Eightfold AI Raises $220M Series E Funding Round Led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2

by Recruiting SoftwareVenture Capital

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Eightfold AI today announced that it has raised a $220M Series E funding round. The funds will be used to continue the rapid growth and development of Eightfold’s AI-powered Talent Intelligence Platform and expand its growing partner ecosystem. Work is changing and the workforce is evolving, forcing organizations to become future-ready today. The need for personalized reskilling and upskilling programs has become one of the most critical issues facing the global workforce today, and Eightfold AI is uniquely capable of solving this issue at a global scale. 

Current HR systems have failed to keep up with the pace of innovation needed to support forward-leaning businesses. The only way to solve this at scale is by building a deep understanding of all talent: the roles and skills of every employee, candidate, contractor and citizen, as demonstrated by Eightfold AI’s unique Talent Intelligence Platform. 

This Series E funding round is led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2* and also includes investors from previous rounds, including General Catalyst, Capital One Ventures, Foundation Capital, IVP and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Total funding raised to date by Eightfold AI is more than $410M, with more than $350M coming in the last several months.

“Current HR systems were designed to address issues from a previous era, and they have failed to keep pace with the changing nature of work and the workforce. At Eightfold, we have an unprecedented opportunity, using AI to align the career goals of individuals while simultaneously creating better results for employers,” said Ashutosh Garg, Founder & CEO at Eightfold. “Transforming HR and global talent further unlocks trillions of dollars worth of human potential. SoftBank shares our bold vision, and we are excited to welcome them as our partner.”

Since the announcement of Eightfold AI’s Series D funding round in October of 2020, the valuation of the organization has more than doubled. This is a direct result of the significant momentum achieved by customers and partners in the public and private sector. The innovation delivered through a single Talent Intelligence Platform is the foundation for leading global organizations as they prepare for the acceleration of changes in jobs, demand of evolving skills demand and other post-pandemic shifts in the workforce. 

“Powered by AI and machine learning, Eightfold’s platform provides global enterprises with a single solution for managing the entire talent lifecycle, including hiring, retaining, and growing a diverse global workforce,” said Deep Nishar, Senior Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We are pleased to partner with Ashutosh and the Eightfold team to support their ambition of transforming how enterprises manage talent and how people build their careers.” 

Learn more about the technology revolution across the HR space during Cultivate 2021, the Eightfold Talent Summit. Registration is now open for the August 10-11 event. 

About Eightfold AI

Eightfold AI® delivers the Talent Intelligence Platform™, the most effective way for organizations to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI’s deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.eightfold.ai.  

*As of the date of this press release, SoftBank Group Corp. has made capital contributions to allow investments by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 (“SVF 2”) in certain portfolio companies. The information included herein is made for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy limited partnership interests in any fund, including SVF 2. SVF 2 has yet to have an external close, and any potential third-party investors shall receive additional information related to any SVF 2 investments prior to closing.

eTeki Appoints CEO & Cofounder in Strategic Talent Tech Platform Expansion

by People News

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eTeki welcomes Hans Bukow, a San Francisco based innovator and technology category co-creator, as Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. During his expansive career, Hans co-created $3+ Billion software centric technology categories including Professional Project Work Marketplaces-Exchanges, Vendor Management Systems (VMS) and Manufacturing Execution Software (MES).

Mr. Bukow’s appointment comes as eTeki moves rapidly to expand its global interviews-as-a-service platform to meet the demand of hiring in a post COVID world. “I’m thrilled to lead eTeki’s excellent team during this rapidly changing world facing a new future of hiring and remote work. As an interviewing tool and global talent marketplace combo, eTeki’s uniquely positioned to help companies scale and optimize technical hiring.” said Hans Bukow, eTeki CEO. 

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As an entrepreneurial veteran of the technology industry, his significant past successes include: Founder/CTO of FASTech (#22 Inc 500) which became Applied Materials Global Services, VP of Product at WorldPlay which sold to AOL to be their Games Channel with EA, and Founder of eWork Exchange’s cloned company eWork Group (EU-Nordics) now worth nearly $2B post IPO, see (EWRK:SS). Hans was last CEO and largest shareholder of Provade VMS which sold to SmartERP in 2018. 

Mr. Bukow has also advised and invested in many other innovative companies with global expansion ambitions including Gustav, a sourcing platform for the recruiting industry. Hans is recognized across industries as a thought leader on the on-demand gig economy and marketplaces together with the work-from-anywhere global future-of-work.

About: eTeki, where the world goes to qualify talent, supplies hiring teams with interviews-as-a-service to scale and optimize technical hiring. Our expert talent pool has sellers in 100 countries representing every role and tech stack. Through eTeki onboarding sellers become certified interviewers. Buyers get an extensive, shareable candidate report and video in 24 hours or less. Full and self service options available. Save time, save money, and reduce bad hires with the most advanced technical interviewing platform. More online at www.eTeki.com

The Eightfold Talent Intelligence Suite is Now Available on the Greenhouse Hiring Cloud Platform

by Partnerships

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.– Eightfold AI, the provider of the Talent Intelligence Platform™, today announced its integration partnership with Greenhouse, the hiring software company, and availability of the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Suite for all Greenhouse customers. Powered by the largest global talent data set, the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Suite delivers a competitive edge in hiring and managing a diverse, qualified contingent and full-time workforce.

“Our partnership with Greenhouse is critical to the advancement of our mission to provide the right career to everyone in the world,” said Ashutosh Garg, Founder and CEO of Eightfold AI. “We’re working closely with Greenhouse to help companies understand each candidate’s capabilities and skills in order to create concrete, future orientation talent strategies.”

