Some good news! There have been reports of record-breaking investment in the recruitment tech (or “WorkTech”) sector in the second half of 2022.
However, some serious questions do have to be asked if recruiters, HR professionals and, indeed, clients and candidates are to benefit from this raft of money spilling into our neck of the human capital world.
If we’re all facing a potential recession, and many critical sectors face crippling staff shortages whilst simultaneously battling rising prices and inflationary pressure on basic goods and services…where is all this investment going?
Is this investment being used to target the pain points in existing recruitment methodologies, or are there new fields of recruitment tech solutions being created?
The state of the recruitment tech union.
Looking at the numbers, recruitment tech investment does indeed seem geared towards specific sectors. However, some topline stats:
- “Recruitment and HR technology VC investment neared $5 billion in the second quarter of 2022…(putting) 2022 on course to even or break the record-breaking year of 2021”.
- “Global HR technology venture capital investment outperformed the rest of the market through the first half of 2022”.
- “More than half (54%) of start-up businesses who have secured private equity or venture capital funding in the past 12 months invested capital in tech recruitment”.
Considering the fallout in overall tech staff numbers in the latter parts of Q1 and over Q2 – typified by the layoffs in some of the world’s now-most recognisable tech firms like Netflix, Microsoft and Meta – the continued good health of HR and recruitment tech can be seen as something of an outlier event in the VC world.
So where is the investment going?
Looking further into the WorkTech report quoted above, investment is focused on three distinct sectors:
- HCM – “the HCM sector amassed a total nearing $2.175 billion”.
- Talent Acquisition – “Talent acquisition’s market share amassed $1.2 billion”.
- Talent Management – “Talent management $1.1 billion”.
HCM, or Human Capital Management is the unique array of processes, strategies and tools that business leaders utilise to improve employee performance, and the recruitment and retention of effective staff. In theory and practice, it’s basically how leaders build effective working environments to get the very best out of their teams.
In effect, HCM is like the “360 recruitment” of recruitment operations: it’s an entirely holistic approach to creating a certain type of recruitment and HR culture, built around getting the most out of its people.
And in our modern, digitally transformed post-pandemic working world, HCM is supported by, indeed entirely built upon, recruitment tech.
So where should UK companies, looking to invest in recruitment tech, put their money?
Rectec have pioneered the world’s first Recruitment Tech Marketplace to expressly deal with this question – when considering the wealth of technical solution available to recruiters, agencies and HR teams, having a simple place in which to access complementary recruitment tech providers cuts out hundreds of wasted hours aimlessly scouring search engines and demos looking for the right fit.
We most certainly don’t advocate blindly following investor trends without research. For business leaders in the UK considering building a new and improved recruitment tech stack, our advice would be there’s no better place to start than following the money…
AI.
- “Nearly 67% of HR professionals believe that AI has many benefits and a positive impact on the recruitment process”. Here at Rectec, we’ve always believed AI is only as effective as the human wielding it, but it cannot be ignored that AI recruitment functionality will vastly improve service time, and delivery of recruitment services, across the board.
Social Media Recruiting.
- The complete dominance of social media for data, audience connection and reach means our increasingly digital lives offer a unique access point for recruiters and HR teams to leverage opportunities. From automated job ads and targeted online spending to integrated social media applicant tracking system plug-ins, we’re at the “Wild West” stage of social media recruitment strategy building, and the money is piling into the sector.
Web3.
- Blockchain and decentralised ledgers will completely change how we create and access data and recruitment will stand to benefit from the rise of Web3 in everything from smart contracts to metaversal working environments and more.
It’s natural to be cynical about recruitment tech changing the industry uniformly for the good. After all, effective recruitment is built upon trusted relationships between people, not programmes or ledgers.
But savvy investment of time and money into recruitment tech is worthwhile, and you’d be following in the footsteps of almost three-quarters of UK employers – “67% of companies…invested more (in 2021, and)…in 2022, that number is expected to increase to 73%”.
A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.
At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.
You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.