Trend Report Vol. 5T A L E N T T E C H L A B S

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Letter from the Director

TTL continues to track shifts and growth in the Talent Acquisition

tech space. Advancements in APIs and interconnectivity among

verticals paves the way for a more cohesive user experience

than ever before.

Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace

How developing a “platform-first” approach can fix the fragmented

Talent Acquisition Technology paradigm. From open APIs to

integrated ecosystems, hope is on the horizon for Talent Acquisition.

Learn how to select the right vendor.

Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick

Recruitment is a dynamic and complex process that will always

include the job description, posting jobs, interviewing, and screening.

What has changed is the execution. Learn how tech has changed

and what tools we’re using today.

Investor Spotlight: AngelList

A rise in incubators and accelerators and an IPO desert are among

the trends impacting the Talent Acquisition funding landscape.

Are late-stage investors getting ready for a big year-end slowdown?

Find out in this investor trends update.

The Future Of Talent Acquisition: Maren Hogan

With a definitive shift in workforce demographics, new tools and

technology, and accessibility changes for small, medium and large

companies alike, the future of Talent Acquisition may look more like

the past than we think. Read the predictions.

Event Recap: Disruptive Innovation In Talent Acquisition

An in-depth look at emerging trends from Disruptive Innovation in

Talent Acquisition, a TTL event. Talent Acquisition experts discuss

what the new wave of platforms and the issues facing today’s

workforce mean for recruitment in this recap by Brian Delle Donne.

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Letter from the Director

It’s an exciting time to be in Talent Acquisition

Technology. In the last six months, we’ve seen

phenomenal growth here at Talent Tech Labs.

We’ve visited conferences all over the country and

held our own talent innovation day here in New York

City. Our model of putting startup companies in front

of actual Talent Acquisition professionals has been

proven. But what does that mean?

In this Trends Report, you’ll see some common

threads. One is hope. Hope that finally, Talent

Acquisition will get its due; from technology partners,

and from its colleagues within Human Resources

suite. Another key thread is the critical need for

innovation that’s coming from the people that make

up our Talent Acquisition Technology Ecosystem.

It’s clear that recruiting is a competitive advantage

when done right.

While leaders and frontline practitioners in Talent

Acquisition continue to be held accountable for more

than the traditional job description (marketing,

branding, retention, tech oversight), we’re also seeing

a leap in the willingness to embrace these roles and

shed some of the old responsibilities that have

become ineffective in today’s talent markets.

At the forefront of this shift, you’ll find the people

highlighted in this report. Whether they’re piloting

an unknown new vendor from our incubator to

astounding results, enabling users in purchasing

open API technology, or vigilantly watching the talent

tech markets to give accurate and timely advice

to investors—recruiters, hiring managers, and talent

leaders are championing the issues that are

important to Talent Acquisition professionals.

I hope you enjoy Volume 5 of our Trends Report.

We are always open to suggestions, so if there’s

anything you would like to see our team cover, please

let us know. You may notice that we have left out

the updated Ecosystem from the report. We will be

turning the Ecosystem into its own release and you

can expect to receive the next version in mid-June.

Jonathan Kestenbaum

Executive Director – Talent Tech Labs

J. Kestenbaum

Welcome to the latest edition of Talent Tech Trends

About the Author: Jonathan Kestenbaum is the executive

director of Talent Tech Labs. Talent Tech Labs was originally

founded to foster the growth and development of emerging

ideas and companies in the Talent Acquisition Technology

space. An entrepreneur at heart, he spends his days building

and advising the technology companies of tomorrow.

