Radancy, the global talent technology leader, is pleased to announce its plans to acquire Firstbird, a global leader in SaaS based employee referral programs. Based in Vienna, Austria, Firstbird offers a comprehensive software solution to digitize and streamline the employee referral process. The acquisition of Firstbird is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, including certain regulatory approvals.

This strategic acquisition combines Firstbird’s innovative referral technology with Radancy’s unified talent acquisition platform. Together, they will provide global clients with enhanced touchpoints along the entire candidate journey, connecting people to careers and companies with qualified candidates to solve their most critical talent acquisition challenges.

“From the first meeting I knew Firstbird checked every box for us. The people, the technology and the opportunity to expand Radancy’s reach within the DACH market made this a perfect match,” said Michelle Abbey, President and CEO of Radancy. “I’m excited to integrate their technology into our global unified platform and continue to transform talent acquisition for our customers.”

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arisian collaborative learning platform 360Learning has acquired Looop for $20 million in a mix of cash and shares. 360Learning received a strong vote of confidence last October when it announced a $200 million investment round co-led by Sumeru, SoftBank, and Silver Lake Waterman, and M&A activities were specifically mentioned. The Looop acquisition marks a first for the company, with presumably more announcements in the future.

Having had a front-row seat to the damage that substandard learning and development programmes can have on business, staff morale, and productivity, in 2014 Ben Muzzell and Dan Gray set out to build a better mousetrap. Employing a series of automations, Looop is a learning management system that eschews the repetitive manual work from the process, resulting in an embedded process that allows teams to create resources with as much, or as little, content as desired, sourced from any input, and delivered when needed.

In doing so, that mousetrap has struck a chord, as Looop reports consistently achieving outstanding satisfaction ratings on eLearning platforms including Capterra (4.9/5), G2 (4.9/5), and eLearning Industry (97%), and has become the defacto L&D provider to companies including Klarna, Monzo, Cazoo, and ASOS. If the credentials don’t already speak for themselves, Looop reports an annual growth rate of 100%, all while being cash flow positive.

From 360Learning’s perspective, the acquisition couldn’t happen at a better time. As the effects of the pandemic continue to play out, companies around the globe are beginning to see the Great Resignation kicking into gear and are pumping huge amounts of capital into talent retention, least of which, learning and development programmes. How much capital? According to Market and Markets, over the next four years, corporate spending on L&D will surge from the $15.8 billion seen in 2021 to a robust $37.9 billion by 2026.

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This week 360Learning, a fast-growing collaborative learning company, received an astounding $200 Million of investment. Only a few years ago this would have been incomprehensible, but now it makes sense. This is a company that has unlocked the Creator Economy in corporate training, and the impact could be massive. Let me try to explain.

The corporate training market is huge: over $260 Billion is spent on employee skills each year. Companies train front-line workers, nurses, drivers, and other essential workers and simultaneously spend millions of dollars on technology skills, professional skills, and more. Compliance and safety training itself is more than a $20 Billion industry and programs for leaders and executives often cost tens of thousands of dollars per person.

Corporate training has been built around the paradigm of teaching. Instructional designers and consultants build courses or programs; they package them into online or workshop formats; then they deliver and sell them to others. It’s very similar to the “publishing model” used in books. It takes months to build a course, then people consume it (or buy it) for many years to come.

The problem, of course, is that this model is slow. The content gets out of date, media standards keep changing (TikTok is the newest paradigm), and employees need up-to-date content. So while billions of dollars are spent on packaged content, much of it never gets used. (We’ve looked at the utility of packaged courseware and it turns out almost 80% of licensed content is never used.  In fact our research with large companies found that internally developed content is up to six times more valuable than off-the-shelf published content.)

There are ways of making published content valuable. In our academy (The Josh Bersin Academy) we “always surprise the learner,” by creating programs that always change from page to page. We use a cohort-based design so people learn from their peers. And we use exciting videos and other entertainment pieces to keep people excited.

But despite all these good ideas, more than 70% of all corporate training is developed internally, and these publishing models don’t keep up. Witness the fall in Coursera’s stock over the last few months, as buyers and investors realize so much of that content isn’t as useful as we thought.

Well thanks to innovators like 360Learning, this is all about to change. And that’s why the company is growing so fast.

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