Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @TryVantagePoint – Virtual Reality Harassment Training!

Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at the HR technology startup VantagePoint. VantagePoint is a virtual reality(VR) learning technology company that has produced both sexual harassment and diversity and inclusion training, as well as a training metrics dashboard to go along with their VR training.

I’m not sure we are even close to what VR can become in the HR world. Clearly, there is a great use case for it in training and we see organizations are beginning to start testing it, but to this point, it’s still rather uncommon in most organizations. In fact, it’s uncommon in almost every part of our lives. Only 2% of people in the world have ever even tried it! But, it’s growing like crazy, basically doubling in usage every year.

All that said, it’s actually super cool and fun! Now, if you ever had put on a VR headset and did a fly through the grand canyon, or taken a trip on a roller coaster, you could probably see how that might get old, are nauseating, very quickly! If you have watched a live NBA game from the first row at half-court, through VR goggles, you start to understand how totally awesome it can be!

VantagePoint’s CEO, Morgan Mercer, was early in on the VR tech and it’s potential use to train our employees in how to be better with sexual harassment and has also added in content for D&I as well. VR is only part of what VantagePoint is about. Doing great VR means you have to have great content for your employees to get emersed in. Ultimately, VR is the training delivery tool, but what VantagePoint understands is you better deliver great engaging content is you want great training.

What do I live about VantagePoint? 

– When you go through harassment training with VR goggles and headphones on, you feel like you are witnessing harassment happening, live, right in front of you. You’re uncomfortable. You want to do something. The fact is, doing training in virtual reality forces the user to be totally focused unlike any other kind of training I’ve ever done.

– VantagePoint has figured out, as LOD and HR pros we don’t really want to mess around with hardware (VR goggles, etc.). So, part of their strategy is to just bring everything to you, have a person on-site, and take away any pain or frustration that might go along with that side of training. You just have them show up, and they take your employees through the training. (You can also do it on your own if you like)

– The harassment training isn’t just watching this stuff happen on VR. The user also gets calls on a pop-up looking iPhone with a call from HR telling the user what they did right or wrong, etc. If you get something wrong, you get thrown back into the experience to do more work.

– I love that you can measure not only the compliance side of the training, but you can also see who is actually getting it, and who isn’t with the metrics dashboard they’ve developed.

We all know we can and have to do better when it comes to sexual harassment training in our workplaces. Traditional, classroom-style training just doesn’t seem to cut it, because it doesn’t grab the attention of the audience. No matter how well done. VantagePoint has figured out a better delivery tool, and one that will be commonplace in the very near future when it comes to all kinds of training.

The price point is actually less expensive then I thought it would be, and I would think most organizations of every size will be able to afford the VantagePoint VR training. I do think Morgan, and her team, are just scratching the surface of what’s possible when it comes to this kind of training in our workplaces. But, great VR content is also labor-intensive to pull off well.

I would definitely recommend a demo, especially if you’re looking for a great alternative to traditional harassment and D&I training. This is training that your employees will definitely remember and pay attention to!

What I learned at Workday Rising 2019! #wdayrising

I love HR Technology. You all know that. So, I was super excited to get invited to Workday Rising since it’s arguably the hottest HR Tech company on the planet, and quite frankly, in the past, they really haven’t engaged the influencer community much, and probably didn’t need to with all of their success.

I’m interested because Workday is disrupting the HR Tech world in a major way, and really the entire ERP landscape. It seems like every single day I speak to a CHRO or CPO who has made the switch to Workday or are in the process of getting ready to make the switch. Currently, they have about half of the Fortune 100, and if you have 2000 employees and above there is a good chance your CFO, CIO, and, we hope, the CHRO are in discussions on whether they should be looking at Workday as their core system.

I came to Workday Rising on a mission. I hear from Workday Recruiting users mostly and many looking for help on how to make it work better for their organizations. I’m not a Workday Recruiting expert, in fact, until this week I never saw the product. I was just hearing stories from those using it and implementing it. So, everything I had was out of context. Getting that context this week certainly helps me understand where Workday is and where they are going with a number of their products and technologies.

So, what did I learn at Workday Rising? 

– Workday sells the “Power of One” really heavily and I never really bought into the pitch, but when you dig into the core tech side of it, it’s certainly compelling based on how organizations should be and will be using data in the future to be more competitive and better performing. And the plans that Workday has using Machine Learning across their platform moving forward. Other enterprise HCMs will struggle to compete with Workday’s capabilities in this area.

