Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry
October 4-10, 2021:
• Industry pioneer Ian Partington launches a new job board for legal support jobs;
• Real-time labor market information is now available through the National Labor Exchange (NLx);
• Gretel.ai, a platform for generating synthetic and privacy-preserving data, raises $50M;
• The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is developing a "bill of rights" to protect humans from harmful uses of AI; and
• The Q3 2021 Global Venture Capital Report: The firehose of funding continues undiminished.
PLUS
• The TAtech Learning & Certification Program in Talent Technology Implementation Management. The best way to ensure your customers onboard your products effectively, delivering the performance improvements they want and the quality reputation you deserve.
Industry Pioneer Ian Partington Launches a New Job Board for Legal Support Jobs
I am pleased to announce that I have dipped my toes back (actually two footed) into the Job Board world again with the launch of Legalsupportjobs.co.uk which is a site targeted at those vital people who support solicitors and other fee earners in the Legal field. The site is for Direct Employers only and we have been really pleased with the progress made since we soft launched the site in August - the uptake from Law Firms throughout the UK has qualified our belief that this is a sector of the market that has been underserved for too long.
Original Source: LinkedIn post
Real-Time Labor Market Information Available Through National Labor Exchange (NLx)
The National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) announced the launch of the National Labor Exchange Research Hub, giving labor market researchers a trusted and transparent source of job vacancy data. The Research Hub is the result of an earlier Data Trust Agreement between NASWA and DirectEmployers Association to share labor market data with state workforce agencies, researchers, policymakers, job seekers, and employers. Approved data users can now access the millions of real-time and historical job postings collected through the National Labor Exchange (NLx), using new data access points and technical background documents. The NLx Research Hub intends to make real-time job vacancy information a public utility for the first time, broadening opportunities for research, analytics and product development. Several state workforce agencies will pilot integrations between the NLx job posting data and traditional labor market information sources. For more information on the NLx Research Hub, visit nlxresearchhub.org.
Gretel.ai, a platform for generating synthetic and privacy-preserving data, raises $50M
Gretel.ai, a platform for generating synthetic and privacy-preserving data, today announced that it raised $50 million in a series B led by Anthos Capital with participation from Section 32, Greylock, and Moonshots Capital. The funds bring the company’s total raised to $65.5 million and will be used to support product development, according to CEO Ali Golshan, with a particular focus on expansion into new use cases. Synthetic data, which is used to develop and test software systems in tandem with real-world data, has come into vogue as companies increasingly embrace digitization during the pandemic. In a recent survey of executives, 89% of respondents said synthetic data will be essential to staying competitive. And according to Gartner, by 2030, synthetic data will overshadow real data in AI models.
Americans Need a Bill of Rights for an AI-Powered World
In the past decade, data-driven technologies have transformed the world around us. We’ve seen what’s possible by gathering large amounts of data and training artificial intelligence to interpret it: computers that learn to translate languages, facial recognition systems that unlock our smartphones, algorithms that identify cancers in patients. The possibilities are endless. But these new tools have also led to serious problems. What machines learn depends on many things—including the data used to train them. Data sets that fail to represent American society can result in virtual assistants that don’t understand Southern accents; facial recognition technology that leads to wrongful, discriminatory arrests; and health care algorithms that discount the severity of kidney disease in African Americans, preventing people from getting kidney transplants.
The Q3 2021 Global Venture Capital Report: Record Funding Trend Held Strong
The record funding pace continues into the third quarter of 2021 with $160 billion invested globally, matching the huge funding increase in the second quarter and up 78 percent year over year. Prior to 2021, global funding had not reached over $100 billion in a single quarter. Funding in 2021 has far superseded that amount, with the first quarter tracking at $135 billion, the second quarter reaching $159 billion, and the most recent quarter peaking at $160 billion. Larger fundings dominated, with $103 billion (64 percent) invested in 400 companies that raised rounds of $100 million or more this past quarter. A further $57 billion was invested in over 4,700 companies in rounds below $100 million. Funding amounts at $100 million or more grew 97 percent year over year, while rounds below $100 million increased as well by 51 percent in the same time frame. In this past quarter, 142 companies joined the Crunchbase Unicorn Board, compared to 145 in the second quarter. These past three quarters are up significantly over all prior quarters for new unicorn companies valued in a private financing above $1 billion for the first time with the board now listing over 1,000 companies, collectively valued north of $3.4 trillion.
The TAtech Learning & Certification Program in Talent Technology Implementation Management
Who gets blamed when a talent technology solution doesn’t live up to customer expectations? The solution provider, of course. Yet, research shows that the vast majority of such shortcomings are caused not by the product or its developer but by inadequate implementation by the buyer. To put it bluntly, most technology consumers lack the skills and knowledge to bring such products onboard, no matter how robust the provider’s own implementation support may be. What’s the solution? Educate your customer. Position your company as an implementation partner with its customers and enroll them in the TAtech Learning & Certification Program in Talent Technology Implementation Management. Your investment will be small and the ROI will be huge, both in customer success stories and your brand’s reputation.