Recruiting services provider Vettery acquired technical recruiting platform Hired last month, aiming to accelerate the "marketplace" concept in recruiting.
Vettery said it plans to launch the combined service offering by the first quarter of 2021. Vettery is owned by The Adecco Group, an international staffing firm that also owns General Assembly, the technical bootcamp and talent development company.
The goal of acquiring Hired, according to the Nov. 23 announcement, is to develop "a comprehensive talent marketplace for technology, marketing, sales, and finance hires." Or, as CEO Josh Brenner put it, "the most efficient and transparent way to connect job seekers and companies."
Brenner told HR Dive that the "marketplace" concept will depart from traditional job boards or recruiting services in the amount of data collected from both job seekers and employers to identify strong matches based on fit and ability. The Vettery algorithms also benefit from data provided by The Adecco Group and associated partners.
"There's information out there beyond what's on your LinkedIn profile and your resume," Brenner explained. "Especially in the tech industry which [Vettery and Hired] have a strong foothold in, it's what projects you've worked on on GitHub, what specific skills are you proficient in, or not."
Hired focuses on placements for tech roles, and includes assessments and bias reduction tools Brenner described as "deep" and "sophisticated." Vettery mostly operates in the tech space as well — Brenner said it represents around 80% of its business — but also expanded into sales, marketing and finance. In terms of career level, Brenner said the focus is mostly on mid-level talent — those candidates with some job experience and an idea of what they want.
The marketplace offering promises to tackle inefficiencies in the recruiting process. Often when a recruiter posts a job, they receive a glut of applications and many unqualified candidates through which they need to sift. In terms of the fee structure, a solution like Vettery sits in between the personalized help of a staffing firm and job marketing services. The core of its value proposition is efficiency in finding candidates to engage with and helping companies hire those most likely to stick with the company.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, many companies slowed their hiring efforts, however many were also rapidly accelerating their technology roadmaps, Brenner said, leading to an increase in demand. The virtual hiring component also led recruiters and business leaders to look for additional solutions to find candidates to help make key technology upgrades related to remote work, he continued.
Vettery's plan is to combine the two companies under one brand with a unified recruiting platform. Brenner said he believes recruiting technology use is in "a very nascent period" and that he hopes the marketplace is an answer for the inefficiencies in recruiting — "a problem that has not been solved well, or in a meaningful way," he said.
"You look at a lot of other industries that have been disrupted using technology, and a lot of industries, a lot of the players that are at the top of those industries are marketplaces," he said. "You look at the Amazons of the world or Expedia in travel. My view has very much been that in the hiring space, the disrupter or the company that is going to really make a big difference is a marketplace solution."
