Recfest Soundbites

Are we about to see Scan your ID to apply become standard practice in hiring? 🪪👀 Right now, talent acquisition is dealing with an unprecedented storm. Mass-application bots, automated resume-tailoring tools, and generative AI have made it possible for a single person to blast out 500 hyper-customized applications before lunch ☕⚡. But the real crisis isnt just volume—it’s authenticity.More hiring teams are reporting: 🚩 Resumes fabricated out of thin air with fake credentials 🚩 Proxy test-takers and AI copilots running assessments 🚩 Ghost candidates and deepfake/camera-swapping during remote video screens 🚩 Stolen identities infiltrating remote roles. Historically, identity checks and background screenings sat at the very end of the funnel: you extend an offer, run the check, and onboard. Today? Waiting until the offer stage means recruiters and hiring managers spend dozens of wasted hours screening people who might not even exist. That leads to a massive question:Is upfront identity verification going to become the new gatekeeper?Imagine having to verify your government ID or complete a biometric liveness check before you can submit an application or book a first-round screen.  In todays episode you'll hear from Findem who just debuted their new Authenticity Suite which helps recruiters to flag fraudulent applicants as well as proof that they're a human…enjoy the audio. And if you want to watch this instead, head to the RecTech media youtube channel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BOSTON — Global employment platform G-P (Globalization Partners) announced strong third-quarter momentum on Thursday, projecting that it will surpass $450 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and achieve more than $100 million in core operating profits for the full year 2026. The Boston-headquartered company credited its accelerating performance to rapid customer adoption of its agentic AI-driven workforce platform and its international compliance infrastructure, which now spans more than 180 countries. If projections hold, G-P will expand both customer headcount and revenue by over 20% compared to fiscal year 2025.  Founded in 2012, G-P operates as an Employer of Record (EOR), handling international hiring, payroll, taxes, and localized human resources management so companies can hire cross-border staff without establishing legal entities overseas. https://hrtechfeed.com/g-p-forecasts-record-2026-on-surging-demand-for-agentic-ai-and-global-employment-services/ BELLEVUE, Wash. — October 14, 2026 — Humanly, an AI hiring platform for high volume hiring, announced the acquisition of CareerArc, a recruitment marketing technology company that helps employers reach, engage, and convert job seekers. The acquisition expands Humanly’s ability to connect the journey from candidate reach to hire, bringing together CareerArc’s top-of-funnel recruitment marketing capabilities with Humanly’s AI-powered candidate engagement, screening, interviewing, and hiring technology. “High volume employers have had to piece together their hiring process with a collection of disconnected tools such as job boards to find candidates, software to process applications, and agencies to fill the gaps,” said Prem Kumar, CEO and Co-Founder of Humanly. “CareerArc allows us to reach candidates earlier. By combining their expertise in reaching and engaging talent with Humanly’s AI-powered hiring platform, we can help employers build a stronger candidate pipeline and move more qualified people from first touch to first shift.”  CareerArc’s portfolio includes HireSocial, a social recruiting platform built for talent acquisition teams, and Job Maps, an interactive career-site experience that helps candidates discover opportunities by location.  https://hrtechfeed.com/humanly-acquires-careerarc/ NEW YORK — Rippling has officially opened a 132,000-square-foot office at 330 West 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan, marking one of the largest physical real estate commitments by an HR technology vendor in New York in recent years.Designed to accommodate over 1,000 employees, the Penn District hub is backed by $3.4 million in state performance-based tax credits via Empire State Development, tied to creating at least 371 new tech and go-to-market roles.  Historically popular among early-stage startups and high-growth mid-market firms, Rippling has spent the past two years repositioning itself from a nimble SMB all-in-one platform into a serious contender for large enterprise contracts. To challenge enterprise stalwarts like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, and ADP, HR tech platforms require deep access to Fortune 500 decision-makers, financial institutions, and multinational talent pools—networks heavily concentrated on the East Coast. https://hrtechfeed.com/rippling-expands-new-york-city-presence/ On October 6, SAP announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire TechWolf, a provider of a leading AI work intelligence platform. What does this mean for SAP SuccessFactors customers?  Closing is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, so we cannot yet provide a lot of details, but let us look into what we can say today. TechWolf provides companies with a real-time, AI-powered model of their entire workforce, mapping employees’ skills, capabilities and tasks against company strategy to identify where to hire, retrain, or deploy their people.  