Recruiting News Network is an agnostic-news organization, supported (in part) by HireClix. We partner closely with a number of industry leaders, bringing their perspectives and experiences to our global audience of talent acquisition practitioners and vendors. In particular, have a very strong partnership with George LaRocque, founder and principal analyst at WorkTech. Recently, HireClix's founder - Neil Costa - and George sat down to walk through the investment landscape around talent acquisition tech (TA tech).

Highlights include:

Unicorns

"My perspective on Eightfold, they've raised a ton of money, they've got a valuation, that's over 2 billion now. I have a difficult time, given what we know about the market for the last, you know, 20 years, I have a difficult time seeing any vendor in the talent acquisition and talent management platform play deliver on that one valuation like that, that's hard, it's hard for me to see that. It demands that they become something more for sure. I think they're going to start coming for ATS platform customers, they're showing up in a lot of deals like that already. They have customers that have put Eightfold in front of like a Workday and they're relegating the ATS to like a back office filing system, and EightFold looks like an ATS to me in that in that environment. As well as showing promise for talent management. You can't deliver back to your investors without without extending further, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them look even deeper into the talent management and talent acquisition category stacks and make some acquisitions or drive their native capabilities in those directions. They they just have to. I think it's it's a really interesting spot that they're in right now because they're sort of dependent on having good partners with like workday and iCIMS and SmartRecruiters, and you know, GreenHouse is coming up into that world as well. So that's a can of worms..."

Reskilling

"And as we look at this next wave of talent, acquisition technology and talent technology, you'll see more models that are doing interesting things around learning and skill certification and creating more pipelines of early career and certified talent, if you will, based on different skills or disciplines are career paths"

Increasingly complex reporting

"If if you're in that large enterprise, and trading publicly you've got regulations from the SEC. And they are asking you to report on your human capital interests in a way that is not just demographics, like, it's it's a narrative, a fact and database narrative, that you'll have to tell if you're telling that story about diversity, inclusion, equity, or as you begin to tell that story that becomes an employer brand story. And then everybody needs to have that story in order to compete with you for talent."

How to reach a suddenly transformed workforce

"The pandemic has put a light on the independent workforce, I'm not talking only about the gig economy, but also freelancers, temp workers, contractors, and how we're now at a place where about half of the American workforce has worked as one of those in their career. And I think we're rapidly moving toward that 50%, that sort of 50/50 independent worker to full time employee ratio. And as we're looking at uncertainty in the market, and trouble difficulty hiring people, I think that's just going to going to get even more leverage. So we're seeing not just sources of talent in there, but also sort of new modern vendor management systems or systems that empower line managers to hire and manage that type of workforce while being compliant and, and paying on contract and things like that."

RPOs become tech vendors‍

"In that RPO space, it's really becoming so tech forward. So if you that the technology has advanced so rapidly, that if you're thinking about taking the transactions out off of the schedulers desk, and and, you know, administrative transactions off of the recruiters desk and providing a better candidate experience with a conversational interface that has a direct implication for RPOs. So you've got companies like AMSs who actually went full on an hourly with their product called "Hourly", with an end to end hiring platform. So they're now selling technology alone, while they're also selling RPO and staffing and other services."

On an utterly wild market

"I would say that things are so out of control, right now that I really stopped making predictions a while ago. I was nervous about a bubble and what would happen in the market and to our category before the pandemic, and then the pandemic hit. And it's out there. I said, you know, don't don't overreact, we're probably going to see investment dry up for a couple quarters, it'll come back once we've got to get through the pandemic, and the resulting economic issues. And then my report the next quarter showed a bigger quarter than the one before and so on. And so it just follows that trend."

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