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Ten Gems – February 2019
The year’s shortest month has whizzed by and it’s time to start the countdown to when we’ll get to ditch our coats for t-shirts. If you live where it’s snowy, perhaps you got to escape for a few days like I did. The snow is not gone however, as evidenced by this pic of my backyard this morning! Here’s a recap on the highlights from last month you won’t want to miss.
February Gems
1. February was black history month; Kylie Quetell’s piece gives some great tips on how white people can celebrate and honor black history.
2. Hung Lee’s Recruiting Brainfood team launched their new website this month. I love it because it brings to life the treasure trove of content from all prior newsletters in a searchable format.
3. Have you heard of Upturn? They are an advocacy group that promotes equity and justice in design, governance, and use of digital technology. They recently wrote an important and thought provoking piece calling for closer examination of hiring algorithms. In particular, they call for a re-visitation of the value of correlation as a signal for validity. This one is worth watching.
4. SmashFly released their annual benchmark report on the F500’s recruitment marketing practices. With it, they raise the question – why are so many companies’ nurture experiences still so poor?
5. Want to glean insights from 130,000 job seekers? The Talent Board published their research report based on the data from their 9th consecutive year of doing The Candidate Experience Awards. Among other things, this report explains why referrals, rapid feedback, and phone calls are so important.
6. Check out Tim Sacket’s piece observing the great ideas and innovation session at the Recruiting Trends Conference. He discusses blowing up the traditional demo and the challenges that poses for both the vendor and the buyer. I think he’s onto something.
7. This is a great piece by Coby Schneider on how Intel has moved from the recruiting funnel to an infinity loop approach.
8. Want to boost your social recruiting game? Check out this CareerArc Facebook Recruiting Playbook Webinar with Mira Greenland. Watch and learn about the value of emojis and direct content + several other insightful and directly actionable tips.
9. Noteworthy acquisitions:
- K2 puts in 200M to acquires majority stake in JobVite while rolling in Talemetry, RolePoint and Canvas. — read my take.
- Hellman & Friedman pays 11B to take Ultimate Software private. Read the Sun Sentinel’s take.
10. Noteworthy funds raised - see below
February Fundraising*
- 100M: blue collar job board: Jobcase
- 32.4M: freelancer platform: Malt
- 16.12M: employee and gig shift management: Humanforce
- 13M: career pathing technology: Landit
- 11M: video based employee communication: Loom
- 10.5M: employee communication: Threads
- 7M: employee polling: Polly.ai
- 4M: employee management and onboarding: Sapling
- Undislosed: recruitment crm: Beamery received investment/partnership from Workday
*Thank you Talent Products Plays for easy access to fundraising and acquisition information (9 and 10 above) – their listings is more exhaustive than mine, I’ve just hit on some the bigger transactions.