session was that recruiting teams need to try and treat each candidate as an individual and try to understand what issues really matter to them -- and then reflect them in their personal journey, from interviews to onboarding.
Overall, it was an awesome two days of learning and networking with Talent Makers from across different industries, and can't wait to see what Greenhouse has in store for OPEN 2020!
