Market Watch for Talent & HR Sept-Oct 2022

Executive Summary

HR Tech market consolidation continues across the ecosystems, HCM software systems and experience enterprises platforms are building out portfolios of best-of-breed solutions to help their clients reimagine employee experience and talent strategy. They are also working on consolidating and integrating data from different data sources to provide insights and analytics for decision making

Despite market constraints and startups valuations struggles, venture capitals and investors keep investing in HR Tech. However, investments are made in a more conservative way. For example, US VC deals is decreasing for the second quarter in a row. According to Pitchbooks “deal value hit a nine-quarter low in Q3, with only $43 billion invested in VC deals across all stages”.

HRTech, Workday Rising and SAP SuccessFactors Connect Conferences brought together vendors, customers, partners to announce new product releases, partnerships, and acquisitions.

Furthermore, consulting companies are also expanding and building out relationships with leading HR Tech vendors to provide a full-service combo to solve problems in Talent & HR.

The metaverse is In the spotlight with Meta Connect! Microsoft and Meta announced their partnership to deliver immersive experiences to bring Teams, Windows apps and games to Quest devices. Overall, the metaverse is now part of the C-Suite agenda and companies are actively creating a talent pipeline to lead and implement metaverse initiatives.

The Metaverse is still in early stages and more software, hardware and tech capabilities (edge computing, IoT, blockchain etc.) need to come together to enable an immersive experience.

Adobe made one of the largest acquisitions of a venture-backed company in the technology space and acquired Figma for $20 billion.

New Offerings & Partnerships

• Workday announced Vision for Transforming Partner Ecosystem and introduced Next-Generation Skills Technology allowing organizations to bring skill data in and out of Workday. See news HERE and HERE.
• SuccessFactors launched Next-Gen HCM. The core of this new release is Success Factors Opportunity Marketplace. Success Factors also announced new features for employee experience and team dynamics. See news HERE.
• Perceptyx and The Josh Bersin Company signed a long-term survey partnership to support HR industry studies. See news HERE
• SkyHive launched automated Talent Architecture Solution. See news HERE.
• Claro Analytics upgraded its people analytics platform with candidate relationship management (CRM) functionality. See news HERE.
• Ameca Engineered Arts most advanced humanoid in the market is powered with automated speed recognition with GPT3 (neural network machine learning language model trained using internet data to generate any type of text). See video HERE.
• Textio expanded offerings to performance feedback to empower managers with real-time guidance to give fair and actionable performance feedback. See news HERE.
• Oracle expand its HCM capabilities and add performance evaluation and listening features to improve employee engagement. See news HERE.
• Cornerstone launched new portfolio of offerings at HR Tech 2022. See news HERE.
• Microsoft and Meta announced partnership to deliver immersive experiences to bring Teams, Windows apps and games to Quest devices. See news HERE.

Relevant Acquisitions

• Adobe acquired design platform Figma for a $20 Billion deal. The deal price is an outlier at a time when software startup valuations are slowing down. See news HERE.
• Envoy acquired workplace platform Worksphere for undisclosed amount. This is a second acquisition in 2022 (Office Together in Aug 2022) following a $111M equity financing round in January that valued the company at $1.4B. See news HERE.
• Talespin, an extended reality company, announced investment from WestRiver Group, and acquired “Pioneer Adaptive Learning’ Platform” from Singularity Group. See news HERE.

Relevant Articles

• Josh Bersin published: 
  • “Ten New Truths About The HR Technology Market”. See article HERE.
  • “The Economy That Just Won’t Quit: Why Jobs Keep Getting Created”. See article HERE.
• TechCrunch published
  • “Meta announces legs”. See article HERE.
• McKinsey published
  • “Digital twins: What could they do for your business?”. See news HERE.

Events

• Gartner Reimagine HR Conference; Oct 24-26, 2022, Orlando, FL. Subscribe HERE

Art of the Possible

• “Anki’s spiritual successor hits Kickstarter with some impressive moves” reported by  TechCrunch. See news HERE.

More to come! Stay tuned.

Note: All views expressed in 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.