Hiring Success: How Visionary CEOs Compete for the Best Talent

By Jerome Ternynck

Who you hire defines everything, from business success down to who you are as a leader. That's why hiring top talent is the #1 priority of most CEOs, and yet, studies show that the majority don't believe they recruit highly talented people. As the talent economy continues to evolve, CEOs need to adapt the way they compete for talent in order to keep up. As a current SaaS CEO and former recruiter, Jerome Ternynck packs 30 years of learnings and differentiated recruiting strategies into Hiring Success to provide CEOs a future-ready perspective for talent. You'll walk away with the ability to attract, select, and hire the best talent at a global scale on demand—leading to hiring success now and in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781544506883

Book preview

Hiring

Success

How Visionary CEOs Compete for the Best Talent

Jerome

Ternynck

copyright © 2019 jerome ternynck

All rights reserved.

hiring success

How Visionary CEOs Compete for the Best Talent

isbn 978-1-5445-0690-6 Hardcover

isbn 978-1-5445-0689-0 Paperback

isbn 978-1-5445-0688-3 Ebook

For my parents, who let me be myself.

For my daughters, who make me better.

For the Smartians, who have joined me on a quest to connect people to jobs at scale.

For all the recruiters out there, making a difference every day.

For the millions of people in search of their dream job.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: You Are Who You Hire

1. The War for Talent

2. You Are Who You Hire

3. The Principles of Hiring Success

4. Measuring Hiring Success

Part Two: Let’s Get Candidates

5. You Need a Strategy

6. The Power of Advertising

7. Priming the Pipeline

8. Finding a Needle in a Haystack

9. Friends of My Friends Are…

10. Hunt in Your Own Backyard

11. What a Great Experience

Part Three: The Art (and Science) of Selection

12. Wait…What Are We Looking For?

13. Tell Me about Yourself

14. The Science of Assessment

15. Please Accept My Offer

16. Let’s Get Started

Part Four: Hiring Success at Scale

17. The Talent Acquisition Dream Team

18. An Optimal Recruiting Model

19. Where Talent Meets Technology

20. Diversity Is the Cake

21. The Future of Hiring Success

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Introduction

Several years ago, at a who’s-who-in-Silicon-Valley dinner hosted by Marc Benioff of Salesforce, I got to talking with some fellow executives about my favorite topic, recruiting. A bank CEO seated next to me asked about my company, SmartRecruiters, and I explained that our software helps businesses find and hire top talent at scale.

That’s great, the guy said. You’ve tapped into something absolutely critical: hiring amazing talent.

Are you hiring amazing talent? I asked.

Well, of course—at least I think so, the CEO responded. My human resources team takes care of that.

How is it working out?

I guess it’s fine, he said. We’re hiring people.

I pointed out that hiring people and hiring great people were not the same.

Are you hiring the people that Goldman Sachs rejected? I asked the CEO. Or are you actually competing for the best talent in your market?

The executive pushed back his chair, looking uncomfortable. Tell me more about what you do, he said.

As I explained that I help businesses transform by treating recruiting as a sales and marketing function, not a back-office function, I saw his dawning realization: What if I’m not competing for the best talent?

Like many busy executives, the CEO believed that hiring top talent was a high priority, but without a formula to ensure that he was actually achieving that goal, he had been dropping the ball. And he’s not alone. Over 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies say they are not hiring the best talent.¹

Unfortunately, most companies lump recruiting in with menial human resources tasks like processing payroll or vacation requests. But this is not a process to be automated and forgotten about. There is a global competition for the best talent. And sooner or later, leaders who don’t realize this will find their companies put out of business by competitors who do.

So, how do you ensure that your organization is hiring amazing talent? I’m going to share the answer to that question in the pages that follow.

But first, how did I discover the recipe for hiring success?

My passion for hiring was born in the military. In 1992, I was twenty-two and serving my mandatory two years of service in the French Army. I’d spent the first part of my tenure training at École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr (Saint-Cyr—the equivalent of West Point), then joined the paratroopers as a lieutenant. I was in charge of training the incoming newcomers, who came to my base by the busload—a new batch every sixty days. I quickly learned to identify which recruits were suited for which posts. It wasn’t just about who could run fast or shoot well; it was about who was a team player, who was a born leader. Every sixty days, I’d dispatch my charges, now trained soldiers, to their various stations and start all over again training the next batch.

After completing my service, I set out to the Czech Republic in search of opportunity. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and the Eastern Bloc was opening up for business. It was like a reset of the entire country. It was incredibly exciting to me: though I had no money and no clue what profession to pursue, I had an entrepreneurial spirit. Sensing that inspiration would find me in bustling Prague, I settled there, asking everyone I met, What’s needed here? What kind of company should I start? The answer almost always came in two parts:

Part one: Any business you can think of, we need it in Prague! The possibilities are limitless!

Part two: But good luck finding great people to work for you.

