RecFest LIVE: Mark Chaffey, CEO of Archer

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

Boomband, a new talent intelligence platform founded by Monster.com creator Jeff Taylor, officially rolled out across all six New England states on Wednesday. Headquartered in Wakefield, Rhode Island, the startup is directly targeting the region’s dense concentration of tech, healthcare, finance, and higher-education employers, bringing nearly 500,000 local, hybrid, and remote roles to the platform at launch. According to Boomband, the traditional online job board model has collapsed under a flood of low-signal, AI-generated applications. The average job posting drew 244 applications in 2025, more than double the volume from 2022, while the regional search cycle for candidates now stretches to an average of 6.6 months. “In a roundabout way, I helped build the system that is now breaking hiring,” said Taylor, Boomband’s founder and CEO. “With Monster.com, we took the Help Wanted section from the newspaper to the internet… Now overlay AI on top of that broken foundation, and you have a full collapse. Everyone is drowning in volume and starving for signal.” By debuting regionally, Boomband aims to give New England employers a localized network that bypasses the flood of irrelevant, nationwide resume-spamming while surfacing local candidates based on actual skill alignment and commute preferences. https://hrtechfeed.com/boomband-expands-to-new-england-for-debut-of-new-ai-talent-platform/ SAN FRANCISCO & LONDON — AI-native hiring marketplace Jack & Jill has raised a $40 million Series A round to upend traditional recruitment and make warm professional introductions at scale. Founded by Matthew Wilson (CEO) and Saaras Mehan (CTO), the platform operates on a dual-agent model designed to eliminate cold outreach, resume spam, and traditional job boards: Jackis a voice agent dedicated to job seekers, holding conversations with professionals to deeply understand their career ambitions, preferences, and ideal roles. Jillis an embedded recruiting agent for companies, learning team dynamics, technical bars, and culture to surface vetted talent. Rather than candidates submitting resumes into applicant tracking systems (ATS), the two autonomous agents negotiate on behalf of their respective sides. When both agents agree on mutual alignment, they directly facilitate a warm introduction between the candidate and hiring team—skipping the application phase altogether. The company says they have already registered 389k candidates and count 5k employers as clients. https://hrtechfeed.com/jack-jill-secures-40m-series-a-to-replace-job-applications-with-ai-agents/ NEW YORK — BoomerangHR has closed a $12.7 million seed round to expand its AI-powered offboarding and corporate alumni platform, targeting a talent market where trusted candidate signals are becoming increasingly scarce. Founded by CEO Jeff Wald, BoomerangHR is designed to democratize the structured alumni networks historically reserved for elite consulting firms and investment banks. The platform plugs into existing HRIS and ATS stacks in under an hour, focusing on three core operational pillars: Automated Offboarding:  Alumni Network Management:  Talent Migration & Reporting:  “A company’s relationship with great talent shouldn’t end when they leave,” said Wald. “We built BoomerangHR to automate offboarding and transform former team members into an active growth network. Through Boomerang, companies can easily access warm rehires, referrals, and sales leads—because your best next hire is someone who already knows your culture, your customers, and your mission.” https://hrtechfeed.com/boomeranghr-secures-12-7m-seed-round-to-turn-offboarding-into-an-ongoing-talent-engine/ The Las Vegas Raiders have selected human resources and workforce technology provider UKG to manage and streamline operations across the franchise’s business, football, and gameday staff. Under the new agreement, the NFL franchise will deploy the UKG Pro suite to consolidate human resources, payroll, and workforce intelligence onto a single operating platform. The move is designed to connect a wide-ranging employee base—from coaches, trainers, and front-office executives to hourly and frontline stadium workers. https://hrtechfeed.com/ukg-lands-an-nfl-team/ Workday, Inc. has named Sarah Kennedy Ellis chief marketing officer, effective October 5, 2026, reporting to Aneel Bhusri, Workday co-founder, CEO, and chair. Kennedy Ellis will lead Workday’s global marketing and communications organization and will be responsible for championing the company’s brand narrative and growth strategy for the AI era. Kennedy Ellis brings more than 20 years of marketing expertise to the role. She joins Workday from Google, where she led global marketing for Google Cloud and Google Workspace and helped build the engine behind one of the fastest growing businesses in enterprise