Market Watch for Talent & HR- May

Executive Summary

Innovation for Talent & HR are in high demand. HR technology players continue to enhance their platforms with new product offerings, partnerships, and acquisitions.  Talent Acquisition is an area that keeps bringing innovation and new AI capabilities: Ceridian acquired Ideal, iCIMS brings an end-to end recruiting platform and Beamery launched its integration with SAP. 

The learning market is also on fire. Axonify acquired MLevel, and LinkedIn Learning launched its LXP and skill taxonomy which will shake up the market with potential integrations with Microsoft Viva and Glint. LinkedIn Learning keep expanding services to other areas across the employee experience and I won’t be surprised if they enter the internal mobility market soon.

Performance and engagement solutions are converging as well. 15Five announced acquisition of Emplify for $50 Million and Workboard raised $75 million series D.

Market Insights

• LinkedIn launched its LXP and skill taxonomy last week. With this announcement, LinkedIn is going beyond its current recruiting, networking and marketing capabilities to compete directly with Degreed, Edcast, Valamis, Docebo, and Fuse universal to help organizations in their reskilling/upskilling journeys. LinkedIn launched an intelligent skill building platform that will bring all of a company’s learning resources and third-party content together in one, central repository of knowledge.
  
  Impact: The market is starting to integrate recruiting, learning, and internal mobility data to provide a holistic view of skills and experiences enabling the creation of personalized learning recommendations while also deploying talent at scale to address business needs. Clients will start looking to utilize LinkedIn immediately due to its new LXP capabilities and integrations with Glint (which offers enterprise-class employee listening insights and analytics) and Microsoft Viva (for employee experience services). See news here.

• Ceridian acquired Ideal, a talent matching platform. This acquisition is targeting to optimize Ceridian’s recruiting suite once Ideal’s capabilities are integrated into the Dayforce platform. Ideal will bring screening, matching and chatbot capabilities to identify the right talent by using artificial intelligence to provide hiring recommendations. Furthermore, Ideal brings DEI intelligence to understand and uncover unconscious bias across every stage, from hiring to retention, while bringing Inclusion insights.
  
  Impact: HCM providers are enhancing core HR capabilities with innovative AI-driven recruiting solutions to keep up with the demand and to identify better candidates faster, reduce time-to-fill, reduce screening bias and position better in the market. We see this tendency expanding to other areas such as re-skilling, employee wellbeing and internal mobility. See news here.

• Axonify, a leader in frontline employee training and communication, announced this week a major capital investment from Luminate Capital in a transaction that valued Axonify at around $350 million. Luminate’s investment will enable Axonify to expand its leadership position in the frontline training and communications market by accelerating new product innovations and growth. This is Axonify’s second growth announcement in less than 12 months. In March, Axonify announced the acquisition of MLevel , and in October 2020, announced a partnership with OpenSesame to provide Axonify customers access to more than 20,000 curated online training courses.
  
  Impact: Corporate training has been reinvented as a result of the pandemic. Personalized learning, mobile-ready, bite-sized focus is allowing employees to learn and consume content in the flow of work and apply it in their day to day work. The corporate training market is evolving with dozens of various learning tools, and companies are all able to “plug-in” to existing work environments to learn. See news here.

• iCIMS launched its latest product innovations designed to bring the right technology for virtual hiring. iCIMS has been investing aggressively to bring innovation and AI for recruiting. This is the result of a series of acquisitions in the last 12 months to enhance iCIMS’s value proposition with intelligent matching, dynamics candidate profile, DEI analytics, and video storytelling and engagement. With these new capabilities, iCIMS is becoming an AI- powered talent acquisition end-to end platform that meet the demand of recruiting in the “flow of work”. See news here.

• 15Five announced acquisition of Emplify for $50 Million. The acquisition positions 15Five as a leading platform that seamlessly integrates employee engagement (surveys and recognition), performance management (OKRs/goals, real-time feedback, weekly check-ins), manager enablement tools, and insights. 15Five now has a customer base of over 2,800, including Spotify, Hubspot, Peloton, Credit Karma, and Siemens.
  
  Impact: The first quarter has shown an aggressive tendency on HR innovation and AI solutions growing in the employee listening, re-skilling and internal mobility. The market ecosystem is exploding with solutions. Our clients need advisory on how to integrate these innovated solutions in their HR stack. Vendors competing in this space: Reflektive, CultureAmp, Officevibe, Lattice ,Betterworks and others. See news here.

• Synthesia’s AI video generation platform raises $12.5 million Series A. Synthesia offers a platform that combines synthetic audio and visuals to produce custom videos to engage and communicate more effectively with employees and consumers. See news here.

• Workboard an enterprise results and OKR platform, raised $75 million Series D. WorkBoard will invest the funds in platform development, customer community, and expansion of its sales and marketing efforts. See news here.

• Utmost has raised $21 million in a series B round of funding. With Utmost, enterprises are promised full visibility into their broader workforce with data-driven insights for procurement, HR, finance, and IT departments. See news here.

• Workplace by Facebook announced new and updated feature to adapt to hybrid work and enhance employee experience. Furthermore, the collaboration platform reached 7 million paid subscribers. This is a big step for workplace as it competes with other collaboration and communication platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Meet, and ProofHub. See news here.

• Upwork introduces Work Marketplace, a new industry category which is a place where companies can connect with the professionals they need and build a virtual talent bench, and professionals can find work they love to do with projects they’re interested in and clients they’re excited to work with. This segment in Talent and HR is exploding with more solution offering talent marketplace platform to match people to opportunities. See news here.
• Beamery announced that its talent operating system integrates with SAP SuccessFactors to transform talent acquisition, diversity, internal mobility, reporting, and workforce planning. See news here.

Relevant Articles

• McKinsey published : Winning with AI is a state of mind , Reimagining your business for AI  and Building workforce skills at scale to thrive during—and after—the COVID-19 crisis
• The Wall Street Journal published: The Post-Pandemic Office Is Already Here—in Australia
• Business Insider Australia: Inside Unilever’s program that allows employees to try out new jobs and gig working opportunities at the company
• Forbes published: How Women In VR Are Changing The Technology World and Top 25 Machine Learning Startups To Watch In 2021
• The Washington Post published: The hybrid office is here to stay and It’s not a ‘labor shortage.’ It’s a great reassessment of work in America.

AI organization Spotlight

• Synthesia is an AI video generation platform that allow users to create videos by using avatars for marketing, communications, and employee and customer training. Users create a video script and then Synthesia generates a video “in minutes,” making it available for translation into dozens of languages. Synthesia’s technology analyzes and manipulates facial features to match written or recorded speech. This solution helps organizations to adapt to the digital age by creating a more engaging onboarding and training experience.

Art of the possible

• Dancing robots replace fans at Japanese baseball game; reported by Reuters. See news here.
• Google’s Plan for the Future of Work: Privacy Robots and Balloon Walls; reported by Wall Street Journal. See news here.
• Every Company is a Tech Company Now; reported by Time magazine. See news here.
• Disruption vs. Hype: What Is the Reality for Robotics?; reported by Robotics 24/7. See news here.
• Domino’s rolls out self-driving robotic delivery car “R2” in Houston, Texas; reported by Forbes. See news here.

More to come! Stay tuned.

Note: All views expressed on this article do not represent the opinions of any entity whatsoever with which I have been, am now, or will be affiliated. My opinions are my own.