https://hrtechfeed.com/what-does-the-techwolf-acquisition-mean-for-successfactors-customers/ Announced at the annual Workday Rising conference by Adam Godson, the company introduced Workday Candidate Profile, a reusable, candidate-controlled digital profile designed to streamline applications across Workday-powered career sites. Instead of forcing candidates to start from scratch at every company career page, the new Workday Candidate Profile functions as a universal, portable identity: Passwordless One-Time Sign-In: When starting an application, candidates can select “Continue with Workday Candidate Profile” and log in using an email-verified one-time password (OTP), eliminating forgotten passwords. Up to 80% Pre-Filled: The system automatically pulls from the candidate’s saved profile to pre-fill up to 80% of standard application fields, including work history, education, skills, and contact information. Candidate Review & Control: Applicants can review, edit, and fine-tune their details before submitting, ensuring their information remains accurate and up-to-date. Preserving Employer Workflows: Employers maintain their custom branding, job-specific screening questions, compliance disclosures, and validation rules without breaking their existing Workday Recruiting workflows. The update is scheduled to roll out to job seekers in early 2027. https://recruitingheadlines.com/workday-overhauls-job-application-process-with-reusable-candidate-profiles/ SAN FRANCISCO — In welcome news for millions of frustrated job seekers, enterprise software giant Workday announced a major overhaul to its job application experience, addressing one of the most widely mocked pain points of the modern corporate job hunt: having to create a new account and manually retype work history for every single company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor is back with his new candidate driven marketplace BOOMBAND filled with deep profiles of candidates. https://www.boomband.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"In recruiting news: LinkedIn is restricting popular third-party sourcing tools like Pin, Gem, and Neuroscale, cutting off unapproved external access to its network. The core issue comes down to user consent and data scraping policies. By enforcing stricter controls over candidate profiles, LinkedIn is aggressively protecting its platform ecosystem. For talent acquisition teams, the takeaway is clear: unauthorized sourcing plugins are out, and relying on official, compliant integrations is the only safe bet." https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pin-gem-neuroscale-gone-from-linkedin-consent-question-brano-vargic-lrovc/ AUSTIN, Texas — In a major push to overhaul the modern hiring process, workplace insights platform Glassdoor announced the launch of Glassdoor Recruiter, an artificial intelligence-powered matching tool designed to replace endless job board scrolling with tailored, culture-first career recommendations. Part of Indeed and subsidiary to HR technology giant Recruit Holdings, Glassdoor aims to address widespread “application fatigue”—a growing issue where candidates submit dozens of resumes into online job boards only to face radio silence. Instead of traditional keyword searching and bulk applications, Glassdoor Recruiter pairs candidates’ resumes and career priorities directly with listings from Indeed’s global job marketplace, filtered through Glassdoor’s extensive database of employee reviews and workplace data. https://hrtechfeed.com/glassdoor-launches-ai-driven-glassdoor-recruiter-to-end-job-search-burnout-and-mass-applications/ SAN FRANCISCO—-Juicebox, the AI recruiting platform, today announced a strategic agreement to acquire intellectual property and other assets from Fetcher, a talent sourcing and recruiting automation platform. As part of the agreement, Fetcher customers will have the option to transition to Juicebox as Fetcher winds down its existing product and operations. “Juicebox has been on our radar for years, and I believe they have the most compelling product on the market right now. We’re committed to working closely with them so our customers feel supported every step of the way,” said Christopher Calmeyn, Co-founder and CEO of Fetcher. Since its founding in 2016, Fetcher has served more than 1,500 customers and over 5,000 recruiters worldwide, and has raised over $30M in capital. Its product combined recruiting expertise with automation to help companies identify and engage qualified candidates. The company’s human-in-the-loop approach paired technology with personalized support, helping recruiters spend less time on manual sourcing and more time building relationships with talent. https://hrtechfeed.com/sap-to-acquire-techwolf/ Arriving just a year after its Series B, the round brings Metaview’s total capital raised to $110 million and marks a milestone in the HR technology sector’s migration from passive AI copilots to autonomous, task-oriented software agents. Metaview plans to direct the fresh capital toward three core initiatives: Agent General Availability: Rolling out fillmore alongside role-specific micro-agents across enterprise environments. Team & Geographic Footprint: Tripling headcount from 80 to 250 employees and opening a New York City office alongside its San Francisco and London hubs. Upskilling Talent Teams: Expanding 10x Recruiting, an educational and community framework designed to train recruiters in talent engineering—the practice of designing, tuning, and overseeing agentic AI hiring systems rather than running repetitive sourcing manually. https://hrtechfeed.com/metaview-secures-60m-series-c-to-scale-agentic-recruiting-and-autonomous-coworker-fillmore/ SAN FRANCISCO & LONDON — Metaview, an AI-native talent acquisition platform, announced a $60 million Series C funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from GV, Intrepid Growth Partners, Seedcamp, Vertex Ventures US, Plural, and Garuda Ventures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today get updates from Dalia, SonicJobs, RecruitmentAds.com, Ribbon and Proven Base. Live from Recfest in Nashville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dallas, Texas - PitchMe, the data enrichment and talent intelligence platform for recruitment and staffing agencies, today launched