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TA Tech Business NewZ

Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry

August 15-22, 2022:

• Spinning up data protection for Saas apps: Spin Technology raises $16M for expanding market;

• Onboarding candidate search & recruitment marketing capabilities: Silkroad acquires Entelo;

• Making talent decisions smarter: Harver acquires pymetrics soft skills assessment solution;

• Busting anti-queer bias in text prediction: USC develops fix to AI problem in search & translation;

• Poaching gets a nod from SHRM: Friend of court brief warns against total ant-poaching ban.

PLUS

Huge brand building and lead gen opportunities – that’s what you’ll get from sponsorships at TAtech’s fall Leadership Summits: Technology & the Candidate Experience (September 28 NYC), Applications of Recruiting AI for Enterprise Employers (October 25 Chicago), and Recruitment Marketing (December 1 Boston). Contact Peter Weddle at PeterWeddle@TAtech.org for details.

Spin Technology raises $16m to protect SaaS apps

Data protection is vital in a world where cyberattacks are a constant threat to organizations. US company Spin Technology has managed to find a niche in this climate as a data protection company that specializes in software as a service (SaaS) protection. This niche was well chosen as Okta has found that companies use an average of 89 SaaS applications, and this will undoubtedly grow as hybrid and remote work continues to push organizations to cloud services. Spin monitors applications and scans them for malware and abnormalities. This process has made it a desirable product, and the company has 1,600 customers. The start up has now managed to raise $16 million in its Series A funding round. The round was led by Blueprint Equity with support from Santa Barbara Venture Partners and Blu Venture Investors. Spin Technology is currently valued at $55 million.

Original Source

SilkRoad Technology Adds Entelo SaaS Candidate Search and Recruitment Marketing Technology

SilkRoad Technology, the world-class onboarding leader, with backing from HighBar Partners, adds Entelo’s candidate search and recruitment marketing technology to its capabilities. This technology will immediately complement SilkRoad’s best-of-breed talent acquisition solutions to deliver holistic end-to-end experiences, from source to hire to retire. Furthermore, with these new capabilities, SilkRoad will empower organizations with enterprise solutions that provide unparalleled sourcing, marketing, candidate management, onboarding and mobility capabilities that drastically improve speed-to-hire, retention, engagement and contribution. To adapt to our new world of work, HR needs to strategically expand beyond traditional approaches to talent acquisition and instead focus on continuous, targeted engagement across the candidate to new hire experience that converts and retains in-demand talent. The addition of candidate search and recruitment marketing capabilities complement SilkRoad Technology’s recruiting and onboarding strengths to create a true end-to-end, best-of-breed talent acquisition platform that helps clients intelligently source, attract, retain and align people to their business.

Original Source

Harver Acquires pymetrics, Further Enhancing Talent Decision Capabilities Across the Employee Lifecycle

Harver, the industry leading hiring solution helping organizations optimize their talent decisions, today announced the completion of its acquisition of pymetrics, the leader in unbiased soft skills assessments. Together, Harver and pymetrics address a broad set of talent acquisition and talent management use cases, empowering organizations to optimize their talent decisions across the employee lifecycle. The acquisition of pymetrics adds a groundbreaking, behavioral-based AI methodology to Harver's comprehensive set of existing talent assessments, providing organizations with a wider breadth and depth of predictive talent decisioning products to address their unique professional and hourly hiring needs. Incorporating best-in-class approaches from both I/O psychology and cognitive science, the combined offerings will accelerate the companies' shared vision of putting purpose to work by identifying, matching, and developing the right people for the right role and ultimately delivering better outcomes for global organizations in a more efficient and unbiased manner.

Original Source

Busting anti-queer bias in text prediction

Modern text prediction is far from perfect—take, for instance, when a search query suggests something completely different from your intention. But the trouble doesn't end at inaccuracy. Text prediction can also be extremely exclusive or biased when it comes to predicting results related to marginalized communities. A team of researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, led by Katy Felkner, a USC Viterbi Ph.D. in computer science student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship recipient, has developed a system to quantify and fix anti-queer bias in the artificial intelligence behind text prediction. The project, presented by Felkner at the Queer in AI workshop at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) conference in July, looks at both detecting and reducing anti-queer bias in a large language model, which is used in everything from search bars to language translation systems.

Original Source

SHRM Supports No-Poach Agreements in Some Cases

While the federal government has been ramping up enforcement of antitrust laws, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) warned that completely banning all no-poach agreements would be detrimental to companies and HR professionals. SHRM recently filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Connecticut HR executives who were charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with restricting the hiring and recruiting of aerospace engineers. The grand jury indictment alleged that six executives in the aerospace industry conspired to uphold illegal no-poach agreements between their companies from 2011 to 2019. It claimed that a manager chastised suppliers who recruited another company's employees and that he threatened to punish those suppliers by taking away access to projects. It also said the group of companies recognized the mutual financial benefit of this no-poach agreement, including reducing labor costs. On Aug. 10, the DOJ opposed the defendant's motion to dismiss the indictment, calling the agreement a "conspiracy" that "stalled careers and mired workers in underpaid, unwanted jobs." SHRM argued that no-poach agreements are sometimes lawful when attempting to partner with multiple staffing firms for the same project. The government has not proved that using multiple staffing firms on one project or at a one location for a client is inefficient or anti-competitive, SHRM pointed out.

Original Source

TAtech’s Fall Leadership Summits Are Huge Brand Building & Lead Gen Opportunities

Huge brand building and lead gen opportunities – that’s what you’ll get from sponsorships at TAtech’s fall Leadership Summits: Technology & the Candidate Experience (September 28 NYC), Applications of Recruiting AI for Enterprise Employers (October 25 Chicago), and Recruitment Marketing (December 1 Boston). These one-day, one-topic conferences are specifically designed to promote dialogue and connections among busy corporate and industry leaders. Each program provides both a deep dive into an important talent acquisition strategy and plenty of time for senior-level peer-to-peer networking. So, lock down your sponsorship before they’re all gone. Contact TAtech CEO Peter Weddle (peterweddle@tatech.org) right away!