Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry
November 7-13, 2022:
• Bringing Web3 into reality: CV Wallet consigns traditional resume to the trash bin of history;
• Winning the legal battle: Court sides with LinkedIn in hiQ Labs data scraping lawsuit;
• Ratcheting up the buzz: Frontline worker solution Beekeeper raises $50M in Series C funding;
• Facing the music: Tech titans layoff thousands after over-hiring and over-paying for years;
• Shining a light on career opportunity: HR tech platform WorkTorch raises $2.2M in seed round.
PLUS
• Congruent Recruiting Marketing – that’s how TAtech CEO Peter Weddle describes the focus of the TAtech Leadership Summit on Recruitment Marketing, coming up on December 1 at Boston University in Boston, MA. Designed for both corporate and industry thought leaders, this event is all about identifying the new Best Practices of Recruitment Marketing – those that align with the expectations and behavior of today’s and tomorrow’s job seekers. Join us!
New Technology Consigns Traditional CV To History
A world-first smart CV that’s powered by the latest Web3 technologies has been launched to revolutionise an outdated and broken recruiting process with a much-needed modern, fairer, efficient and trusted hiring ecosystem. The CV Wallet app has been developed to help overcome the challenges associated with traditional hiring, which include data privacy and security breaches and risks, high application drop-out rates, inconsistent referencing and interview bias. Despite its long-discussed demise, and without any other viable alternative, the CV continues to dominate a hiring process that is unfair, inefficient, costly and untrusted…until now. Richard Collins, co-founder of CV Wallet, said: “The root of the problem within the recruitment industry is that HR technology and the hiring process are woefully outdated and unfit for purpose in a post-Covid world of work. Unbelievably, the traditional CV has barely changed in 400 years, and the recruitment industry has built a hiring process that has become unfair, inefficient and untrusted off the back of it.” The advent of Web3 technologies has allowed serial HR tech entrepreneurs, Richard and Beverly Collins, who co-founded programmatic job advertising platform, ClickIQ, which sold to Indeed in 2019, to apply this new technology to the traditional CV and launch their free CV Wallet app.
Court Sides With LinkedIn in Data Scraping Lawsuit vs. hiQ Labs
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in favor of the professional network, with Judge Edward Chen writing, “hiQ relied on LinkedIn for its data primarily by scraping wholly public LinkedIn profiles using automated software. hiQ had continuously attempted to circumvent LinkedIn’s general technical defenses since May 2014. It experimented and attempted to reverse engineer LinkedIn’s systems and to avoid detection by simulating human site-access behaviors. hiQ also hired independent contractors known as ‘turkers’ to conduct quality assurance while ‘logged-in’ to LinkedIn by viewing and confirming hiQ customers’ employees’ identities manually.” hiQ Labs wound down its operations in 2018, although its servers continued running into 2019 to deliver on client contracts. Chen wrote, “In sum, hiQ breached LinkedIn’s user agreement both through its own scraping of LinkedIn’s site and using scraped data, and through turkers’ creation of false identities on LinkedIn’s platform.”
Frontline worker solution Beekeeper Raises $50M in Series C Funding
Beekepper, a Zurich, Switzerland-based frontline success system provider, raised $50M in Series C funding. Backers included EGS Beteiligungen, Kreos Capital, Energize, Thayer, SwissCanto, Keen Ventures, Alpana Ventures, Edenred Capital and Verve Capital. The company intends to use the funds to continue to invest in product development and establish its leadership in the frontline success category. Led by CEO Dr. Cristian Grossmann, Beekeeper empowers frontline businesses and their workers with the digital solutions they need to do their best possible work. Founded in 2012, the company provides a mobile-first platform for companies to automate paper-based processes, communicate with employees in real-time from anywhere, and improve the engagement, productivity, and safety of frontline teams. Since 2020, Beekeeper has seen growth with thousands of frontline business locations now using the platform in more than 150 countries.
Tech’s Talent Wars Have Come Back to Bite It
When Stripe, a payments start-up valued at $74 billion, laid off more than 1,000 employees this month, its co-founders blamed themselves. “We overhired for the world we’re in,” they wrote. “We were much too optimistic.” After Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, slashed the company’s staffing in half last week, Jack Dorsey, a founder and former chief executive of the social media service, claimed responsibility. “I grew the company size too quickly,” he wrote on Twitter. And on Wednesday, when Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shed 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, blamed overzealous expansion. “I made the decision to significantly increase our investments,” he wrote in a letter to employees. “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.” The chorus of conceding by tech executives that they hired too many people is ricocheting across Silicon Valley as the industry rushes to make cuts, blaming a worsening economy.
HR platform WorkTorch raises $2.2M seed round
WorkTorch, previously known as QuickHire, announced today the closing of a $2.2 million seed round led by Tenzing Capital. Along with the raise comes the name change, with the goal of encapsulating the business’ focus on employee recruiting and retention. Speaking to TechCrunch, its founders, sisters Deborah Gladney and Angela Muhwezi-Hall, said the rebrand was a year and a half in the making as they realized the changing relationship between employees and employers. “Finding the right talent is just half the battle,” Gladney said. “Where companies are really being hit the hardest is losing people faster than they’re coming in the door.” They realized that their hard work to help companies find the right talent was fruitless if those businesses weren’t doing anything to keep those workers. “We started leaning into what was happening to people post-hire and have started to focus on career development and talent retention tools,” Gladney continued. “So our new name is WorkTorch. We want to be a guiding light to a better career, a better workforce.” Launched last April, the company says it has a roster of more than 40,000 service industry applicants actively looking for a job, with at least 1,000 interviews a month scheduled via the platform. As part of its rebrand, users will now have access to a career development portal where they can track professional growth, as well as connect with others who have similar interests. At the same time, employers will now be able to access new retention tools to look at national and regional data trends, as well as receive feedback from their employees on their current working experiences.
Congruent Recruitment Marketing
• Congruent Recruiting Marketing – that’s how TAtech CEO Peter Weddle describes the focus of the TAtech Leadership Summit on Recruitment Marketing, coming up on December 1 at Boston University in Boston, MA. It’s all about identifying the new Best Practices of Recruitment Marketing – those that align with the expectations and behavior of today’s and tomorrow’s job seekers. This unique one-day event is specifically designed to promote connections among busy corporate and industry leaders. Its program provides a deep dive into the top of the recruiting funnel with plenty of time left over for senior-level peer-to-peer interaction. That makes it the perfect venue for building your brand and generating sales leads. Join us!