technology. Prior to joining Google, she was chief marketing officer of Adobe Experience Cloud, and chief marketing officer of Marketo, playing a critical role in Marketo’s successful acquisition by Adobe in 2018. https://hrtechfeed.com/workday-has-a-new-cmo/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Linkup published their august 2026 jobs report; Key Takeaways Job openings stayed flat: Active job listings rose 0.1% in August 2026, to 4.96 million from 4.95 million in July. This suggests that underlying labor demand in the U.S. remained steady, alongside seasonal recruitment adjustments. Broad-based industry gains: Industries that saw an increase in job postings include Wholesale Trade (2.7k), Construction (1.6k), and Real Estate and Rental and Leasing (1.2k). However, Retail Trade saw the largest decrease (-4.8k). Major occupation drops: Office and Administrative Support occupations experienced the largest drop (-9.4k) followed by Installation, Maintenance, and Repair (-7.0k), and Production (-6.1k).  https://hrtechfeed.com/august-2026-jobs-recap/ UKG has introduced several new AI-driven capabilities aimed at supporting frontline workforces, accelerating bulk recruitment, and preventing costly payroll discrepancies. Key among these updates is UKG Bryte Voice, a voice-enabled assistant integrated with UKG Pro that allows deskless staff—such as retail and healthcare workers—to execute routine tasks (like checking schedules, reviewing timecards, or updating direct deposit information) hands-free via Siri or Google Assistant.  For talent acquisition, the platform now provides AI-assisted high-volume hiring tools, including candidate job recommendations, profile summaries, and a "Bulk Apply" workflow capable of processing up to 100 applicants simultaneously. Finally, UKG rolled out Agentic Pay, which allows administrators to examine historical pay data and resolve discrepancies before processing payroll through natural language queries to eliminate costly errors.  https://hrtechfeed.com/ukg-launches-voice-enabled-ai-and-agentic-pay-tools-to-support-frontline-workers/ TORONTO — 7shifts, the restaurant HR platform, today announced the launch of Employee Training, a restaurant-specific training solution built directly into 7shifts. The new offering gives restaurants a simpler way to train their teams without adding another standalone tool. The launch expands 7shifts’ role across the restaurant employee lifecycle, bringing hiring, onboarding, training, scheduling, pay, and retention together in one platform. Formerly known for scheduling and payroll, 7shifts has now fully evolved into a comprehensive HR platform. “Operators are done paying for separate software to hire, onboard, train, schedule, and pay their staff, they want one system for the entire HR employee lifecycle, not a patchwork of tools that don’t talk to each other,” said Jordan Boesch, chief executive officer at 7shifts. “When it’s all in one place, teams get strong faster and managers get time back to actually develop their people.” https://hrtechfeed.com/restaurant-hr-platform-adds-employee-training-feature/ In HR tech partnership news Match2, the platform powering the Universal Candidate Profile™, today announced that its Connected Talent Solutions™ is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings.  PageUp, a global leader in talent acquisition software, and Sapia.ai, the pioneer in conversational AI for talent evaluation, today announced an enhanced strategic partnership. Building on their established relationship, the deepened integration links Sapia.ai’s autonomous, skills-based interviewing with PageUp’s newly advanced AI functionality.   Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, and ADP, a global leader in HR and payroll solutions, today announced an expanded, strategic partnership. The partnership affirms AWS as ADP’s strategic cloud provider, enabling its continued AI transformation and ongoing innovation of generative and agentic AI solutions for its more than 1.1 million clients across 140 countries and territories.  https://hrtechfeed.com/hr-tech-partnerships-in-the-news/ And finally the CEO of Hackajob Mark Chaffey share d on Linkedin today that the company will now be known as its core product name, Archer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining me today is John Nurthen, Executive Director of Global Research at Staffing Industry Analysts. John has spent more than three decades in the staffing industry—and he has just authored a global research report titled The Digital Workforce in Recruitment 2026. In it, John maps out how digital worker agents——are moving from the fringes directly into the recruiting lifecycle. We’ll be breaking down why the future isn't about fully replacing human recruiters, the hidden risks of 'AI sprawl' and compliance liabilities, and how leaders must learn to manage a mixed workforce of employees, contractors, and algorithms.  