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Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace

If companies are not careful, Talent Acquisition can become the

most fragmented process within an organization. There are many

steps to a holistic recruiting approach and many different vendors

to work with across these steps. To make a senior hire within a

technology company, for example, a recruiting team might need to:

— Post the job to multiple job boards and aggregators

— Do distributed video interviews

— Offer meaningful skills/behavioral assessments

— Leverage reference check vendors to skip the phone call bias

— Perform background checks

— Prepare an offer

That is five separate vendors to work with in what we all see as

a relatively straightforward hiring process. It gets worse. The vast

majority of customers are on legacy ATSs (in which sourcing and

CRM were afterthoughts), so we need to integrate these steps

into our already complex process. A Talent Acquisition professional

may also need to do some or all of these things:

— Ensure the job is distributed to internal employees

for referrals

— Tap into select agencies who might have good candidates

— Ensure the career page is up & mobile optimized

— Email all of the relevant targets in my talent pool

using my CRM

— Leverage LinkedIn Recruiter to source folks

That’s 10 steps with 10 potentially different vendors or tools.

This may sound exorbitant or insane (or both), but it’s the reality

of today’s recruiters. Last week, I spoke with a Fortune 20 company

who has 19 different systems “on top of” their ATS, with only

four of them integrated. The talent leaders at this company were

incredibly frustrated because their reality looks like this:

— Recruiters spend less time recruiting and more time

doing “swivel-chair integration”

— They are wasting money and resources to support

vendor integrations if they bother at all

— They can’t get the “full-picture” data they need because

it’s stored in many different systems

— Worse, they are running their best candidates through

a menial, disconnected experience

How to Identify Platform- First Vendors:

− Every endpoint of a vendor’s product feature is exposed to a restful API

− The vendor’s APIs have a robust API management and throttling process

− The vendor’s APIs are easily viewable and testable on a vendor’s development sites

− The vendors offer metadata reporting APIs for 3rd party reporting tools

− The vendors offer pre-built sophisticated bi-directional connectors with HRIS systems

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How did we get here?

There are many reasons recruiters find themselves in this professional

predicament, but one primary cause stands out. The relatively shoddy,

closed state of the underlying technology (powering all of the vendors

that comprise the TA stack) is at the core of this issue. Few ATS

vendors have open APIs, nor have they taken the time to realize the

mess they have created. The resulting customer frustration has led

to a resurgence in customers blindly buying the recruiting modules

of their large HRIS vendor. This is because they assume all of these

modules are integrated automatically.

However, this doesn’t end well as many of these vendors also lack

open APIs—sometimes even for their own Talent Management

modules, meaning that Talent Acquisition leaders are jumping from

the ATS frying pan into the HRIS fire. Regardless of which purchasing

decision they make, they find themselves with a system that isn’t

integrated with their other platforms, leading to disjointed processes,

inefficient recruitment teams and poor candidate experience.

...to win in Talent Acquisition, one must

adopt a platform-first approach...

There is exciting news—not on the horizon, but here today. It’s no

mistake there is a wealth of technological innovation in the Talent

Acquisition space. Nothing is more important for a customer’s

success and survival in this “world is flat” reality than getting better

Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace Continued

people than your competition. You can’t do that if your recruiters are

ill-equipped, your sourcing team is doing duplicative work, and your

candidates are giving up on applications. So today, we are seeing

companies taking a broader, more impactful view. They realize to win

in Talent Acquisition, one must adopt a platform-first approach.

It is easy to identify such vendors and their products.

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This is a huge step, but it is merely the beginning. While this

pace of innovation is exciting to the Talent Acquisition buyer, it is

truthfully what other application categories have been offering for

over five years. Some vendors are going further—recognizing how

little time and resources the Talent Acquisition buyer has to do

the work themselves with these new open APIs. They are creating

marketplaces where they work with the myriad of potential vendors

a Talent Acquisition buyer might need, and have thus created

a much larger “whole product” with an integrated ecosystem.

Successful vendor marketplaces have these common components:

Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace

− Partner solutions integrated to a consistent set of APIs that are always maintained

− A consistent consumption experience within vendor’s UI, including easy invoking of partner services from a hiring process as well as view the partner results from within the vendor’s solution

− Ability to combine and view the partner and vendors data to provide a whole picture

− Flexible choice of business models, ranging from distribution for simpler “customer-click” purchases (often to SMBs) to referrals for “more complex” sales to larger customers

Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace Continued

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The benefits for companies looking to evolve their Talent

Acquisition strategy and impact are obvious: no more swivel chair

integration, no more burdensome integration, reduced IT costs,

and more efficient processes. What is less obvious, but more

powerful, is that customers can ensure a consistent candidate

experience, while great candidates don’t get lost across multiple

non-integration points. This is terrific news for Talent Acquisition

technology vendors, especially those who specialize in one core

area of the Talent Acquisition spectrum. If these ecosystems bear

fruit and take off (which they will—platforms always win in the

end), this will allow them to double down on their core strength

while having multiple effective routes to market knowing that their

solution is easily consumable with others.