SONAR, a new search product designed to eliminate one of agency recruiting’s most stubborn workarounds: searching an ATS or CRM for known candidates, then opening a separate sourcing tool to find everyone else. Live now in early access across the UK, US and Europe, SONAR searches public data sources across the web and returns enriched candidate profiles recruiters can review and contact from one place. The product works alongside systems such as Bullhorn, Avionte and Vincere, giving agencies a modern sourcing layer without requiring an ATS migration or disrupting the system of record their teams already use. The launch is the first step in PitchMe’s plan to bring an agency’s internal database and the external talent market into one search experience. A second module in development will synchronize candidates from an agency’s ATS or CRM into PitchMe, display internal and external candidates side by side, and automatically route qualified candidates back into the ATS as they advance through a hiring pipeline. SONAR organizes each hiring effort as a Project, which can be private or shared with a team. Inside a Project, recruiters create Searches in one of two ways: describe the candidate they need in plain language and let SONAR build the query, or use more than a dozen structured filters covering job title, geography, experience, education, skills, employers, credentials, and languages. Link LONDON — Global learning and testing giant Pearson announced on Tuesday an agreement to acquire Workera, a Silicon Valley-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence-powered skills verification and enterprise assessments. The transaction marks Pearson’s latest strategic push into corporate upskilling, aiming to address mounting corporate anxiety over workforce readiness in the age of generative and agentic AI. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2019 in Palo Alto, California, Workera operates an adaptive assessment platform that combines agentic AI, psychometrics, and role-specific simulations to benchmark what employees can actually do, rather than relying on self-reported résumés or static quizzes. The roughly 60-person startup serves high-profile enterprise and defense clients, including Accenture, ServiceNow, and the U.S. Space Force. Following the acquisition, Workera will fold into Pearson’s Enterprise Learning & Skills unit. Workera’s co-founder and chief executive, Kian Katanforoosh, will join Pearson’s leadership team. https://hrtechfeed.com/pearson-acquires-workera/ WALTHAM, Mass. — In a bid to upend conventional human resources workflows, compensation data veteran Salary.com announced the launch of SalaryTalent, an AI-native talent management platform designed to place real-time compensation intelligence at the center of everyday workforce decisions.  Built on Salary.com’s foundational job ontology—which encompasses over 1.4 million leveled job titles across 30,000 organizations in 140+ countries—SalaryTalent is powered by the company’s Max AI engine. The suite debuts with five interconnected products designed to cover the entire talent lifecycle: Product Focus & Strategic Capabilities Recruiting Pre-configures job requisitions with compliant, pay-transparency salary ranges to streamline offer negotiations from day one. Candidate Sourcing Matches active and passive candidates by skills and experience while aligning market pay expectations early in the pipeline. Performance Management Connects employee reviews, goals, and career paths with live market pay and skill demand; leverages AI to flag rating and compensation anomalies. Workforce Management Unifies shift scheduling, attendance, leave management, and overtime compliance with an auditable time-to-payroll pipeline. HR Agent Orchestration Implements human-in-the-loop governance for AI agents, featuring permission scopes, configurable approval gates, and audit trails SalaryTalent is available immediately across desktop and mobile. To accelerate adoption, Salary.com has introduced the SalaryTalent Bootcamp, a 30-day, risk-free pilot program allowing enterprise clients to test the suite using their own job architecture, pay bands, and market conditions before committing.  https://hrtechfeed.com/salary-com-expands-into-talent-management-with-launch-of-ai-native-salarytalent-platform/ SAN FRANCISCO — HiringCafe, an AI-powered job discovery search engine, announced Monday that it has raised $6.8 million in pre-seed funding and launched a new automated “AI Talent Agent” designed to search open roles on behalf of candidates. The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Nonfiction Capital, Silicon Gardens, and angel investors from hiring giants ZipRecruiter and Indeed. Unlike legacy job boards that operate primarily on sponsored-listing and advertising business models, HiringCafe positions itself as an exhaustive internet-wide search engine. Traditional aggregators typically surface about 20% of active job openings—mostly sponsored posts from large corporations—leaving millions of applicants to fight over the same visible positions. By deploying automated agents and web-indexing algorithms to crawl company career pages directly, HiringCafe claims its index exceeds 5.7 million open roles—up to 400% more than leading traditional job boards. https://hrtechfeed.com/hiringcafe-secures-6-8-million-to-tackle-the-hidden-job-market-with-ai-talent-agents/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hackajob is now known as Archer. We go behind the name change with their CEO and whats the future of AI in recruiting. Recorded live from Recfest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I chatted up Joseph Cole VP of Marketing for Findem about the launch of their new agentic studio for sourcing. Recorded live at Recfest in Nashville, TN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

