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SAP.iO In San Francisco, HR & People Engagement

Immerse “Upskill Ultimatum” Research Reveals Need for Businesses to Transform Training or Risk Losing Talent

Major research conducted by global software company, Immerse, reveals that nearly 50% of US and UK employees are prepared to move companies if they don’t receive the training they need, yet HR departments are not prepared to revamp old methods for another seven years. The lack of modern training leaves the door wide open for continued departures at a time when recruiting is in emergency mode.

Immerse’s brand new research, The Upskill Ultimatum, reveals that a majority of companies plan to wait until 2028 – when tech-savvy Gen Z workers will form a large proportion of the workforce – to deploy immersive training technologies^[1] across their organization. This is despite studies which have shown the effectiveness of these technologies in boosting knowledge acquisition and retention, and despite the fact that two-thirds of HR professionals believe that companies that fail to employ cutting-edge training technologies will struggle to attract and retain top talent.

he survey of 1,000 knowledge workers and 1,000 HR professionals across a range of sectors, conducted by Immerse, show massive fractures in the current training landscape. Nearly half of HR professionals (49%) believe that today’s training deployment is inadequate for a hybrid working world. Also, businesses are feeling the effects of this “learning drought”, with half of HR professionals reporting an emerging skills gap in their organization, resulting in operational company risk.

Immerse is a virtual reality technology company that has developed the Immerse Platform which enables companies to create, scale and measure virtual reality training. Having grown license revenues by 300% last year and with a global customer base and customers such as DHL, Nestlé and bp, Immerse are leaders in using VR to maximize human performance and the employee experience.

Crosschq Secures $30M in Tiger Global Led Series A Financing To Expand and Scale AI-Powered Talent Intelligence Cloud™

Crosschq, pioneers of the Talent Intelligence Cloud™ powering a revolution in data-driven hiring and people analytics, announced today an extension to its Series A financing bringing the total round to $30 million. Led by Tiger Global, this $16.5 million expansion included returning investors GGV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, SAP.iO, rocketship.vc, and new investors including Jack Altman, current CEO of Lattice.

“Our talent landscape is changing with unprecedented velocity and the need for advancements to drive better hiring decisions has never been greater,” said Mike Fitzsimmons, Co-Founder and CEO of Crosschq. “Our Talent Acquisition and DEI leaders are hungry for reliable data and analytics to source and retain the best talent. We are proud to be emerging as the Talent Intelligence vendor of choice for this increasingly complex environment.”

Over the past year, Crosschq’s Talent Intelligence Cloud™ has rapidly been adopted by talent leaders across all core sectors. In the last month alone, users of Crosschq’s platform have nearly doubled, up by 86%. In addition to attracting major players in the Enterprise Tech, Fin-Tech, and Media industries including Snowflake, Blend, Hubspot, and Dish Networks, the company has recently expanded solutions in the Life Sciences and Health Care sectors. Adoption by new customers including Carbon Health, CityBlock Health, and Hengrui, China’s largest pharmaceutical company, reflects this growing market segment for the company.

Recruiting technology company Humanly.io raises $4.2 million in seed funding round

A technology company that uses artificial intelligence in recruiting job candidates has raised $4.2 million, including funding from two local venture capital firms.

Humanly.io is headquartered in Seattle and Sacramento, and it raised the recent seed fund from investors including Moneta Ventures of Folsom and Growth Factory Capital in Rocklin.

“We will use the money to scale up the team and the product,” co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Gardner told the Business Journal.

The company currently has 10 employees, most of whom work remotely, though the company has small offices in Seattle and Sacramento.

The funding this week was led by Zeal Capital Partners in Washington, D.C., and also included Spark Growth Ventures, Basecamp Fund and Y Combinator.

According to venture capital tracking website Crunchbase, Humanly.io has raised a total of $5.3 million since its launch in 2019.

Humanly.io uses artificial intelligence software to automate screening and scheduling of hiring for companies and recruiters. It also has a suite of software that helps recruiters and hiring managers be more efficient during job candidate interviews and virtual interviews over teleconferencing.

Paradox’s New Experience Assistant Named HR Executive Top Product of 2021

Paradox, the conversational recruiting software company helping global brands like Unilever and McDonald’s streamline the hiring process through automation with a human touch, announced its newest product, Experience Assistant, earned the top honor in HR Executive annual best HR technology solutions awards.

Experience Assistant was selected because it fundamentally transforms how candidates interact with a company — instantly turning any existing career site into a dynamic content-driven and hyper-personalized interaction on both mobile and desktop devices. While Paradox’s flagship recruiting assistant, Olivia, has built a reputation for helping global recruiting teams get work done, Experience Assistant focuses on the candidate.

“For years, the holy grail of candidate experience has been true 1:1 personalization at scale, but it’s been elusive at best,” said Aaron Matos, Paradox Founder and CEO. “We have a vision for the next-generation of consumer-grade recruiting software — and Experience Assistant builds on that vision. We don’t believe employers should be forced to overhaul their career site to create unique, dynamic experiences. Now, they don’t have to.”