https://www.staffingindustry.com/who-we-are/john-nurthen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this weeks episode sponsored by Dalia.co * Hibob gets infusion of cash, Recruiter.com acquires Feenyx, Staffmark's report on AI in recruiting, new features from ICIMS and Vervoe. READ ON https://hrtechfeed.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Chris Russell explores how job seekers are taking transparency into their own hands with new consumer tools like DidTheyGhostYou.com and JobScamScore.com. We break down how public ghosting leaderboards and AI scam-detection tools actually work, why they are becoming an early-warning radar for your employer brand, and the practical steps recruiters can take to protect candidate trust and optimize their ATS workflows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up: If you’ve logged into your recruitment dashboard recently and noticed your LinkedIn ad campaigns look a little different, you aren't imagining it. LinkedIn officially retired its daily and 30-day "slot" campaigns and migrated everyone over to a Pay-for-Performance—or P4P—model. Here’s what that actually means for your hiring budget: Instead of buying calendar airtime where you pay regardless of engagement, you now pick a fixed budget tier—either $299, $399, or $549. You only pay when a candidate clicks "Apply." Sounds great, right? But here’s the catch you need to know about: Your campaign ends as soon as the budget is spent, or after 30 days—whichever comes first. That means a high-demand role could burn through a $399 budget in twelve days, leaving your listing inactive for the rest of the month if you don't keep an eye on it. Plus, unused budget operates on a "use-it-or-lose-it" rule and won't roll over. Check your account settings this week to make sure your tier matches your hiring volume—and don't forget to verify your LinkedIn Company Page to keep your free organic listings flowing. Moving on to funding news: Background screening and workforce safety platform Yardstik has raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Harbert Growth Partners, bringing their total capital raised to $65 million. Why is this important? Because traditional background checks have historically been built around a single "moment in time"—the day someone gets hired. But as Yardstik points out, workforce risk changes every single day. Yardstik is using this cash to double down on fraud prevention and continuous workforce monitoring. Instead of waiting for an annual review, their system alerts employers in real-time if a worker’s driver’s license lapses, insurance expires, or a regulatory exclusion occurs. With 98% account retention and clients like Gopuff and TaskRabbit, Yardstik is proving that ongoing fraud protection isn't just a premium add-on anymore—it's becoming the standard foundation for contingent and traditional workforces alike. In product news today, we have two major updates aimed at making talent acquisition smarter and faster. First, iHire released its new Hiring Market Insights dashboard. It lets recruiters compare candidate availability directly against job demand across specific metros and skills. If you’re struggling to hire a specific role, it tells you whether it's a candidate shortage or an overcrowded job market—helping you tweak job titles and expectations before launching a campaign. Meanwhile, assessment provider eSkill introduced Linea, an AI-powered intelligence layer built right into their platform using Anthropic's Claude models. Here’s why recruiters will love it: You can drop a job description into Linea, and in seconds, it drafts a custom skill assessment pulled from eSkill's library of 70,000 validated questions. Crucially, eSkill designed Linea with a "human-in-the-loop" approach—showing the AI's reasoning for every question so recruiters stay in full control of the final test. Finally, a brand new study from financial tech firms Branch and Stripe reveals a massive shift in how people work: Gig work is officially no longer just a "side hustle." According to their Gig Workforce Index—which surveyed over 1,000 flexible workers—56% of gig workers now rely on platform work for the majority of their household income. A few eye-opening stats from the report: The Competition is Wild: 60% of workers say they have to accept a posted gig in under two minutes before someone else snatches it up. The Multi-App Hustle: Nearly half balance three or more different apps simultaneously to keep income steady. Cash Flow is King: 78% experience weekly income fluctuations, and 72% spend their earnings within 24 hours just to cover gas, groceries, and bills. The takeaway for HR and platform leaders? Fast payouts and financial management tools are no longer perk add-ons—they are the primary driver of worker retention. https://hrtechfeed.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices