TA Tech Business NewZ
By peterweddle
April 19, 2021
April 12-18, 2021: Candidate.ID lands new investment of $970K+ to spur growth and machine learning product development; Facebook’s ad delivery system still has gender bias according to new study; PayPal now accepts cryptocurrency, giving it mainstream credibility in financial transactions; ZipRecruiter’s new “Act Fast!” label notifies recruiters if candidates are being actively recruited by other employers; Hired adds sales roles to its tech talent marketplace and expands its operating locations; Coinbase goes public adding even more momentum to cryptocurrency (don’t miss the TAtech Leadership Summit on this emerging dynamic and the impact of blockchain on talent acquisition); plus NewZ Makers: @ChrisHsu, @CindySongne, @BobMemmer, @TobiasWelzel, @PhilippeBonin, and @TheoRokos.
A venture capital firm has invested an additional £700,000 into a Glasgow-based recruitment software developer. Blackfinch Ventures initially invested £630,000 in April 2020, taking its total investment to £1.3m. Candidate.ID was founded in 2015 and produces software that provides recruiters with information based on candidates’ interactions with a company’s online content. The software is aimed at assisting specialist staffing companies and larger employers, potentially replacing customer relationship management systems. The Blackfinch funding will enable the company to focus on its revenue growth plans, while developing the machine learning technology behind its solution.
An audit by researchers at the University of Southern California found that Facebook’s ad delivery system discriminates against women, showing them different ads than it shows to men and excluding women from seeing some ads. The team of researchers bought ads on Facebook for delivery driver job listings that had similar qualification requirements but for different companies. The ads did not specify a specific demographic. One was an ad for Domino’s pizza delivery drivers, the other for Instacart drivers. According to the researchers, Instacart has more female drivers but Domino’s has more male drivers. Sure enough, the study found that Facebook targeted the Instacart delivery job to more women and the Domino’s delivery job to more men.
While markets are focused on a sensational cryptocurrency-related IPO and on China’s announcement that it has created a cryptocurrency version of its regular currency, the yuan, a more momentous event took place a few days before: PayPal has found a way to let consumers use various cryptocurrencies via their PayPal digital wallets to seamlessly buy stuff from the platform’s almost 30 million merchants. The cryptos are instantly converted into regular money, so sellers have no currency risk. The huge obstacle to cryptos becoming genuine currencies that can be used for commercial transactions has always been their extreme volatility. PayPal has found a way around this.
Many employers lose top candidates to more agile competitors by taking too long to contact them. Now, ZipRecruiter(R) helps employers avoid this costly mistake by giving them valuable information about the status and availability of applicants they are considering. When employers browse through applicants, an “Act Fast!” label notifies them if candidates are being actively recruited by other employers and encourages them to reach out quickly. The label indicates that the candidate has received a signal of intent from multiple other employers in recent days. As hiring surges and employers compete for candidates, such information is becoming ever more sought after. The U.S. economy added 233,000 jobs in January, 468,000 in February, and 916,000 in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the summer, the pace of hiring could accelerate even further if access to vaccines continues to expand and the economy reopens more fully. “Our ‘Act Fast!’ label benefits employers by letting them know if they are at risk of losing a candidate they like. It also benefits job seekers by driving employers to engage more quickly,” says ZipRecruiter co-founder and CEO Ian Siegel. “Our goal is to make the hiring process as efficient as possible for both sides of the labor market.”
Hired, the world's largest AI-driven talent marketplace that helps companies connect with high-demand talent and build diverse teams, announced its new unified solution and rebrand following its acquisition by Vettery and The Adecco Group in November 2020. Hired has absorbed Vettery to operate as a single platform that matches a highly-curated pool of motivated candidates with fast-growing, innovative companies. The new, combined solution expands Hired's pool of candidates beyond tech to sales roles as well. As the economy is recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and highly-qualified candidates are re-entering the job market, Hired has seen significant year-over-year growth in hiring activity on its marketplace, exceeding pre-pandemic levels. Besides continuing to offer remote roles globally, Hired is now available to candidates in four new markets – Atlanta, Dublin, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia – bringing the platform's number of concentrated regions to 18 of the leading tech hubs in the world across the U.S., Canada, UK, and Ireland.
Shameless Plug: For more on this emerging dynamic, join us at TAtech’s new Leadership Summit on Blockchain & Other Data Technologies in Talent Acquisition hosted by Job.com. Coinbase, a platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, became the first major cryptocurrency company to go public in the United States on Wednesday. It’s a clear sign that crypto is firmly in the mainstream of the finance industry — and it’s not going away anytime soon. Coinbase stock — which is trading under the ticker COIN — ended its first day at $328 per share, putting the newly public company at a more than $85 billion valuation on Wednesday evening. Throughout the day, Coinbase’s price stayed far above the $250 reference price that the Nasdaq set before trading began, and at one point swung as high as $429. Ahead of the listing, the value of several cryptocurrencies also surged, with bitcoin hitting an all-time high.
Chris Hsu, Zibo CEO, has joined the Board of Directors at Talent.com.
Cindy Songne was appointed VP, Enterprise at Talenize. She also serves as a Member of the TAtech Advisory Board.
Bob Memmer joins SmartRecruiters as their new Chief Revenue Officer. Previously, he was SVP of Sales at Captora.
Tobias Welzel is the new Chief Commercial Officer at Joblift. Prior to this position, he was Senior Director of Sales DACH at Indeed.
Philippe Bonin was announced as the Chief Financial Officer at Taqlent.com. Previously, he was VP Finance at Cogeco, Inc.
Theo Rokos was named president of Wedge. Most recently he was chief revenue officer at Job.com, and co-founded GreenJobInterview.