Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry
November 13-19, 2023:
• Acknowledging the AI definition: ‘Hallucinate’ is Cambridge dictionary’s new word of the year;
• Making a distributed workforce: Remote creates marketplace to help company tap global talent;
• Onboarding with songs: Anthym launches ‘Welcome’ to harmonize new hire company intros;
• Heading for a tech talent crisis: UK CTOs decry the lack of quality developers for hire;
• Seeing a light in the darkness: Talent Board survey shows hiring is normalizing not nosediving.
PLUS
Find business partners, get customer insights and snag a real competitive advantage at TAtech Europe & The World Job Board Forum. Don’t miss the premier B2B conference for job boards and talent tech companies in the EMEA region! Coming up in London on December 4-6, it is the only event that’s specifically designed for company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and totally focused on advancing the bottom-line growth of their enterprises. So, register today and accelerate the success your company achieves, today, tomorrow and into the future!
‘Hallucinate’ chosen as Cambridge dictionary’s word of the year
Cambridge dictionary’s word of the year for 2023 is “hallucinate” – a verb that gained an additional meaning this year. The original definition of the chosen word is to “seem to see, hear, feel, or smell” something that does not exist, usually because of “a health condition or because you have taken a drug”. It now has an additional meaning, relating to when artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, which generates text that mimics human writing, “hallucinates” and produces false information. The word was chosen because the new meaning “gets to the heart of why people are talking about AI”, according to a post on the dictionary site. Generative AI is a “powerful” but “far from perfect” tool, “one we’re all still learning how to interact with safely and effectively – this means being aware of both its potential strengths and its current weaknesses”.
Remote launches marketplace to help global job seekers and employers find each other
Remote, the leader in building, managing, and supporting globally distributed workforces, today launched a marketplace for employers and job seekers. Fully integrated with Remote’s global HR platform, Remote Talent provides companies and their future teams around the world an easy way to connect. Key features of Remote Talent include: Employers can now use Remote to find candidates for open roles. In addition to the traditional capabilities of a job board – allowing employers to advertise their openings to candidates seeking hybrid and on-site local roles – Remote Talent also offers employers access to qualified global talent with experience working remotely and a desire to bring their skills to a fully distributed team. Job seekers can now visit www.remote.com/jobs to find amazing remote roles with top companies. Free for candidates, it removes ambiguity by going beyond the search capabilities of traditional job boards to allow users to see how remote a role truly is before applying. Users can filter by time zone requirements, salary in multiple currencies, travel obligations, and more – making it easier to find the perfect job, wherever the opportunity might be located.
Anthym helps colleagues form workplace connections through music
Anthym, a platform for employees to connect through personal memories and music taste, launched its latest product to make the onboarding process feel more personable for new hires. Dubbed “Welcome,” the offering expands Anthym’s music-based team connection experience, launched last year at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield. Employees create “JamTracks,” five songs that correlate to important memories in their lives, such as when they adopted their dog or lost a loved one. In this case, the hiring manager tasks a new hire to complete a JamTrack, which is then shared with the rest of the team, fostering a deeper connection between colleagues. There’s also a ChatGPT-powered feature that generates employee user manuals for managers to get a sense of the new hire’s personality, communication style, core values and how they might relate with other team members. For instance, if you wrote “Married My Best Friend” as a favorite memory paired with the song Marry Me by Train, the AI tells the manager that you maintain strong relationships.
The UK is heading for a technology talent crisis
Almost three-quarters (72%) of UK Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) believe there is a lack of quality developers available to hire, according to a new report - State of Development Landscape and Trends for 2024 - from curated developer marketplace platform Deazy. It's an issue on the minds of CTOs, with one-third of respondents saying that this lack of tech talent kept them awake at night. The main reasons for this dearth of tech talent were the UK education system not producing sufficient quality candidates and tech moving so fast that it is difficult for candidates and their skills to keep pace – both were cited by half of respondents. Other factors for the lack of quality tech talent given were people being put off by the prospect of AI doing much of their work (36%), the industry putting off diverse candidates (35%), and Brexit shrinking the talent pool (35%).
Research Shows Hiring Is Normalizing Instead of Nosediving
According to an upcoming Talent Board research report, nearly all respondents told us they’re relying on reskilling and upskilling to fill in their organizations’ gaps in specialized and hard-to-find skill sets: 37% are doing so to a significant degree, and 27% are doing so to a great degree. That definitely makes sense, since job growth is starting to slow, or more specifically, normalize to pre-pandemic levels, with employers adding 150,000 jobs in October. The unemployment rate also ticked up to 3.9%. Part of the slowdown is due to the impact of the UAW’s strike against all Big Three automakers, with union deals now reached with each of them. And according to ERE labor columnist Jay Denton’s latest ERE article, “The number of people voluntarily quitting their job was at just over 3.6 million in both July and August. Those are the two lowest totals since February 2021.” [So] are we just normalizing instead of nosediving? Maybe. In our latest CandE Community Pulse results for October, the good news is that hiring continues to be stable (at least with those who responded the past 10 months) and again reflects the bigger jobs reports the past few months, even with the slowdown. When we asked employers what their current hiring status was, 76% said “we’re hiring,” up from September, but still consistently stable since January. However, freezing hiring was still up in October, but laying off and redeploying were down. (Additionally, contract and management hires increased in October.)
Snag a Real Competitive Advantage at TAtech Europe & The EMEA Job Board Forum
Find business partners, get customer insights and snag a real competitive advantage at TAtech Europe & The World Job Board Forum. Don’t miss the premier B2B conference for job boards and talent tech companies in the EMEA region! Coming up in London on December 4-6, it is the only event that’s specifically designed for company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and totally focused on advancing the bottom-line growth of their enterprises. Whether your company is a niche or general job board, aggregator, talent marketplace, online classifieds business, programmatic platform, chatbot, conversational AI solution, ATS, recruitment marketing solution, CRM platform, interviewing or assessment system or talent technology consultancy, this event will supercharge your sales and your profits. So, register today and accelerate the success your company achieves, today, tomorrow and into the future!