Today on The Weekly Dose I take a break from the normal tech reviews and give you some insight on some happenings in the world of HR Tech.

For those who don’t know Jobvite, they are a popular Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that actually started out as an employee referral technology before the market was truly ready to buy into that concept. So, they pivoted from employee referral tech to full-blown ATS with employee referral tech.

This past week Jobvite announced they will be one of the first corporate ATSs on the market to integrate the ability to mass text candidates and have an AI embedded tech interact with those candidates. All of this will be powered by Canvas, an SMS-enabled screening technology that I’ve reviewed on my site a while back, and called “Jobvite Text”.

This is a great move for Jobvite! Most corporate ATSs have been dragging their feet on this type of technology over worries corporate TA teams really didn’t want it. Over the past year, though, more and more organizations have been embracing texting candidates in a big way and the results have blown away reply rates of email, phone, and LinkedIn Inmails.

I suspect we’ll see many more ATS vendors build this core functionality into their systems within the next year, as many already have this on their roadmap, but have been pushing it off for other functionality they felt their clients wanted more over the ability to mass message and screen via text messaging.

Ultimate Software who has had a really strong track record of buying HR and TA technology that wasn’t core to their system and integrating it into Ultipro is at it again with the purchase of HR Service Delivery technology PeopleDoc.

PeopleDoc is a best of breed HR Service Delivery software that allows organizations to deliver world-class service delivery to employees through document management, employee knowledge centers, and employee case management. While this doesn’t sound sexy, it will give UltiPro something no other enterprise HR provider has in the market.

Ultimate is looking to move up-market in a big way and the purchase of PeopleDoc will help position themselves as a product that will deliver to large, enterprise-sized organizations. Their payroll is already top-notch, their core HR product is really good, and PeopleDoc will make best in class.

Ultimate doesn’t buy outside technology often, but when it does, it has shown to buy smart products that make their overall offering better, and they actually listen and integrate the talent from the new company into their organization.

We will see many more partnerships and acquisitions in the coming months. Some will make sense, some we’ll wonder why. I look at each of them from both sides. Does it benefit both companies, and does it make the overall product offering of the major player better, faster, than what they could do on their own?

For both Jobvite and Ultimate this happened last week.