Finding specialized talent was a major problem because the economy was transitioning from a communist, centralized economy into a liberal, capitalist one. If you were looking for someone with five years’ experience in marketing, nobody in the country qualified, because five years earlier marketing hadn’t existed there. This was true in so many fields.

My First Aha Moment

It didn’t take long for it to hit me: the businesses fueling Prague’s boom depended on their ability to hire talent. Seizing the opportunity before me, I opened one of the first recruitment agencies in the country. Right away, it was clear that I’d been correct: the many Western companies now setting up shop in the Czech Republic really did need help. Long accustomed to hiring for aptitude (the candidate’s past experience or education), not attitude (the candidate’s personality and potential), they were terrible at identifying raw talent. Which of course was exactly what they needed to be doing in order to bridge the gap between available specialized jobs and Prague’s inexperienced talent pool. So, I jumped in and helped companies like L’Oréal, McDonald’s, and Microsoft fill thousands of positions. It was a very democratic and diverse process; almost anyone could claim any job if they had the right characteristics and attitude for it.

Over the next seven years, my recruitment agency expanded throughout Central and Eastern Europe, opening offices in seven countries. Then came the internet in the late nineties—and with it, limitless opportunities for recruiters. No longer did we need to sort through stacks of paper resumes to find candidates; the process could be automated online. I moved to London and founded a recruiting software company.

The first software I built was an applicant tracking system (ATS) that launched in 2002. My software, like its competitors’, put candidates into a database that automatically tracked every stage of their application process. ATS software was so cost-effective and efficient at processing job applicants that 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies soon adopted some form of it. By 2010, when the ATS market was nearing $2 billion worldwide, I sold my software company and set off for San Francisco on a mission to try to create something new and better.

Because, while my software had been successful, I knew I hadn’t yet achieved my mission.

A New Mission to Reduce Search Friction

At the time, the United States was still reeling from the after-effects of the 2008 financial crisis. Unemployment was high, the economy was down, and people were struggling to make ends meet. I wanted to be part of the solution. I wanted to help solve unemployment by giving companies the tools to find the talent they needed to succeed.

What had been missing from early ATS software, mine included, was a crucial piece of the puzzle: these systems filled the role of tracking candidates, but they didn’t help companies attract those candidates. They didn’t solve the problem of search friction.

At the time, the concept of search friction—how long it takes for supply and demand to meet in the job market—was relatively new. It was coined by three professors—Dale Mortensen, Christopher Pissarides, and Peter Diamond—who won the 2010 Nobel Prize for economics for their work studying the problem of unemployment, and what to do about it. The scholars had found that high search friction in the labor market was very bad for the economy. How bad? It was, and still is, a global problem costing us trillions of dollars each year.²

In San Francisco, I began studying companies that were already successfully using technology to reduce search friction. The rental market was a brilliant example: thanks to Airbnb, for instance, you no longer had to conduct weeks of research to find an apartment for a weekend on the other side of the world. Instead, you could book a place with two clicks. Friction in that market had been removed.

I wanted to do the same thing for the recruiting market. And I knew this meant that in addition to offering outward-bound recruiting tools, this new product must not treat hiring like a rote process. Candidates deserved better than to be moved through the interviewing and hiring experience like widgets on a factory assembly line. They were humans, not products, after all. And they were vital to the economic well-being of the nation and the world. Shouldn’t they be treated with due respect?

One day, I took a blank sheet of paper and wrote down what it would take for a recruiting software platform to hire amazing talent on scale. I zeroed in on three core attributes:

Candidate experience: It should help me find candidates.

Hiring manager engagement: It should help me pick the right talent, engaging both recruiters and hiring managers.

Recruiter productivity: It should increase productivity by containing all of my data in one place.

These became the three principles of hiring success, woven into what became the SmartRecruiters platform.

After four years of development and testing, my team and I launched the first version of our software in January 2015. Since then, we have acquired 700 clients around the world, including Visa, Bosch, Ikea, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Today, our platform facilitates over a hundred thousand interviews monthly, and we just celebrated our one-millionth-hire mark. We’re proud that many of our customers have doubled their hiring velocity—the percentage of jobs filled on time.

Most importantly, our software makes applying for jobs easier and more fun for candidates, while simultaneously attracting the highest quality candidates. How do we know this? We created a formula that measures the fit between new hires and jobs, not just the quantity.

Now, my mission is to give every company the tools they need to achieve this level of hiring success. And I want to give every candidate a job they love.

Are You Ready for Hiring Success?

This book reveals my tested strategy for hiring amazing talent and out-hiring the competition. I didn’t write it for recruiters. Nor for those interested in tips and tricks for hiring. Our goal at SmartRecruiters is to help companies hire amazing talent at scale. Which is why I’ve written this book for the executive who has significant power to change the way recruiting is done at their company—but until now has lacked the right strategy and tools.

This book is for the CEO I met at that Silicon Valley party three years ago—the one who said hiring great talent was his top priority but didn’t know how to get his team to execute on that vision. It’s for the disruptors of the world who are ready to shake up and transform the recruitment process at their companies. It’s for leaders who understand the fundamental truth