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Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry
September 30-October 6, 2024:
• Advancing recruiters’ careers: TAtech & Talent Collective open talent tech certification program;
• Moving beyond science fiction: Shelly Palmer explores ‘Building Your First Synthetic Employee’;
• Revenging the resume black hole: I applied to 2,843 roles with an AI-based job application bot;
• Moving into the referencing biz: Seek targets acquisition of HR and recruitment tech firm Xref;
• Sticking their finger in the dike against the AI development flood: NYT says No to Perplexity.
PLUS
• The TAtech Leadership Summit on Recruitment Marketing, February 26-27, 2025 in Tampa, Florida. For senior execs at enterprise employers and TA solution providers.
• TAtech North America & The World Job Board Forum, June 3-5, 2025 in Oceanside just north of San Diego, California. For job board and talent technology company CEOs, senior execs and rising stars.
Seating is limited at both events, so register today!
TAtech & Talent Collective Launch Talent Technology Strategist Certification Program
TAtech and the Talent Collective, a professional membership organization for women in the talent acquisition field, announced the launch of the Talent Technology Strategist Certification Program. Expertise in the application of talent technology is now a core competency of recruiters, so this 2-semester, year-long educational program provides TA leaders and professionals worldwide with the skills and knowledge to acquire, implement and use talent technology effectively. Sitting for the Cert.TTS certification exam is optional. Each month, the curriculum features a 75-minute online course organized into three segments: a presentation on a key aspect of state-of-the-art talent acquisition, a demonstration of a related talent technology, and a moderated Q&A period with the instructor. In addition, the courses are recorded so that attendees can review the content and share it with colleagues. Instructors are SME drawn from the company Members of TAtech: The Association for Talent Acquisition.
Building Your First Synthetic Employee
What would it take to build your company’s first synthetic employee? What AI models could you use? How much data will it require? What about compute power? Electricity? Technical resources? Security? Legal? Risk? Ethics? Is the idea simply too crazy to think about now? Should you just wait until someone invents artificial general intelligence (AGI)? Over the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of leading several workshops on this very subject for some of our global clients. Some key takeaways: You don’t need AGI to do this. Getting everyone aligned on what it will take to turn AI into a competitive advantage is invaluable. The exercise will help you organize all the disparate AI projects that are already in progress across your organization.
I Applied to 2,843 Roles’ With an AI-Powered Job Application Bot
Before I put my laptop aside at the restaurant I’m working at, I open a terminal window, enter a single command, and hit enter. The server gives me my breakfast and I push my laptop away as the bot springs to life, opening a Chrome window and navigating to LinkedIn. It starts scrolling through job listings, and opens a few of them. I watch the bot find a job at a company called Alpha Lion and click “Easy Apply.” It enters my biographical information, generates a resume, and writes a cover letter. It tells Alpha Lion I am authorized to work in the United States, that I do not mind remote work and in fact prefer it, that I have not served in the military. It explains that “I am particularly drawn to Alpha Lion’s commitment to personal excellence and innovation in sports nutrition” and that “I am looking forward to the opportunity to discuss how my skills and experiences align with the goals of Alpha Lion and how I can help propel your video marketing efforts to new heights.” It clicks apply. I take a bite of my toast.
Seek targets acquisition of HR and recruitment tech firm Xref
Australian job board Seek has entered into an exclusivity deed for the potential acquisition of Xref, an Australian-based HR and recruitment technology company that offers a range of reference and pre-employment checks, employee engagement and exit surveys. Seek and Xref announced a partnership in June 2024 to explore opportunities to collaborate and improve the way reference checks are used in employment. The job board said Xref’s capability is a logical extension of Seek’s product offering and addresses a clear need for Seek’s customers. The deed follows the submission of a non-binding indicative proposal to acquire all of the ordinary Xref shares on issue for AUD 0.2181 (USD 0.15) in cash per Xref share by way of a proposed transaction. The indicative proposal denotes an enterprise value for Xref of approximately AUD 45 million (USD 30.2 million).
The NYT Says No to Perplexity
The New York Times has put Perplexity.ai on notice: “Don’t crawl our site, or else!” This is a little comical since Google has been crawling nytimes.com since the beginning of Google, but we need a distinction here. Two verbs, both terms of art: “to crawl,” which means to systematically browse the web, index content, and then make it searchable through a search engine; “to scrape,” which is the automated process of gathering information from the web to collect content from webpages. Is Perplexity crawling to index and surface data, or is it scraping to index, surface, and train on data? Hmmm… The dispute between The New York Times and Perplexity underscores growing tensions between traditional media outlets and AI companies over content usage rights. The New York Times issued a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, accusing the AI search engine startup of using its content without permission. This move comes amid similar claims from other publishers, including Forbes and Condé Nast, and an ongoing lawsuit by NYT against OpenAI and Microsoft over content training without proper authorization.
One-of-a-Kind Conferences for TA Solutions Business Success
• The TAtech Leadership Summit on Recruitment Marketing, February 26-27, 2025 in Tampa, Florida. For senior execs at enterprise employers and TA solution providers.
• TAtech North America & The World Job Board Forum, June 3-5, 2025 in Oceanside just north of San Diego, California. For job board and talent technology company CEOs, senior execs and rising stars.
Seating is limited at both events, so register today!