Each year, HR Executive top product award recognizes the most innovative new technology solutions that are helping business leaders meet the critical HR needs of their organizations. The staff of HR Executive selects the Top HR Products each year after performing an extensive evaluation of the submissions with help from a panel of industry experts.

SAP Startup Spotlight: The Mom Project

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at The Mom Project.

The Mom Project is the leader in helping businesses attract and retain female talent. With a community of more than 500,000 talented professionals connecting to over 2,000 companies, the company is committed to building a better workplace by harnessing the oft-overlooked intellectual workplace power of moms. In this interview with founder and CEO Allison Robinson, we will explore what makes The Mom Project unique and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: How does The Mom Project work?

Allison Robinson: On top of offering $500,000 in grants as part of the Stronger Together Fund, The Mom Project created programs to support community members during their time of need as we all continue to navigate the coronavirus pandemic that sent ripple effects through every aspect of life beginning in March 2020. RALLY, for example, is a peer-to-peer mentorship program giving community members the space to solicit and offer advice. Resume Rev, a no-cost program that helps moms put their best foot forward, saw more than 15,000 resumes created and downloaded within the first 90 days. RISE, the inaugural initiative from our not-for-profit MomProject.org, launched in September 2020 to elevate 10,000 women of color over the next three years through a new upskilling model that puts moms first with scholarships to highly sought-after technology certificate programs including Google and Salesforce.

As of July 2021, there are more than 500 women enrolled in RISE via one of six certification tracks including Salesforce Administration, Google IT Support, and Google IT Automation with Python, which can be completed in as little as six weeks. In Q2 of 2021, RISE also introduced additional certification tracks such as Project Management, Data Analysis, and UX Design to further accelerate the supply of qualified leaders of color to meet demand for diverse talent by committed employers and partners of The Mom Project.

The Business of Marketing Featuring Diane Keng CEO & Founder of Breinify

In this Business of Marketing podcast we hear from Diane Keng who is the CEO & Founder of Breinify who will provide an inside look at their platform that helps enterprise brands collect data and create personalized digital experiences for their consumers and how SAP.iO was imperative to their growth.

Listen here….

SAP.iO In San Francisco, Portfolio News, HR & People Engagement, Announcements

Paradox acquires Baltimore-based Traitify to simplify recruiting process

Paradox, a recruiting software designed to make the process more conversational and personalized, has announced its acquisition of Traitify, a mobile-first digital assessment platform based in Baltimore, to simplify the recruiting process.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Paradox founder and CEO Aaron Matos expects the Traitify platform to further enable Paradox’s mission to “simplify hiring through automation with a human touch.”

“They share our passion for recruiting and our philosophy that software should make things simpler, faster and easier — not add more work,” Matos said in a statement.

Scottsdale-based Paradox was founded in 2016 after Matos observed recruiters spending way too much time managing their application tracking system (ATS), following up on emails and scheduling interviews.

Matos saw an opportunity to automate much of these tasks. This idea plagued him like a “pebble in his shoe,” which is what drove him to start Paradox. He believed software should be doing the work for us, not the other way around. He wanted to build software to help recruiters spend less time with software and more time with people. Olivia, the company’s conversational AI assistant, has been developed to make that happen.

Since then, Paradox has experienced rapid growth and has been recently ranked in the top 5% of the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. Some of Paradox’s major clients include Unilever and McDonald’s.

The company’s acquisition of Traitify is the next step in its growth strategy.

Conga Acquires Contract Wrangler

Conga, the global leader in Commercial and Revenue Operations transformation, today announced the acquisition of Contract Wrangler, a leader in applying AI and ML to understand the terms and obligations in contracts that impact revenue, risk and cost once the contract is executed. With the combination, companies of all sizes will be able to holistically manage all of their contracts, whether on the company’s or third-party paper, to manage risk while optimizing revenues.

The Use Case Podcast: Storytelling about Censia with Joanna Riley

In the Use Case Podcast, episode 114, we have storytelling about Censia with Joanna Riley. During this episode, Joanna talks about how practitioners make the business case or the use case for purchasing Censia.

Joanna is an expert in all things teams and tech. Her passion for democratizing talent information in order to help organizations hire much better talent more efficiently and lucratively really comes through during the podcast.

Listen Here…

SAP.iO In San Francisco, HR & People Engagement, Announcements

Gapsquare, a pioneer of machine learning into gender pay disparity, is acquired by XpertHR

Inequalities between women and men in the workplace have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are likely to persist in the near future, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). The World Economic Forum estimates globally it will take 267.6 years to close the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity.

So it’s even more crucial that the global gender and ethnicity pay gap be “squared away” by entrepreneurs passionate about the issue.

Gapsquare, a U.K. startup that’s been addressing this issue since 2017, has been among a handful of startups addressing these concerns via machine learning around the issue.

Its analytics software, which analyses and tracks pay disparity, pay equality and pay gap data, has now been acquired by XpertHR, a part of RELX, for an undisclosed sum. TechCrunch understands from sources that Gapsquare never raised institutional venture funding.

The Gapsquare platform — along with co-founders Dr. Zara Nanu and Ion Suruceanu — will be joining the XpertHR team. Gapsquare previously counted Vodafone, Condé Nast and Serco as clients, amounting to data from tens of thousands of employees.

Gapsquare’s model is to provide HR and Reward professionals with actionable insights about their company’s existing pay gaps.

Mentor Spaces Raises $2.5M to Bring More Diverse Talent Into the Workplace

Denver-based startup Mentor Spaces announced the closing of its $2.5 million seed funding round. The American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact led the round, with participation from several others.

Mentor Spaces launched in 2020 in order to bring more diversity into the workplace. Countless companies pledged to do better in their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts last year. But saying you’ll do something and actually doing it are two separate things. Underrepresented groups can be excluded from the workplace not because the intent to hire them isn’t there, but instead because of what Mentor Spaces calls the “network gap.”

As Mentor Spaces points out, research shows that location, education and prior employment can make a person 12x more likely to be given a certain opportunity. Because of this, marginalized groups must work much harder to secure the same opportunities as non-marginalized folks, or risk remaining on the margins.

Mentor Spaces Raises $2.5MM to Advance the Careers of Underrepresented Talent Through Mentorship

Mentor Spaces, a community-driven mentorship platform helping companies scale their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, today announced it has raised $2.5MM in a seed round of funding. The American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact(AmFam Institute) led the round, with participation from ECMC, Portfolia, Rethink Education, Service Provider Capital, and The Social Entrepreneurs’ Fund.

“As one of the largest mentorship communities for underrepresented students and professionals, funds from this round will enhance our ability to support our clients’ goals to efficiently build diverse talent pipelines through a mentorship-centered strategy,” said Chris Motley, founder and CEO, Mentor Spaces. “As a Black founder, raising institutional capital is not easy, and our team is thrilled at the positive response that the market has shown to our unique approach to solve one of the biggest challenges talent acquisition leaders face today.”

While LinkedIn’s research shows that one’s location, education, and employment can give individuals a 12-fold advantage in gaining access to opportunity, underrepresented professionals without confidence and social capital are at a significant disadvantage when pursuing new job opportunities. Many mentorship solutions in the market don’t address the key issues caused by this “network gap,” further limiting opportunities for underrepresented students and professionals. Recent studies also show that Black employees are leaving early-career jobs in droves due to the lack of support and visibility to opportunities at their organizations.

SetSail Debuts New AI-powered Solutions to Help Sales Teams Unlock More Revenue

SetSail, the AI-powered micro-incentives platform for sales, will unveiled multiple new product features on at the company’s first annual SetSail Voyage virtual conference. New SetSail features include a signal-based coaching app; smart milestone signals to help reps accelerate revenue; and data automation tailored to the way reps use their CRM.

The world of work has changed in the past year, and the ‘new normal’ requires a new way of selling,” said Haggai Levi, CEO of SetSail. “To be successful today, sales teams must embrace data, signals and storytelling. This is where SetSail comes in – providing sales teams with the information they need to take the small steps that lead to closing big deals.”

Founded in 2018 by former Google machine learning experts, SetSail uses AI to identify the buying signals needed to close a deal. The platform then converts these signals into recommendations for sales reps and presents them with micro-rewards (e.g. monetary rewards and recognitions) for following the best path of action and building good selling habits.

Crosschq Co-Founder Named to Forbes Next 1000 List

Crosschq, the pioneers of Human Intelligence Hiring™ for building diverse, winning companies, today announced that CEO and Co-Founder Michael Fitzsimmons was named to the Forbes Next 1000 list in the first class of 250 standouts.

The Forbes Next 1000 list is a first-of-its-kind initiative designed to spotlight bold and inspiring entrepreneurs on their way to great success, celebrating ambitious entrepreneurs who are redefining what it means to build and run a business today, especially in the ‘new normal.’ According to Forbes, by year’s end, the list will include 1,000 entrepreneurs that “will have a “running start to land on the cover of Forbes.” The judges include a panel of A-list leaders from every sector, from entrepreneur Ayesha Curry and National Geographic Society Chairwoman Jean Case, to LinkedIn CoFounder Reid HOffman and baseball legend Alex Rodriguez among others.

“I’m honored to be recognized by Forbes in this way,” said Fitzsimmons. “These are never individual awards. Every member of our Crosschq family, from employees, investors, advisors, customers, and partners, make these happen.”

Crosschq is committed to fundamentally leveling the playing field for job seekers by enabling companies to go beyond the resume and look at the full picture of a job candidate when making a hiring decision. Crosschq already helps more than 100 companies of all sizes screen, source and hire the best talent through our digital and automated reference checks.

Verusen raises $8 million to reconcile supply chain data using AI

Atlanta, Georgia-based Verusen, a startup leveraging AI to build a connected supply chain, today raised $8 million in a series A round co-led by Forte Ventures and Flyover Capital. The company says it will put the funds toward R&D as it expands the size of its workforce.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report anticipated that companies would have to address the implications of their supply chains in regions affected by the coronavirus. For instance, they might have to secure future air transportation as supply and capacity become available or buy ahead to procure much-needed inventory and raw materials.