Boston Consulting Group reports that

organizations that win in recruiting deliver

2.5X the revenue growth over those who don’t.

It just may be in a few years that TA

and HR is where the coolest and geekiest

kids in IT work.

Finally, real technology is coming to HR tech (no more flat-file

integrations) in the area that has the most impact in HR: Talent

Acquisition. Boston Consulting Group reports that organizations

that win in recruiting deliver 2.5X the revenue growth over those

who don’t. It just may be in a few years that Talent Acquisition

and HR are where the coolest (and geekiest) kids in IT work.

Would that be so bad? I think not.

About the Author: Brett Queener is President and COO of SmartRecruiters,

an industry-leading Talent Acquisition Platform with 700+ customers including

AOL, Atlassian, Skechers, MicroStrategy, and Ubisoft. Prior to SmartRecruiters,

Brett was a senior executive at Salesforce.com for 11 years, including as the Head

of Products where he launched many market-winners including the industry-

changing Salesforce AppExchange.

Highlight: Components of a Successful Vendor Marketplace Continued

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Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick

Consider two colleagues at the same level in your company. The

first is incredibly bright and switched-on. The second, however,

is a slacker. The contrasting qualities are paramount. Yet, no ATS

in the world could distinguish between them; it only sees two

people with the same job, title, company and time period. Your

ATS does not have the capability to track the intangibles; learnings,

accomplishments, and impact, to name a few.

Your ATS does not have the capability to track

the intangibles; learnings, accomplishments,

and impact, to name a few.

Simply put, ATS technology is stuck in the 1990s. Applicant

Tracking Systems are nothing more than cumbersome systems

of record and black holes for job seekers that unfortunately do

not capture who the candidate is and what he or she represents.

Due to the pace of consumer change, combined

with rapid technological advancements,

traditional job posting has been effectively

rendered obsolete. Companies and

candidates both mutually depend on smart-

business intelligence and effective candidate

management tools. Technology facilitates

connectivity and enables a mutually impactful

partnership between recruiters and prospective

talent. However, the collective challenge that

Talent Acquisition specialists face is figuring

out how to best-leverage these advancements

to create a dynamic and engaging digital

recruitment process.

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Because of this, it’s critically important that we are maximizing

technology in order to attract and retain dynamic talent. To

succeed in this endeavor, we need to move past technology

that simply screens and dismisses unsuitable candidates. Rather,

we must focus on treating candidates as consumers, and sell to

them throughout the process in order to compel them to join our

respective firms. While social recruiting isn’t entirely new, there

are various tactics that have proven effective and continue to gain

popularity. Tactics include video interviewing, mobile recruiting,

and social media engagement as part of the application, rather

than a screening mechanism.

...we need to move past technology that

simply screens and dismisses unsuitable

candidates.

A good question to ask is, “When job seekers go online to look

for employment, where are they going?”

CareerBuilder reports nearly 75% of current workers are open

to new opportunities, but only 18% actively look at job postings.

Furthermore, nearly 44% of candidates only respond to a job

opportunity when someone contacts them. These figures show

that interactive communication is essential; the methods by

which we engage with prospective candidates will be the key

differentiator between winning and losing the talent war.

As I alluded to before, candidates are more than just job seekers;

they are savvy consumers, engaging with our brands on multiple

levels. We can market to talent as thoughtfully and acutely as we

market to customers. So why don’t we?

