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What Are We to Make of Recent Jobvite Moves?

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The Top-line Context

Jobvite picked up an investment of $200 million and is using it to acquire three smaller companies:

  • Talemetry (recruitment marketing)
  • RolePoint (employee referrals and in-company moves)
  • Canvas (a text-based conversational screening bot)

Post-acquisition, the combined company will have north of 2,000 customers. No valuation was disclosed in this deal. As noted by TechCrunch, the last valuation of Jobvite is pretty old — September 2014 — and was around $150 million, although the company has never confirmed that.

What Does This Likely Mean?

First off: The HCM space is still a big market, and will be for years to come.

More specifically: Because of a tighter labor market (heck, the tightest in Alan Greenspan’s lifetime), we’re back to “the war for talent” being significantly more than a buzzword. This renewed focus on talent has hit the intersection of two tech trends: (1) being the natural evolution of tech to function more effectively and (2) being the rise of AI and machine learning within HR tech to help remove the top-of-funnel logistical nightmare that has bogged down recruiters and kept the process from being ROI-facing effective.

Now, look at these acquisitions again with that context:

  • Talemetry uses marketing tech to find ideal candidates and market directly to them.
  • Canvas is a bot that initiates the screening process, saving top-of-funnel time for recruiters.
  • RolePoint helps you ID internal superstars in the war for talent so that you don’t even have to focus on out-of-house external searches.

The Jobvite acquisitions look even more strategic through this lens, because they’re at the intersection of different events happening to the recruiting function of HCM over the past five years. They’re bolstering their platform in a similar vein to Outmatch bolstering around talent analytics.

Jobvite was already winning Brandon Hall awards for candidate experience and recruitment marketing, so the moves help bolster an already-impressive suite.

Will Increasing Consolidation Lead to Better Candidate Experience?

We’ve all had friends in lengthy job searches who complain about how legitimately “inhumane” it can feel. Part of this is humans mucking it all up, for sure. Part of it is that the overall talent landscape has been fragmented with hundreds of point solutions for years. If we see increasing consolidation of those solutions into end-to-end suites, will the job search process finally be something people turn to with joy?

The candidate experience may never be pure joy, but we can at least get closer to enjoyable. And beyond the fiscals, shouldn’t that be the end game in this space?  

Your Turn

You know the drill. We have our thoughts, but we’re more interested in yours. What does the latest round of acquisitions mean for the future of Jobvite? How vital is solution consolidation to the candidate experience? Is this consolidation more important to the candidate or the employer?