– Workday Recruiting – is a core HCM job requisition system. It was launched five years ago and they are building out features as fast as they can. Workday Recruiting doesn’t try and see itself, at this moment, as an end to end recruiting platform. It’s a large enterprise applicant tracking system built for enterprise-level hiring and compliance on a global scale. That isn’t easy to pull off at scale. They have invested in some great add-on technologies to build out your TA tech stack, like Beamery (CRM-Recruitment Marketing), Mya (recruiting chatbot, AI, automation), and Pymetrics (talent matching AI), all of which by the way are top Best of Breed TA Technologies.

– The Workday Recruiting pain point with many clients has been lack of LinkedIn integration and I got to see what Workday will be launching soon around their LinkedIn integration and it’s impressive, and current Workday Recruiting users who are also heavy LinkedIn users will be excited for this.

– Maybe the miss, from my conversations with current and upcoming Workday Recruiting clients, is these clients believing they’ll just use Workday Recruiting for recruiting and won’t have to build out the rest of their TA tech stack. You will and you should, especially if you need to do a higher amount of external recruiting. I still believe “we” (me, you, Workday, etc.) can build out some great tech stacks around Workday Recruiting that will rock. That’s a goal of mine! (Sackett Stacks!)

– Workday Talent Marketplace is impressive. The reality is in large organizations is that you have 3-4 main buckets of hires: 40-60% will come internally; 20-40% will come from referrals; 10-20% will come from external recruiting; 1-10% will come from your contingent workforce (contractors, temps, consultants, etc.). That means internal hiring and mobility is truly your most important type of hiring the larger you are, and it’s what younger generations are demanding from employers of choice. Workday’s Talent Marketplace is a better internal hiring experience than you’ll find in any other tech on the market.

– I tend to judge HR and TA Technology on their leadership, mostly. Do I believe the leadership at all levels, executive, technology, product, sales, etc. have the capability to pull this off? I’ll start with the Workday Talent Optimization and Recruiting product folks because after spending some time with these teams they are loaded with talented folks who ‘get it’. While you might want changes and updates faster, this isn’t some best of breed SMB technology that can just whip out features on a daily basis. Enterprise-level buyers and users have different needs on so many levels that it takes time to build and test before launching out globally and ensuring it works at scale.

– I met a ton of enterprise clients using Workday Recruiting that were very happy with the product and the direction and the consistent deliverables of the roadmap for the Recruiting product. They are also understanding that this power of one platform across the organization is important for the future of what they want to do in establishing systems that will deliver a better overall employee experience. I actually thought I would show up and hear bitching, and honestly, I didn’t. I heard way more excitement over the new stuff and a customer base that feels like they are being heard and an understanding that there’s a bigger picture to enterprise ERP than just core HCM or Recruiting, or payroll.

– The CEO of Workday, Aneel Bhusri, and his leadership team, especially their technology team, really have a strong grasp of where they are going with the platform into the future. You get the feeling from them, almost like parents with kids about Santa Claus, like they know something the rest of us don’t, in a good way. They are confident their direction will not only be successful for Workday, but ultimately for their clients, and you can’t doubt it with their growth. They are pushing the Machine Learning around their data really heavily and I think they’ll be an industry leader their very soon based on the tech they’ve built across the platform.

So, Did I sell out to Workday?

I know some folks in the industry are going to read this and think that. I will say I’ve been super consistent over the past five years writing about my learnings in HR and TA Technology that I will tell you what I like about a product and then encourage you to go demo and make your own conclusions. I’ve been super consistent in writing on this blog to help others in our community understand all of this a bit more easily.

I’m not an HR and TA Technology hater, I’m an HR and TA Technology geek! Can Workday get better at certain things? Yep. Does Workday have an understanding they need to get better at certain things? Yep. Is Workday going to be all things for all people? No, and they don’t want to, which is part of their strength. They know exactly who they are and who they want to become.

I was asked to come to Workday Rising as an “Influencer”. They put no constraints on me on what I could say on social media or write on my blog. They took a risk and I want to thank the team for trusting me enough to let me in on the inside and giving me such great access to your leadership teams and product teams.