Marketers learn in a flash that marketing to the wrong people

negatively affects bottom line figures. The same is true for status-

quo recruiting tactics. Yet, thanks to all the technology options

available to us today, we can evolve past “black hole” recruiting

and treat each job-seeker like the valued collaborator he or she is.

Through smart and insightful technology, we can humanize the

recruiting process with candidate relationship management (CRM)

tools that are geared towards engaging job-seekers rather than

intimidating them. Initiating contact is a critical first step, so long

as it has the human touch.

Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick Continued

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...we can humanize the recruiting process with

candidate relationship management (CRM)

tools that are geared towards engaging

job-seekers rather than intimidating them.

Social media has revolutionized the way we connect, interact

and engage. Because of this, the technology we leverage must

seamlessly connect across a candidate’s online presence. Social

media is no longer used to screen a candidate, it is now used

to validate a candidate. The most successful social media

recruitment initiatives are those that imitate real-life scenarios.

People want to see the “face behind the brand” and are conducting

online audits of potential employers prior to and during the

recruitment process. It is important to integrate your digital

footprint to ensure that you are presenting your desired corporate

brand to potential candidates.

Mobile recruiting has far surpassed all expectations. Today more

than 72% of candidates apply via a mobile device. More than 61%

of people said they have a better view of the brand based on their

mobile experience. These figures reveal the importance of having

a mobile-friendly application process.

Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick Continued

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...future generations will make decisions in

sound bites, and they won’t wait around for

companies to make up their minds

As video continues to take over social as the preferred stimulus,

appealing to candidates in this way will significantly increase.

While the use is not new, video interviewing and screening needs

to be fresh as the prevalence and application gain momentum.

Videos must sell the culture and brand. It’s beneficial and unique

to give candidates the opportunity to leave timed interview

applications. Internally, employee generated content will be

adapted to help recruiters engage with candidates.

Over time, other social and mobile tools like WhatsApp, Line and

SnapChat will replace lengthy traditional conversations. The role

of the employer will be to sell the opportunity in 90 seconds or less,

while the role of the candidate will be to convince the employer

they are the right fit in the same amount of time. The fact is, future

generations will make decisions in sound bites, and they won’t wait

around for companies to make up their minds.

Recruitment is a dynamic and complex process that will always

include the job description, posting jobs, interviewing, and

screening. What has changed is the execution. As we leap towards

the third decade of the 21st century, with Millennials transforming

into industry leaders, and Generation Z taking their place as the

largest portion of the workforce, we have no choice but to tackle

these challenges head-on.

Ultimately, the winners in the talent wars will be the companies

that can effectively and efficiently use pre-existing technology

while keeping a watchful eye on what tomorrow will bring.

About the author: Simon Fenwick is the Executive Vice President and Managing

Director of Global Talent Acquisition at IPG Mediabrands. His experience spans

client and agency environments. He has extensive experience in designing,

implementing and managing operational delivery of global talent teams and

acquisition strategy.

− Use social and mobile tools to replace lengthy conversations

− Videos must be honest and sell the culture

− Create a mobile-friendly application and career site

− Market to talent like consumers

− Personalize your first candidate message

− Customize your approach with CRM

Talent Acquisition Talk: Simon Fenwick Continued

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The Rise in Accelerators and Incubators

Accelerators and incubators are surging, and in many cases

corporate sponsorship is the fuel driving it forward. Over 2,000

incubators and accelerators can now be counted across America.

These programs can boost economic capabilities and development

across regions and can consolidate the support network early

stage companies require to succeed, particularly in emerging and

“flyover” cities.

Viability-Centric Investor Criteria

In 2016, investor criteria will shift focus to viability metrics

over growth metrics. Some of these measures include margin

analysis, acquisition rate, retention rate, break-even and customer

diversification. During a period of reduced liquidity, companies

that can sustain themselves without investor intervention will

trade at a premium to their VC-tethered peers.

IPO Desert

Venture capital fundraising has continued to rise despite America’s

ongoing IPO drought, but something needs to give. With the rout

in tech stocks in January and continued global equity volatility, Q1

2016 was the slowest period for IPOs since 2009. Investors have

shifted their perception of public offerings as a viable liquidity

strategy. Expectations for timing of exit and value are undergoing

re-calibration along with renewed focus on corporate acquirers.

Venture Capital Trends: Q2 2016

The United States equity surge reached its

seventh year in 2016, spurring one of the most

durable venture capital periods since World

War II. 2015 ended with more than $100 billion

flowing through startups across every stage

of investment, yet volatility in stock prices and

concern over valuation have many investors

spooked about an overheated market. Here are

a few venture capital trends to look for in the

rest of 2016.

Investor Spotlight: AngelList

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Investor Spotlight: AngelList Continued

A Decrease in Startup Valuations

An outcropping of the factors listed above has manifested in a reset

in valuations. Some high-flying companies who raised big rounds

in 2014 and 2015 must now justify their valuation to investors on

par with historical norms, else they will likely face flat or down-

round valuations upon their next fundraise. A few fund managers

have openly joked about keeping a unicorn target list of companies

they do not expect to remain above $1B. However, a reduction

in late stage valuation has a positive trickle-down effect on early

stage investors to be more conservative with terms in Seed and

Series A rounds. Median valuations are down anywhere from 30%-

50% from Seed through Growth.

Increasing Difficulty with Raising Mega-Rounds from

Late-Stage Investors

Investor sentiment and flexibility at the late stage is especially

under pressure. In Q1, mega deals were at lows not seen since

Q3 2014. This is likely a result of diminished multiples, fewer exit

opportunities and bloated valuations from the last three years.

Series B and later investors pay particular attention to burn rate,

as their tolerance for write-offs are nil. As one growth investor

recently told me, companies earning $20M a year but burning

$30M now must either find a way to break even or they will

go out of business.

Seed-Stage Funding Becomes Increasingly Professionalized

Early-stage VCs and platforms such as AngelList are becoming

fixtures in funding rounds leading up to Series A. In this

environment, professional full-time investors are competing with

part-time angels in identifying companies and getting into “hot

rounds.” To that end the industry is becoming more insider, and

competition for allocation more fierce. Beneficiaries of this shift are

lead VC funds and intermediaries such as AngelList, which provides

Angels and Micro VC’s access to VC deal flow.

About the author: Adam Carver is a former Principal at Mesa Ventures and

now leads partnerships for AngelList in New York. He formerly worked at the

accelerator Techstars and at Morgan Stanley in the credit trading group.

AngelList is the premier platform for investors to discover and invest in

venture-caliber early stage startups. It has facilitated $250M in funding into

over 1,000 companies.

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Future of Talent Acquisition: Maren Hogan

Pinning down the future of Talent Acquisition is a tricky beast.

One year, we’re all screaming about gamification and mobile

recruiting and the next year, some will insist psychometrics,

big data, and virtual reality are the next big thing. The future

of recruitment has been written about by countless analysts,

futurists, vendors and yes, those rare birds, practitioners.

Here’s my take:

Like any predictions, we’re going to get some of them wrong.

Here are the trends that aren’t so “techy” but will probably carry

the day when it comes to getting it right about the future of

Talent Acquisition.

Spray and pray is so over, on both the candidate and the recruiter

side. You can see it in the gasping death throes of some of the

larger, more general job boards. It can be seen in every recruiting

nightmare blog post. It’s a main stage keynote at every event. If you

can take the time to source a candidate properly, you can then take

the time to approach them as you might any other human being. Is

it faster? No. Is it more effective? Absolutely.

Recruiters are responsible for cultural fit and retention. That’s

why you hear so much about assessments, personality tests and

matching these days. While very few enterprise companies have

perfected it, many are following the rank smell of high turnover

straight back to the Talent Acquisition executives. So recruiters

are learning how to be better judges of skill and alignment.

Talent acquisition is a marketing role, not a sales one. As we

recover from our economic slump, job seekers, both passive and

active, are going to balk at aggressive tactics that interrupt their

workday. Today’s prospects want to know what you know, they

want to see what you’re like and they want to be approached with

the same level of personal touch they receive from all the other

people trying to market something to them. Just as marketing has

moved from outbound to inbound, so too must recruitment.

“I think the very role of a recruiter is evolving. It’s not enough to

be a great sourcer. It’s not enough to be a great closer. We need

to bring more to our clients...Tomorrow’s recruiters will be:

— Creative marketers

— Brand champions, at ease working up and down

and inside/outside their organizations,

— technically fluent and know how to wrangle metrics…

They will understand what social media is, what it isn’t, and how

to effectively incorporate it into various programs (recruiting,

branding, talent communities, etc). They MUST be self-motivated

and curious in order to keep pace with the rapidly evolving talent

landscape. The recruiting world is changing fast, if recruiters

aren’t driven to keep up they will struggle.”

--Lars Schmidt, Founder, Amplify Talent

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Future of Talent Acquisition: Maren Hogan Continued

Recruiters will stop accepting bigger haystacks. In the past, job

boards, matching services and even applicant tracking systems

would boast about the number of profiles they could give Talent

Acquisition pros access to. Today, an exhausted profession

demands a more discerning set of technologies that makes

the location of the “needle” much clearer. Today’s recruitment

technology (once the big guys’ SLAs have run out) should offer

up a few great matches, not 200 potentials. As search algorithms

become increasingly sophisticated, and tools’ APIs begin to talk to

one another, recruiters will build systems that work inside

their organizations, and according to their process.

Recruiters will start to build personas. Sensing a theme here?

Marketers build personas to “get inside the mind” of their prospect.

Recruiters can and should do the same. Candidate personas are

only popular among 44% of CEOs but 69% say it will be more

important within five years or more. Persona-based recruiting will

happen in the future. Of course, this only makes personalizing your

approach that much easier.

Candidate experience wins out big. While it doesn’t feel like a

prediction when bloggers, presenters, analysts and those smart

folks at the candEs have been saying it for years, it’s still worth

noting that as companies compete for top talent and that top talent

continues to become more savvy, more mobile, and less patient,

we’re going to have a problem. Interestingly, SMBs are ideally suited

to “clean up” as the enterprise companies flounder with exhaustive

application processes, 45-60 hiring cycles and career sites that

look terrible on even the best smartphones.

The future of Talent Acquisition, as it turns out, belongs to those

willing to try new tactics, pivot gracefully and treat job candidates

with the respect they’ve long been asking for.

About the author: Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer, writer and business

builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. Founder and CEO of Red Branch

Media, an agency offering marketing strategy and outsourcing and thought

leadership to HR and Recruiting Technology and Services organizations

internationally, Hogan is a consistent advocate of next generation marketing

techniques. She has built successful online communities, deployed brand

strategies and been a thought leader in the global recruitment and talent space.

She was part of the founding team of RecruitingBlogs and Fistful of Talent and

continues to write about Talent Acquisition and leadership on Forbes, Inc, Fast

Company, HRExaminer Business Insider, Entrepreneur, LinkedIn’s Talent Blog and

her own blog, “Marenated”, a collection of articles that dates back ten years. Red

Branch Media works with startups and Fortune 500 companies around the world.

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Filling a room with top talent executives is sure to bring up some

interesting topics. In fact, when Talent Tech Labs presented its

initial Disruptive Innovation in Talent Acquisition in NYC’s Flatiron

district last week, we found out exactly what sort of topics and

trends come up.

The event was kicked off with a bit of context on how Talent Tech

Labs was founded to nurture innovation by bringing new concepts

and solutions to the market for sourcing, engaging, and hiring

talent. Our incubator is focused entirely on Talent Acquisition

technology and fosters a community through collaboration and

engagement. It exposes founders to mentors, beta testers, events,

and actual talent executives to give critical feedback on new

applications and platforms and how they might work in the real world.

Brad Cook from Informatica, Simon Fenwick of IPG Mediabrands

and brand marketing and social engagement guru Craig Fisher all

delivered provocative presentations based on their experiences

implementing cutting-edge solutions. While each executive was

innovating in their own way and had unique recruiting and sourcing

issues to contend with; there was a common thread that ran

through their presentations.

