Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry
June 19-26, 2023:
• Forecasting a shady garden: Is the bloom off the rose for AI companies seeking investment;
• Coming back to earth: Survey finds tech workers spooked by layoffs into accepting lower pay;
• Keeping interviews bias-free: VidCruiter buys AI interview intelligence firm Ingage Solutions;
• Struggling to keep up: Study finds most companies overwhelmed by risks posed by AI tools;
• Mapping tech talent locales: Sequoia releases Atlas to pinpoint sources of tech talent in Europe.
PLUS
Worldclass content & business-building connections – that’s what you can expect at TAtech Europe & The EMEA Job Board Forum, coming up in London on December 4-6. It is the only conference in Europe and the rest of the EMEA region that is designed for job board and talent technology company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and totally focused on advancing the bottom-line success of their enterprises. The information and insights and the contacts and relationships it provides will accelerate your sales, reinforce your brand and give you a sustainable competitive advantage in the market. So, don’t delay; register today to take advantage of Early Bird Discounts.
Is the Bloom Off the Rose for AI Companies Seeking Investment?
Recently, a couple of venture capitalists knocked on Ben Pham’s door to hear a pitch on his new advertising startup named Obello. Pham had decades of experience in advertising with Character, a branding agency he co-founded with Oliver Ralph that worked closely with the likes of Apple, Netflix and Facebook. After selling the company to marketing giant Dentsu, Pham and Ralph were working on a new generative AI product. The first line of the pitch deck read, “Obello: An AI-powered graphic design platform.” “I visually saw them recoil in their seats and roll their eyes, because they had been beaten over the head by so many companies saying ‘AI-powered’ [or] ‘powered by AI,’” Ralph said. That’s not surprising. After ChatGPT took the world by storm in November, generative AI startups began popping up left and right. Venture firms were enamored with it — around 10% of global startup funding last year went to AI companies, according to Crunchbase data. We’re on track to outpace that: So far in 2023, 15% of all startup funding has gone to AI-focused startups. But the dust is beginning to settle, and some venture firms are getting skeptical of startups that claim to power their platforms using generative AI and large language models.
Tech workers are willing to give up on high salaries and take a pay cut amid mass layoffs, survey shows
The majority of tech workers in a Blind survey said they'd accept equal or lower pay. Many of those surveyed attributed their willingness to accept lower pay to an uncertain job market. Tech workers have been questioning for months whether its the end of the era of $500,000+ pay. It might be the end of a very lucrative era in tech. Mass layoffs appear to have spooked many tech workers into being willing to accept lower salaries, according to a new study. About 56% of tech workers in an official poll from the anonymous job posting site Blind said they would accept equal or less pay in a new role and some 45% of those respondents said they'd accept equal or lower pay due to a lackluster job market amid a series of layoffs across the tech industry.
VidCruiter Acquires Ingage Solutions, an AI Interview Intelligence Technology founded at Stanford University
VidCruiter, Inc.—the world's leading interviewing platform used by Fortune 500 companies, national governments, and international organizations— has acquired AI-startup Ingage Solutions. The acquisition increases VidCruiter's interview intelligence technologies by expanding its video interviewing platform's real-time intelligence engine. Ingage's ethical AI technology will improve interview performance, reduce the impact of bias, and contribute to more equitable hiring practices ensuring leading firms can better identify top talent faster. Ingage was founded by Jamal Madni and Matt Davis at Stanford University. Both individuals had been researching virtual meeting technology prior to the gathering restrictions in 2020 and were asked to guide Stanford University's transition to online learning. Following this success, Matt, Jamal, and their team shifted focus towards real-time interview intelligence. Ingage successfully developed a deep integration with Microsoft's internal APIs, reaching a milestone as the only interview intelligence solution to fully integrate with Microsoft Teams.
71% of organizations struggling to keep up with new AI risks, report finds
More than 70% of organizations are struggling to keep up with the risks of using artificial intelligence (AI) tools — and should consider using Responsible AI (RAI) programs to stay on pace with the latest advances, according to a June 20 report from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. Significant risks have emerged, particularly with third-party AI tools, which make up 55% of all AI-related failures. This could lead to financial loss, reputational damage, the loss of customer trust, regulatory penalties, compliance challenges, litigation and more. “The AI landscape, both from a technological and regulatory perspective, has changed so dramatically since we published our report last year,” Elizabeth Renieris, one of the report co-authors and guest editor of MIT Sloan Management Review, said in a statement.
Sequoia debuts Atlas, an interactive guide to the European tech talent landscape
There is an estimated 3 million software engineers in Europe, depending on what report you want to believe, but finding the right engineers for the job at hand isn’t all that straightforward. London or Paris might well have the highest concentration of software engineers, but knowing what locales offer the best access to specific disciplines is an entirely different ballgame, particularly in such a geographically distributed continent as Europe. This is something that venture capital (VC) juggernaut Sequoia is seeking to address with a new online interactive tool called Atlas, which, while built primarily with its own portfolio founders in mind, it’s releasing to the general public today too. Atlas meshes various qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, including a talent survey of 1,035 participants; a survey of 125 recruiters from European tech companies; 17 “in-depth” interviews with founders and recruiters; and aggregated data from third-party sources such as Dealroom, SeekOut, Remote, Ledgy, and GitHub. At its core, Atlas attempts to present a picture of the current European technical talent landscape, incorporating the 27 members states of the European union plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway (collectively known as the European Economic Area [EEA]), in addition to Switzerland, Ukraine, and the U.K.
TAtech Europe: Worldclass Content & Business-Building Connections
Worldclass content & business-building connections – that’s what you can expect at TAtech Europe & The EMEA Job Board Forum, coming up in London on December 4-6. It is the only conference in Europe and the rest of the EMEA region that is designed for job board and talent technology company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and totally focused on advancing the bottom-line success of their enterprises. The information and insights and the contacts and relationships it provides will accelerate your sales, reinforce your brand and give you a sustainable competitive advantage in the market. Whether your company is a niche or general job board, aggregator, talent marketplace, online classifieds business, programmatic platform, conversational AI solution, chatbot, ATS, recruitment marketing solution, CRM platform, interviewing or assessment system or talent technology consultancy, this event will supercharge your company. So, don’t delay; register today to take advantage of Early Bird Discounts.