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Talent Acquisition Movers, Shakers, & News Breakers – December 2019, Part 2

The last few weeks of the year provide us with the opportunity to reflect on everything that happened in the previous twelve months. In the HR and recruiting, 2019 saw tons of M&A activity, colossal funding rounds, the continued rise of artificial intelligence followed by the inevitable backlash, and low unemployment rates impacting hiring outcomes across sectors. To say it was a busy year would be an obvious understatement. And while it’s too soon to tell what 2020 has in store, we’re going to take this moment to recap the most recent highlights as well as the top stories we saw roll across the RecruitingDaily desk. 

Here’s what’s going on lately, mostly in terms of capital investments, mergers, and acquisitions:  

AI talent marketplace Gloat will close out the year with a $25 Million Series B round. Gloat intends to use the money to “further its mission of democratizing career development, unlocking skills, and enabling enterprises to build a future-proof workforce.” It will also go toward making new hires for the company’s New York and Tel Aviv offices and enhancing its technology. 

VNDLY, a “new age” contractor and vendor management system, announced $35 M in Series B, which included participation from ServiceNow amongst the traditional VC types. The funding is earmarked for the standard “product innovation, global expansion, and the continued investment in customer service and support.” The ServiceNow involvement stems from the companies’ existing integration and partnership. 

Employee experience company Limeade raised approximately $68 M through its recent IPO on the Australian Securities Exchange. Limeade chose to enter the ASX after being approached last spring, saying, “The more we looked at it, the more we found it was a perfect fit for our financing needs.” The funds will be used for product development, customer support and sales. 

Jumpstart, a recruitment platform that aims to increase diversity, finished its Series A with $8.5 M raised. The company focuses primarily on helping recruiters widen the candidate pool for early-career knowledge worker-types. Company founder and CEO Ben Herman is a former recruiter turned entrepreneur, looking to do more than simply save recruiters time in their day.   

Learning Management System Absorb Software made its third acquisition of 2019, taking on ePath Learning, a cloud-based learning technology company. This comes after the purchases of eLogic Learning in August and Torch LMS last May. Suspect, we may hear more from Absorb Software in the New Year as the company pursues an aggressive growth strategy.  

 

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2019 Monthly Headlines:

  • January 2019 kicked off with a bang, with Infor landing a $1.5 Billion investment ahead of the company’s proposed IPO to take place within 12-24 months. Almost 12 months later, no sign of the IPO just yet, but it’s safe to say that Infor set the bar high for the rest of the year. 
  • Charging into a decidedly different direction, Ultimate Software took us into February with news back in February that it was going private in an $11 B private equity deal. Given one of the investor’s relationships with Kronos, this one sparked speculation but so far, the two continue operating independently.
  • March roared in with Ceridian buying up almost all of the assets of an analytics firm named Clearview Logix, and select intellectual property rights from Paysa, an AI-powered personal career advisor. 
  • As April came to a close, industry analyst Josh Bersin introduced “The Josh Bersin Academy” to help HR practitioners invest in themselves. Course programming ranged from agile learning to well-being at work.  
  • Assessments provider Shaker International and interviewing solution Montage joined forces back in May, before re-branding as Modern Hire in late September. The two companies retained their respective teams and offices, collectively focused on re-imaging recruiting through predictive intelligence and automation.  
  • In June, the AI technology company, AllyO, completed its Series B financing round with $45 M. That brought the company’s total raised to $64 M since emerging from stealth mode in early 2018. Since then, the company continues to expand its product offering to encompass more of the overall HR experience.
  • July saw the programmatic advertising market on the move, with StepStone taking a majority stake in Appcast with TMP Worldwide acquiring Perengo and Indeed acquiring ClickIQ. Happening in quick succession, these stories indicated a growing, albeit competitive, interest in the programmatic side of recruiting. 
  • Near the end of August, recruiting software Entelo took on ConveyIQ, provider of candidate engagement SaaS solutions, in an effort to become the first company to offer end-to-end management of candidate interactions from source-to-hire.
  • In September, Human Resource Executive Magazine unveiled both the Top HR Products of the year as well as the Awesome New Technologies. The lists featured names such as iCIMS, Paycom, ADP, Talroo, DDI, and Paradox. 
  • At Workday Rising in October, the company rolled out a series of new applications, including Workday People Experience, Workday People Analytics, and Workday Credentials. These features corresponded closely with some of the biggest trends spotted throughout 2019 as a whole.  
  • Recruiting technology solutions provider, Oleeo announced its corporate privatization from the London Stock Exchange in November. The company, formerly known as WCN, made the move to “accelerate its AI technology innovations and market expansion, while also increasing its investments in customer success.” 
  • And just in time for the holidays, the productivity automation company, Zapier, published The Work Resolutions Report and found that eight hour days are no longer with the norm with the average knowledge worker spending almost ten hours a day working. On that note, we’ll be back in January. 

Got news to share with us for that next update? Contact [email protected].

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Noel Cocca

CEO/Founder RecruitingDaily and avid skier, coach and avid father of two trying to keep up with my altruistic wife. Producing at the sweet spot talent acquisition to create great content for the living breathing human beings in recruiting and hiring. I try to ease the biggest to smallest problems from start-ups to enterprise. Founder of RecruitingDaily and our merry band of rabble-rousers.