VANCOUVER, Wash. — ZoomInfo , a leading intelligence platform, has announced the launch of Talent Autopilot, its most advanced recruitment technology to date. Designed to help talent acquisition teams bypass the limitations of traditional keyword searches, the new platform combines professional and company intelligence with autonomous reasoning to unearth qualified candidates who might otherwise slip through the cracks. Rather than depending rigidly on specific job titles, standard keywords, and narrow filters, Talent Autopilot allows recruiters to supply contextual descriptions of a role. The system then evaluates candidates across broader criteria—including underlying skills, practical experience, career paths, and corporate backgrounds—to discover non-obvious fits whose talents match the position’s requirements. “Recruiting teams do not need another tool that simply gives them more candidates to sort through,” said Jon Bischke, General Manager of ZoomInfo Talent Solutions. “They need technology that understands what they are trying to accomplish and has the intelligence to act on it.” https://hrtechfeed.com/zoominfo-unveils-autonomous-recruiting-and-candidate-discovery-features/ BOSTON — RippleMatch, a leading early career recruiting platform, today announced that its university product is now available free of charge to all higher education institutions. The news follows RippleMatch’s acquisition by JobGet, the fastest-growing job platform connecting workers to employers at scale, and provides universities a valuable tool to support students through an entry-level hiring market that’s challenged by AI disruption. “Career services teams are being asked to do more for students at exactly the moment when the job market has become most unpredictable for them,” said Audrey Patenaude, General Manager of RippleMatch. “AI is reshaping the entry-level roles where graduates have traditionally gotten their start. The job search process has become more opaque, and universities are doing this with fewer resources than ever. With our acquisition by JobGet, we’ve gained access to a dramatically larger job inventory and employer network, and that growth allows us to expand access to universities at no cost, and we believe that’s what this moment calls for.” https://hrtechfeed.com/jobget-announces-free-access-to-ripplematch-platform-for-universities/ Phoenix Education Partners, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, has reached an agreement to acquire Fuel50, an AI-driven workforce intelligence and talent mobility platform, for approximately $31.5 million in cash with up to $8.5 million in performance-based earnouts through 2027. Fuel50’s platform uses enterprise data and an ontology spanning over 5,000 skills to help organizations map internal capabilities, forecast labor needs, and drive employee upskilling and reskilling. The transaction, expected to close within 30 days, reflects Phoenix Education’s broader push to bridge the gap between higher education and AI-era corporate talent development; following the deal, Fuel50 will operate as an independent subsidiary under its own brand, with co-founder and current president Jo Mills stepping into the role of CEO. https://hrtechfeed.com/univ-of-phoenix-buys-an-hr-tech-firm/ SAN FRANCISCO — Crosschq announced a major transformation and brand overhaul today, officially relaunching as Brilliant AI to establish what it terms the “hiring intelligence” category. Backed by a new strategic investment from Bessemer Venture Partners, Brilliant AI brings together three distinct HR tech entities: Crosschq, candidate verification platform ApplicantX, and behavioral assessment platform Traitify. Together, the newly unified company aims to solve recruiting’s long-standing blind spot: closing the feedback loop between pre-hire candidate evaluation and post-hire employee performance and retention. https://hrtechfeed.com/crosschq-rebrands-as-brilliant-ai-combining-three-hr-tech-platforms-to-create-hiring-intelligence-category/ ATLANTA — Predictive hiring and assessment provider Harver has acquired Symphony Talent, a major player in recruitment marketing, employer branding, and candidate relationship management (CRM). Backed by private equity firm Rubicon Technology Partners, the newly merged entity aims to address the talent lifecycle from upfront recruitment marketing to post-hire performance. By integrating Symphony Talent’s recruitment marketing and CRM capabilities with Harver’s pre-employment assessments, fraud detection, and reference-checking tools, the combined company will offer: Attraction & Engagement: Employer value proposition (EVP) development, programmatic job advertising, custom career sites, and CRM-driven talent communities. Selection & Verification: Validated predictive assessments, video interviewing, reference checking, and candidate fraud detection. Workforce Intelligence: End-to-end data feedback loops connecting initial recruitment targeting with quality-of-hire and long-term employee retention. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Symphony Talent will operate under the Harver umbrella, positioning the unified business to compete directly with integrated enterprise talent clouds.  https://hrtechfeed.com/harver-acquires-symphony-talent/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For years, we’ve built career sites for two audiences: human candidates and basic search engines. But right now, candidates aren’t just scrolling through job boards anymore—they’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI assistants to find their next role, evaluate company culture, and summarize opportunities. That shift means your career site is no longer just being read by people; it’s being parsed, filtered, and judged by AI. Joining us today to break down this shift is Brianna Huynh, VP of Brand and Creative at Appcast.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices