Utmost Raises $21 Million to Become the Vendor Management System for Workday Customers but The Market Needs More Than That
Utmost announced a $21 million Series B round of VC for its vendor management system (VMS). This brings its total raised to $32.2 million.
There’s a renewed focus on the independent (aka contingent) workforce in the work tech market. Like many trends that were chugging along for decades, this one was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The independent workforce represents $1.2 trillion of spend which is about 5.7% of the U.S. GDP. This includes contractors, freelancers, solopreneurs, gig workers, and temp workers and it is also increasingly leveraged by all market segments, from SMB through large enterprise. Innovative models are springing up in this tech category from emerging players that empower new approaches to living in a hybrid workforce world, enabling the enterprise to quickly find and hire these workers like Stoke Talent or providers bringing workforce management and shift scheduling like Sirenum. Of course, incumbents like beeline are leveraging a large enterprise client base while innovating for the future.
We haven’t seen Utmost yet, but its positioning is core to a traditional VMS in a “command and control” sense. Product messaging is focused on driving compliance and cost/spend control. Its integration to Workday creates the potential for a tie to strategic workforce planning. Utmost focused almost exclusively on Workday customers who participated in the recent round via Workday ventures. There’s a great deal of complexity in vendor management at scale. The Workday investment will ensure continued support in that ecosystem while deferring hiring and talent management opportunities to Workday.
In total $2.7 billion was invested globally in work tech during Q1. Get the WorkTech free report and analysis here.
Source: Utmost Raises $21 Million Series B to Accelerate Growth and Expand its Extended Workforce System
Years have passed since Handshake founder Garrett Lord’s dumpster dive that he claims inspired the creation of the company and this week’s announcement of its $80 million Series E round of venture capital funding with a new valuation of $1.5 billion. Still, it makes for a good back story if you’re trying to level the playing field for early career and internship jobs. This puts Handshake’s total raised at $234 million.
Taking the world of campus recruiting and early career hiring virtual is not a new trend. Like so much of what we’re seeing in this latest wave of work technology for recruiting, Handshake considers the automation of the workflows and relationships with students, campus career offices, and employers table stakes. They lean into capabilities that help employers engage a more diverse early-career candidate pool and impact overall candidate engagement and efficiency.
EY leveraged Handshake to drive stronger engagement with diverse talent at the top of their recruiting funnel. With our help, EY was able to help secure a 125% increase in engagement with Black and Latinx candidates.
At the start of the pandemic, GE looked to Handshake to help pivot to a virtual recruiting model and drive their up-funnel activity. They doubled the number of virtual interviews compared to the year before and saw a 76% conversion rate from engaged students to applicants.
P&G has achieved significantly greater efficiency by leveraging Handshake, improving cost-per-hire by 67% over the past two years.
From Handshake’s announcement
Handshake told TechCrunch that they now have 550,000 employers using its system, including 100% of the Fortune 500 using its system to some degree. They have projected revenues of $100 million. They also claim to have 18 million students from more than 1200 educational institutions on the platform, which drove 98 million student-employer “connections” last year alone.
That said, they’re in a very competitive market where getting from $100 million to growth that supports a $1.5 billion valuation won’t come easily. We see this as a space where providers vie for a “share of wallet” versus an enterprise-wide early-career/campus budget. Let’s look at a short list of notable providers in the category. Providers like Brazen see similar momentum and fuel virtual events and candidate engagement. Yello, who takes more of a hiring process platform approach to campus and early-career hiring, is also prevalent in the Fortune 500. Then there are rapidly emerging companies adjacent to Handshake like WayUp and Headstart, both focusing on mitigating bias from early-career hiring in their own unique ways. And, let’s not forget about the job boards where sites like collegerecruiter.com leverage programmatic technology to provide employers with better efficiency and quality candidates.
An investment in better hiring experiences for students and early-career professionals where they also have a more fair shot at opportunity is something we can get behind. That valuation makes us a little nervous, though.
$2.7 billion was invested globally in work tech during 2021 Q1 alone. Get WorkTech’s free report and analysis here.
Source: No Connections, Experience, or Luck Required | Handshake
Singapore-based impress.ai announced a USD $3 million Seed round of venture capital funding for its conversational recruiting tech. This brings its total raised to $4.4 million.
Impress.ai operates a no-code, self-service platform that is highly focused on simplifying and accelerating various parts of the recruitment workflow. It uses AI chatbots to create a seamless interview experience for candidates, answer queries with a 96% accuracy rate while simultaneously providing assessments, and assign an overall metric value to the candidate.from AsiaTechDaily
It’s already late in the game for recruiting chatbots. Impress.ai looks to be focused on expanding into Australia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. A good strategy given the saturation of other providers in the USE and EMEA.
$2.7 billion was invested globally in work tech during 2021 Q1 alone. Get WorkTech’s free report and analysis here.
Source: Singapore HR tech startup impress.ai secures $3m pre-Series A funding
Blind, the anonymous professional network, announced a $37 million Series C round of venture capital to move its platform toward career advice and recruiting. This brings its total raised to $61.8 million.
Blind gives users an anonymous network, which presents like a message board, to communicate about their workplace. Co-founder and GM Kyum Kim told TechCrunch that usage spiked during COVID and the work from home surge, especially with employees of tech firms. Kim is hoping to harness what’s communicated by employees anonymously to offer aggregate insights to employers. Blind is also looking to offer employers hiring connections to users who express intent to leave, bringing Blind into recruiting. Today, the company has a free and extremely rudimentary job board – basically a collaborative Airtable to post jobs manually.
There’s an obvious analog to Glassdoor, where anonymous reviews and ratings feed an employer-brand perception and then a tie to a job board. While employers scramble to manage their brand on Glassdoor and most take it very seriously, there is definitely some resentment in the market toward the way they monetize the site. As you read that “Blind is building what it calls “Talent by Blind,” a platform for capturing this hiring intentionality and selling it to recruiters.” You can’t help but wonder if that play might cause resentment with Blind’s anonymous users. It’s a tightrope walk they’ll have to manage.
One thing is for sure, this one will be fun to watch.
$2.7 billion was invested globally in work tech during 2021 Q1 alone. Get WorkTech’s free report and analysis here.
Source: Blind raises $37M to double down on workplace gossip and career advice | TechCrunch