RecFest LIVE: Mark Chaffey, CEO of Archer

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

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