These were just some of the highlights from my own lense of interest, there is really so much more I could share about some other really cool stuff Workday is doing. Here are some links on some of the other stuff that is worth reading:

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Eightfoldai – AI Powered Talent Intelligence Platform

Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at Eightfold. Eightfold.ai is a recruiting technology that kind of is hard to define, like many of the new AI-driven technologies within the TA space right now. Eightfold does automated matching of candidates to your jobs with rankings, it can build personalized career sites, help eliminate hiring and screening biases, and even be used for internal mobility.

See what I what I mean? What do you call that? They call it a talent intelligent platform. It can integrate with your ATS and/or CRM and help you automate much of the front-side of your recruiting screening and matching process.

What I find in most organizations is we have recruiters, and they might be really good at the job of recruiting, but they don’t have the specialized knowledge to truly know what candidate will be better at a certain job than another because they lack the technical skill knowledge. Eightfold uses AI and deep learning to match candidates much more accurately and quickly than a human recruiter can do.

The process of Eightfold is fairly lightweight. They can pull in your jobs from your ATS or you can create a job in Eightfold and it will go to work ranking candidates who are the best fit and most likely to respond to the job you have open. This gives an instant target list for your recruiters to go after.

What do I like about Eightfold? 

– Eightfold can help organizations better leverage the resources and data they have invested in talent attraction that has previously not been available to most organizations. Technology like Eightfold will move organizations faster, but also with a higher quality of hire.

– Eightfold personalizes the career site experience for candidates who are coming to your site. Candidate has the ability to upload their resume/application and immediately get a personalized experience that is different from the next candidate who comes to your site.

– Eightfold will help organizations do a better job at hiring for diversity by masking certain information on profiles, but also delivery funnel diversity statistics so TA leaders can have a real-time view of diversity pipelines within the organizations and see where diverse candidates are falling through.

– Because Eightfold’s match technology is so robust, organizations are using it for internal mobility as well, but uploading all of their internal talent and giving a view to leaders of the organization of where you might already have someone internally who is the best fit for a position, and should go down that path first, before looking externally. Too often we see great talent turnover because a position was filled from the outside, and they were never even considered for it, and didn’t even realize it was a possibility.

This type of technology can be used across all kinds of industries, not just tech. From a cost standpoint, and a data standpoint, it works much better at larger volumes, so you’re probably looking for at least 500+ employee organizations to be most effective. It’s certainly dynamic and eye-opening when you demo and I encourage to take a look! While there is an investment to get technology like Eightfold, the ROI is huge in comparison to hiring another recruiter or sourcing pro.


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @SparcStart launches Amplify Video Management System

Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at SparcStart‘s newest product, Amplify. Amplify is a video management system/platform where you can store all of your employment branding and recruiting-related content no matter where it was produced. So, you can bring videos in from professional third parties, YouTube, employee-generated videos from their phones, videos generated on other video-enabled apps, etc., and have all of that content in one place.

Why is this a big deal? Video has increasingly become the go-to content for talent acquisition, and the growth of video being used is off the charts when it comes to employment branding and recruiting. The problem is we don’t have one place to catalog all of this content. We don’t have one place to share this content and measure the views. We don’t have one place to approve and ensure the right video content is being used by our teams.

Well, until Amplify.

What do I like about SparcStart’s Amplify VMS (Video Management System)

– Super simple and easy to use dashboard to upload all of your EB & recruiting videos so you have them all in one system. Plus, from the dashboard, you can share them on social, get a URL to share with candidates that will bring them to your company branded micro-site to view (less noise then sending them to YouTube).

– Create videos as well, without the need for your employees to download an app. Basically, through the dashboard, invite them, tell them what it’s about, they get an email to click through on their phone, record, and upload all in two clicks total! You then have the ability to view and approve to be added to the content library on the dashboard. (click the pic below to see me use Amplify in action)

– Having a video management system allows you to have one spot for quality control across your entire environment. The one problem with quick-video is that we lose control of our brand when all of this is being generated and no one seems to be in charge. Amplify is a great tool to have for any organization that potentially has many locations, divisions, regions, and countries using corporate branded video.

– Early users are already figuring out how to use this system in ways it wasn’t even designed for! Some early adopters are increasing their offer acceptance rate by having hiring managers send a quick offer video link, along with the offer letter, to make the offer super personalized for each candidate. Organizations can send out personal interview videos within seconds.

SparcStart was started as a video job description tool, which is how most of us will know them. The addition of Amplify, which is a stand-alone product, really is something that is needed in the industry and most people are just figuring out they need as video content has exploded. The pricing model is very affordable (like $1K/month for 50 vids!), especially when you figure out all the ways you can use it. The video below literally took me under thirty seconds to click on the email link, record, and upload, with the ability to use! The simplicity of Amplify is why I really think it will take off! Well worth a demo!


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Facebook Partners with ATSs to Bring Jobs to Your Company Page!

Today on The Weekly Dose I let you know about some changes coming to Facebook and how Facebook is partnering with ATSs to make it easier for employers to get your jobs posted on your Facebook company page.

Facebook has long been that one person we’ve always wanted to dance with us, but they seemed uninterested in having anything to do with the recruiting community. The reality is, FB has more active users than any other social network and that means the potential for us to some serious hiring on FB has always been a dream of most TA pros.

Recently Facebook announced some partnerships with ATS providers SuccessFactors/SAP, JazzHR, Talentify, and Workable. While SuccessFactors, JazzHR, and Workable are all in the ATS space, Talentify is more of a CRM-like, programmatic job posting tool. Both Workable and JazzHR are strong SMB value ATS providers, while SuccessFactors wasn’t originally designed to be an ATS, but because of the acquisition by SAP has built out that functionality, although I think most using it probably feel that recruiting still isn’t its strongest point.

I’m not sure exactly why Facebook choose this group to start, but like most things, my guess it’s probably a combination of relationships being leveraged (hello, SAP), and just scrappiness by the smaller players mentioned to find a way to get this done.

So, what’s actually being done?

“Jackie Chang, head of Business Platform Partnerships at Facebook, said the social network will “continue to identify strategic companies” in order to help businesses hire and people find work. “We’re looking to grow these partnerships,” she said. “We know many businesses are already working with HR solutions providers to manage their hiring needs and we want to make it easier for businesses to tap into the tools they already use, and help more people find jobs.”

Also, from Chris Russell:

There are two ways that the new integrations will work – an onsite, “native apply” experience and an offsite “redirect” experience. In the native apply experience – the messenger popup will still occur.

Onsite, “native apply” experience:

    • We have a Jobs XML Feed, which enables partners to publish job posts on behalf of employers directly on Facebook.
    • Job seekers can apply to those roles directly on Facebook, and the application information is sent back to the partner.
    • This allows employers to reach qualified candidates while staying connected to the systems they already use.
    • Employers can also create jobs in their ATS, and publish that job to Facebook.

Offsite “redirect” experience:

    • We have a Jobs XML Feed, which enables partners to publish job posts on behalf of employers directly on Facebook.
    • Job seekers are redirected to the employer’s career site and can apply to the role on the employer’s career site.
    • Employers can also create jobs in their Applicant Tracking System, and automatically publish that job to Facebook.

Very cool stuff, as Facebook has been one of the hardest nuts to crack when it comes to recruiting, and these integrations should make it easier for employers to start getting their jobs in front of FB users more easily. Facebook won’t be the holy grail for everyone, just as LinkedIn isn’t the holy grail for every employer either, but the potential is there for it to be a very good source for so many that don’t see the pools of talent they need on sites like LinkedIn, or other job boards.

Does your ATS have this integration, or are they working to make it happen? The only way to find out is to actually give them a call and ask that question!

The HR Technology Conference Brings Back Pitchfest!

So, I’ve written about this in the past, but LRP just announced last week that they will be bringing back The Pitchfest to the 2019 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas, October 1 – 4. The Pitchfest was my single favorite event at any conference last year!

What’s the Pitchfest? 

“30 HR technology startups will have the opportunity to present their solution at this year’s conference. In the three preliminary rounds, ten companies will have three minutes to pitch the panel, with an additional two minutes to answer the judges’ follow up questions. Two companies from each round will advance to the Pitchfest final, where the top six will go head to head. Once selected, the overall winner will participate in the conference’s popular “Discovering the Next Great HR Technology Company” session, in addition to taking home a monetary prize from the Randstad Innovation Fund and exhibit space for the 2020 HR Technology Conference & Exposition®.

The preliminary rounds are scheduled for October 1 and 2 with the Pitchfest final on the morning of October 3. Any exhibiting HR Technology Conference & Exposition® startup can submit a Pitchfest application ahead of the June 29, 2019 deadline. Those selected will receive notice no later than August 9, 2019. The online application and additional details can be accessed here. There is no fee to apply.”

Last year I got to judge and Emcee this event. It was amazing to see these startups get on stage and pitch what they had. To hear it from the entrepreneurs themselves, but also see some ideas in HR and Recruiting that no one else on the planet was thinking about was super inspiring.

I would encourage anyone in the HR and TA tech space to click through and check it out. The coverage of the event is worth its weight in gold. The stage was constantly surrounded by a whos-who of HR Tech analyst, influencers, and investors. You cannot get better, more inexpensive, publicity on the planet than making the final cut of thirty and taking your shot at being the one!

The process alone of applying and being selected for the Pitchfest, for any entrepreneur and their team, is invaluable.

Again, I will be attending the HR Technology Conference this fall. I hope to see you there. Also, don’t forget the Women in HR Technology event that happens on the first day of the conference. It’s the largest event specifically designed for women in HR Tech on the planet, and content is tremendous. I’m on a panel for that event as well, getting to share my mother/son experience of working with my Mom at my company, HRU Technical Resources.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Trakstar_hr Employee Evaluation Software Simplified

Today on The Weekly Dose I review the employee evaluation technology Trakstar. Trakstar is a dynamic end-to-end performance management software built for SMB employers who are looking to move their paper process to the cloud and modernize their performance practices across their organization.

The biggest mistake employers make in driving great performance is setting great goals for individual employees to achieve. The core of Trakstar is built around this understanding that great goal setting leads to the potential for great employee performance.  Trakstar is built around three core products: Performance management (evaluations), 360 reviews, and goal setting.

The difficulty we all face in HR around performance management is getting our leaders to follow the process and deliver great feedback to employees that drive higher performance and higher engagement. Trakstar has built an intuitive technology that makes this process easy for our leaders and allows us to hold them accountable to the process as well.

What I like about Trakstar: 

– Super clean UI and an easy to use UX, which actually makes it intuitive for our leaders to drive better performance through the process without even thinking about it. Within a very short period of time, your leaders won’t even realize they’re actually working in a platform as this will become a business tool they rely on to manage their teams.

– Super easy to use 360 feedback tool that allows you to request feedback from anyone within the organization, so get more robust feedback across the organization and the real impact an employee is having.

– Goal setting that is bi-directional between employee and leader and tracked continuously throughout the year. As well as easy to set automated reminders, so that both sides can stay on top of these goals and not let them slip to the side.

– A succession planning tool that is built around a 9-box grid that I love! Gives your leaders an instant view of high performers and up-and-comers across the organization in an instance.

Trakstar has built a performance management tool for SMB that rivals many of the enterprise level performance management technologies. Cloud-based with an open API that allows you to integrate it into any HRIS system you might be using now. Trakstar is designed for organizations where employee performance and increased performance of the organization is a priority.

Well worth some time to look at a demo, especially if performance management is a priority within your organization. Trakstar is the best end-to-end performance management technology for SMB that I’ve seen on the market.


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Pocket Recruiter (@pkrecruiter)

Today on The Weekly Dose I review the recruiting technology, Pocket Recruiter. Pocket Recruiter drastically reduces the time it takes to screen, source and evaluate candidates, helping recruiters achieve a higher interview to placement ratio. 

Pocket Recruiter is one of these new recruiting technologies built around the concepts of Machine Learning and A.I. Basically, it integrates with your ATS and will automatically scrap every new job (or you can manually put in jobs as well) and then it will go out and source candidates for each job you have from both your internal database and external data as well.

Where Pocket Recruiter stands out is it’s ability to match candidates to your job, and it’s ability to learn and get better. The recruiter gets a list of matching candidates that are scored out and ranked based on, pattern recognition, the internal algorithm, etc.

Your recruiter gets a shortlist within minutes to go out and start connecting. Organizations are seeing savings of up to 60% in time to source and screen, because most of the heavily lifting of sourcing is done, and the matches are of higher quality, so you’ll need less screens. They are also seeing improvements of 90% from resume submitted to the hiring manager to request for interview. So, the quality is definitely improving.

What do I like about Pocket Recruiter:

  • Your recruiters can override the algorithm within Pocket Recruiter to bring back different results almost immediately, if something isn’t coming through like it should. This might seem small, but it’s huge as we that recruit usually quite a bit more than the algorithm in terms of what we are looking for.
  • You can add your internal employees into the mix, making Pocket Recruiter a great tool for internal mobility.
  • The Performance Metrics might be one of the best I’ve seen in any recruiting tool, as it basically replicates your recruiting funnel for you on each individual recruiter. So, not only are you finding talent faster, but you also now have this great performance management tool for your team. I also loved the ROI tool built into Pocket Recruiter.

For me, technologies like Pocket Recruiter are the future of recruitment and how I see A.I. having the biggest early impact to how recruiting evolves in the near future. Pocket Recruiter ensures you are utilizing all of your candidates to the fullest, and it speeds up the entire process to get to hires quicker. Well worth a demo!


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Jobvite goes shopping!

Big news out of the world of the Talent Acquisition technology. Jobvite, with a major investment from K1 Investment Management, went out and bought three best of breed recruiting technologies:

  • Talemetry – CRM, Recruitment Marketing technology
  • RolePoint – Employee referral and internal mobility technology
  • Canvas – Text-based screening and interview technology

All four of these technologies, separately, I’ve recommended that TA pros and leaders should demo. They are all top rated recruiting technologies on their own.

I think these acquisitions are just one more signal in what we see is a growth of the Talent Acquisition Suite, away from core HRIS suites. The TA Suite of the future is a stand alone tech stack that can become a competitive edge for organizations.

The one part of this acquisition that confuses me, a little, is Role Point. While I love them as a point solution, Jobvite already has Jobvite Refer, so this acquisition seems a bit redundant. I mean Jobvite invented Employee Referral technology. While I’ll agree RolePoint is better than Jobvite Refer, I’m not sure they are that much better tha I would spend millions of dollars to acquire.

I will say that that Internal Mobility is a hot topic in almost every organization, so I’m assuming this is the main reason for the acquisition.

Regardless, I believe this positions Jobvite uniquely in the space to be able to offer an advanced Talent Acquisition suite that no one else in the space can put forth, at this point.

One thing to consider is how other ATSs like iCIMS and Greenhouse (we also see Ultimate Software/UltiPro doing this on the HR suite side) are building out their stacks for their customers. Both have taken the App/Marketplace concept. Think of this like your Smartphone. You buy your base iPhone, and then add the apps you want.

That’s the big question! Will the market want a suite or will they want a marketplace of pre-built integrations that you can select and plug and play?

Both buyers are in the market. We already see the suite buyers who want one enclosed technology that does almost everything they need under one umbrella – what it looks like Jobvite is building with these acquisitions. We also know some buyers love to select specific technologies and somewhat build their own stack, based on their own unique needs. It’s really just positioning, I’m not sure we’ll see one strategy win out ultimately.

Definitely an aggressive move by Jobvite. They were falling behind the market a bit and this will definitely thrust them back into the lead pack. I think we all felt like 2019 would be a great year for acquisitions and Jobvite has come out of the gate making a giant swing!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @PowerToFly

This week on The Weekly Dose I review the D&I technology platform Power to Fly. Power to Fly is a recruiting platform used for connecting people with companies committed to building more diverse and inclusive environments. 

Founded in 2015 by two females who were named one of Fast Companies most creative people in business. The original concept was to connect women with remote jobs (which it still does). From that PTW learned many organizations also wanted and needed gender diversity in their in-house teams as well. Today it’s not only women but all underrepresented talent in the marketplace. 

The original concept of being a marketplace to connect one type of candidate with companies isn’t new, but Power to Fly definitely come at this from a different angle than most. While you can post your jobs on their site, which has over a million profiles of female candidates, Power to Fly focuses more on community events and interactions, both in-person and virtual. 

Power to Fly hosts in-person networking events hosted by client(s) companies to bring women in a specific marketplace together. These interactions help females and underrepresented candidates build a network of their own to leverage as they grow their careers. 

These live events bring together upwards of 200 women and are sponsored by some of the largest brands in the world, but can also be leveraged by a handful of employers in a market coming together to co-sponsor together. Power to Fly has found females are much more likely to apply to your jobs after attending these events (and the research into gender-specific applies echoes this as well).  The likelihood of apply from those attending these events rose 60% after attending. 

Power to Fly also holds virtual events with top Female executives and thought-leaders allowing women to ask live Q&A to help them in their career. Giving anyone a chance, in an ultra-safe environment, to ask questions they probably wouldn’t or don’t even have access to a mentee to ask. 

I love the concept. Traditionally, men clearly have had so many built-in networking advantages to aid their career path. Building out these networks for females and underrepresented candidates is a must and long overdue. 

If you are looking to add diversity into your talent pipelines Power to Fly is definitely something to check out. Job postings, live events, and virtual events, the power of their community is their real strength.  It’s women helping women in the most positive ways! 


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.