Brad Cook posited that you won’t know if something will work for

your processes until you select and implement something non-

traditional—encouraging talent leaders to get out of their comfort

zone. However, he did recommend having a safety net in the form

of a beta or pilot program, before attempting to go at scale.

Craig Fisher also echoed the sentiment that you can’t be bashful

about trying new ways to advance the state of the art. In large

companies, it can be difficult to get buy-in for new technology, but

if you prove it works in one department, you can make a case for

cost or time savings and essentially earn that stakeholder approval.

Fenwick pointed out his talent function has learned from the way

IPG’s digital agency engages clients; treat job candidates just like

agencies treat their customers: client relationship management.

His firm belief is to better enable internal personnel as corporations’

best brand ambassadors.

Event Recap: Disruptive Innovation In Talent Acquisition

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More than ever, talent leaders who effectively implement innovative

solutions are being recognized for those efforts. Seen as emerging

thought leaders, they have earned the opportunity to affect change

in their organizations, especially in companies where talent is

deemed a strategic imperative.

The second half of the event featured six companies curated by

Talent Tech Labs to each highlight various aspects of the hottest

sectors of the Talent Acquisition Technology Ecosystem. Three later

stage startup firms presented first, followed by earlier stage

companies that Talent Tech Labs has in incubation now and who

promise to be rising stars.

Of the later stage presenters, Talentron presented its tool to make

hiring managers more proficient at effective interviewing. Clinch

demonstrated its cutting-edge CRM solution that allows companies

to better gauge candidate and passive seeker engagement. Finally,

Mercer Match presented its gamified psychometric testing tool,

which uses gameplay to draw out characteristics that map to the

hiring company’s target profile. These demonstrations were

critiqued by a panel of industry thought leaders who lead talent

functions at Razorfish, FanDuel, and American Express.

To round out the day, Recroup demonstrated its automated

ad-retargeting technology that helps track candidates to posted

jobs by finding them where they live in social sites, and Step

presented its technology to engage targeted talent pools with

crowdsourced compensation data.

An audience of nearly 100 participants were fully engaged and had

many questions for the speakers, panelists and startups. We asked:

“What did you get out of these sessions?”

— Excellent insights and information on what

leaders in the field are doing.

— I’m fascinated with what is occurring in the startup space!

— Small, nimble companies appear best suited to pinpoint

challenges that need resolutions.

However, some leaders pointed out that the tradeoff between new

and nimble had to balance against playing in a legacy HR Tech

stack, and wondered if some of the younger companies would be

able to scale to industrial or enterprise burdens.

Event Recap: Disruptive Innovation In Talent Acquisition Continued

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Talent Tech Labs will be running more of these “demo days”

targeting specific audiences. While this event targeted high-level

corporate Talent Acquisition executives and practitioners in the

NYC metro, future events will be offered in other cities, and will

feature content and tools geared toward the invited attendees.

Our next event will target staffing companies through a virtual

demo day jointly presented with an industry association focused

on IT, engineering, and specialty technical skilled professionals.

To make the most of these upcoming events, Talent Tech Labs

is asking the following:

— What are the biggest, most intractable challenges

you face today?

— What would you most like to see change about

how Talent Acquisition works today?

— Are there case studies that you can share with us about

lessons learned as you stepped outside the normal tool

kit to enable some new approach to Talent Acquisition?

Please respond to me with any observations that you would like to

share that will assure our programs going forward meet your needs.

We look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events.

About the Author: Brian Delle Donne is President of Talent Tech Labs. Talent

Tech Labs was originally founded to foster the growth and development

of emerging ideas and companies in the talent acquisition technology space.

In addition to accelerating the startups we enroll, the company has become

a “go to” source of data and analysis on all the developments in the talent

acquisition technology space.

Event Recap: Disruptive Innovation In Talent Acquisition Continued

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We want to hear from you! If you have information you would like us to share with the talent acquisition technology community please reach out to us:

Telephone: 1-646-300-7060 Email: hello@talenttechlabs.com

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