Market Watch for Talent & HR- February

As we continue to live through the pandemic, organizations are redefining the new digital workplace as well as hybrid workforce models to increase agility and organizational resilience. The HR innovation market started strong in 2021 with new acquisitions, partnerships and POV in the Talent & HR innovation space. Acquisitions continues in February and big movements in the employee engagement analytics market- Workday acquisition of Peakon- as well as a new platform for employee experience -Microsoft Viva- that is expected to revolutionize the market. See highlights below:

AI for Talent & HR- Market Insights

• Paradox , virtual agent solution, acquired Israeli chatbot Spetz to expand global client services and build a world-class R&D center in EMEA. See news here
• Valamis partners with Adelis to accelerate its LXP global expansion. See news here
• Pluralsight entered into definitive agreement to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $3.5 Billion . See news here
• Pluralsight acquired Next Tech to accelerate skills development through hands-on experiences. See news here
• Workday acquired people analytics company Peakon for $700 million. Both are joining forces to improve the future of work. Workday will provide organizations with a continuous listening platform, including real-time visibility into employee experience, sentiment, and productivity, to help drive employee engagement and improve organizational performance. See news here
• PeopleFluent expands performance management offerings with acquisition of Reflektive a provider of performance management software, specializing in engagement and analytics tools. See news here
• SAP  entered into an agreement to acquire Signavio a leader in the enterprise business process intelligence and process management space. See news here
• Citrix has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wrike, a rapidly growing, recognized leader in the SaaS collaborative work management space, for $2.25 billion in cash. See news here
• Pluralsight  the technology workforce development company, announced that it has partnered with the learning experience and upskilling platformDegreed. See news here
• Microsoft launches Viva, an AI-driven employee experience platform to bring tools for employee communications, wellbeing, learning, knowledge discovery, engagement and analytics to prepare organizations for the future of work. See news here

• Phemon, an end-to-end talent experience platform acquired Talentcube, an experience driven video recruiting tech company. This is Phenom’s third acquisition in five months offering a broader spectrum of solutions across the talent lifecycle: talent sourcing and assessment, interview scheduling, CRM, chatbot, internal mobility, analytics and new skilling. These capabilities are placing Phenom to compete directly with Eightold, Skyhive , Avature, Ascendify , Pymetrics, Viser and smaller tailor-made tech solutions. Most likely its next steps is to acquire employee listening capabilities. This acquisition is showing the tendency in the market of the rise of talent experience platforms.

  Academia

• HRB published three great article in the talent space: 9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2021 and Thriving in the Age of Hybrid Work and How to be Funny at Work
• Deloitte published: 2021 Global Human Capital Trends 
• Josh Bersin published: What’s Ahead For 2021? Five Lessons For The Coming Year and The Massive Market Impact of Microsoft Viva 
• Accenture Fjord published: Fjord Trends 2021
• McKinsey published: Organizing for the future: Nine keys to becoming a future-ready company
• World Economy Forum published: The priority for workplaces in the new normal? Wellbeing
• Forbes published: 100 Years Later, The Future Of Robots Still Lies In Science Fiction
• Towards Data Science published: Prediction 2021: The Year AI Becomes Normal

Spotlight: HR innovation players of the month

• Gloat: AI-driven workforce agility and talent marketplace platform that helps clients match their people to new roles, gigs, secondments and projects increasing agility and career mobility. It allows organizations to deploy talent at scale, democratize career development, unlock skills, and succession planning.
• Pymetrics: is the only predictive, unbiased workforce AI platform design to find and retain the best talent. It helps clients to solve challenges across the talent lifecycle by synthesizing organization’s DNA,  reskilling and providing behavioral talent insights for career development.
• Amelia: The most human AI™ for the Enterprise. Digital humanoid solution that helps clients to redefine their hybrid workforce models, scale HR service delivery and shape organization’s human and machine collaboration.
• Yva combines active feedback (employee surveys powered by AI) and passive feedback (ONA and collaboration analytics) to address employee engagement, levels of stress and employee wellbeing. It helps clients to measure engagement, employee burn out and provide a clear view on what happened within organizations and why.

Art of the possible

• See How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance. Video here.
• Sophia the Robot creators announce plan to mass-produce robots this year. Video here. See news here

The latest acquisition of Peakon from Workday is establishing a trend in the market, HCM players are “acquiring” AI capabilities in the employee listening and collaboration analytics to move from insights to recommendations/actions . We will see more market consolidation in this space in 2021 since organizations are very interested to embed these capabilities in their HR stack/tools.

Employee experience platforms are on the rise as well. We will see how the market react to the launch of Microsoft Viva.

Employee experience platforms are on the rise as well. We will see how the market react to the launch of Microsoft Viva.

More to come! Stay tune

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