Eightfold AI and Greenhouse users will immediately benefit from the ability to:

  • Fill roles faster with candidates who will deliver and succeed within established budgets

  • Deliver a candidate experience that attracts a talented labor pool

  • Lift diversity hiring strategies using Equal Opportunity Algorithms to ensure every recommendation uses only relevant data, and never uses factors such as age, race, gender, or disability status.

  • Improve recruiting with transparency and trust

  • Deploy a single AI-powered source-to-offer solution

Grounded in Equal Opportunity Algorithms, the Talent Intelligence Platform uses deep-learning AI to help each person understand their career potential, and each enterprise understand the potential of their workforce. Eightfold customers report substantial benefits throughout their talent processes, including 100 percent increase in recruiter efficiency, 35 percent faster time-to-fill, 60 percent higher qualified candidate volume, 88 percent more employee referrals, and more.

“To attract and hire top performers, companies must be aligned on the importance of hiring and commit to a talent strategy that prioritizes both new candidates and their existing talent pool,” said Jon Stross, President and Co-founder, Greenhouse. “Partners like Eightfold AI share our passion for structured, repeatable and scalable hiring processes and the role they play to help companies create a competitive advantage through their candidate experience.” 

Join Eightfold, Greenhouse, Proactive Talent and Noom on June 8 to hear Jon Stross and Ligia Zamora, Chief Marketing Officer of Eightfold AI, discuss how to hire for potential using deep learning. Register for Open Forum: Building Belonging on June 16 to learn more about how to create an inclusive hiring experience in a hybrid working world.   

Greenhouse.io users can learn more about Eightfold AI and schedule a demo here. To learn more about the Greenhouse Partner Hiring Cloud visit greenhouse.io/integrations.

About Eightfold AI
Eightfold AI® delivers the Talent Intelligence Platform™, the most effective way for organizations to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI’s patented, deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.eightfold.ai.

Eightfold.ai® delivers the Talent Intelligence Platform™, the most effective way for organizations to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold.ai’s deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. Eightfold’s AI-powered platform integrates readily with Greenhouse, and is used by Greenhouse customers worldwide. Eightfold customers are seeing substantial benefits to their talent acquisition processes, including 100 percent increase in recruiter efficiency, 35 percent faster time-to-fill, 60 percent higher qualified candidate volume, 88 percent more employee referrals, and more. With Eightfold, customers are also boosting their DE&I strategies. Eightfold’s Equal Opportunity Algorithms ensure that every recommendation provided by the AI is unbiased. Features including Anonymous Screening and Diversity Analytics support the fairness goals of your organization.

About Greenhouse:
Greenhouse is the hiring software company. We help businesses become great at hiring through our powerful hiring approach, complete suite of software and services, Hiring MaturityTM methodology and large partner ecosystem – so businesses can hire for what’s next.

Based in New York City with offices in San Francisco, Denver and Dublin, Greenhouse Software has over 4,500 customers. Some of the smartest and most successful companies like HubSpot, Buzzfeed, J.D. Power, Booking.com, Scout24 and Warby Parker use the Greenhouse hiring software platform to improve all aspects of hiring, helping them to attract top talent.

Greenhouse has won numerous awards including Inc. Magazine Best Workplace (2018 – 2021) and Glassdoor #1 Best Place to Work, Forbes Cloud 100, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Inc. 5000, Crain’s Fast 50.

© 2021, Greenhouse Software, Inc. All rights reserved. “Greenhouse Hiring Maturity”, “Talent Makers”, and the G Logo are trademarks of Greenhouse Software, Inc.

SOURCE Eightfold AI

Cadient Talent Unveils New Machine Learning Technology to Redefine How Companies Find and Hire Hourly Workers

by Hourly WorkersHuman Resources Software

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MORRISVILLE, N.C. – Cadient Talent, a human resources software company, today revealed its latest technology, which infuses machine learning and augmented intelligence (AI) to help organizations identify and hire employees more efficiently and increase quality of hire. Cadient Decision PointTM is a recommendation engine that works with any applicant tracking system (ATS) to instantly analyze all applicants and present hiring managers with a short list of top candidates from which to choose. 

Thanks to data-driven analytics, which is the foundation of Decision Point, the review of job candidates that used to take hiring managers days to do, and for some candidates was not done at all, can now be accomplished in a more effective manner in a matter of seconds.

Managers are busier than ever, especially those whose workers are paid by the hour, and hiring is just one of their many responsibilities. Hourly employees often leave with little or no notice, and open positions need to be filled quickly. Availability becomes the top selection criteria rather than company fit. As a result, managers make uninformed decisions, new hires don’t stay as long, and the process starts all over again. This cycle can cost companies up to $4,800 to replace each hourly employee.

Decision Point uses combined machine learning and AI with data analytics to identify candidates, without human emotion or bias, who are most likely to succeed and stay with the company longer. Once they receive the recommendations, managers can focus on the top candidates to fill the position. 

“Decision Point allows managers to begin the hiring process a step ahead of the competition with tested, data-driven analytics,” said Jim Buchanan, chief executive officer of Cadient Talent. “This solution uses machine learning algorithms that are created for a specific business to deliver better hires who will stay longer, perform better and have a greater positive financial impact on their company.”

By using machine learning and AI, Decision Point identifies the characteristics of a company’s top-performing employees and applies that learning to the hiring process to find candidates most likely to succeed.  

Decision Point is unlike other solutions using AI for recruitment process automation. Those solutions learn to automate the way employers have previously hired. For companies with high employee turnover, that automation allows hiring managers to keep making poor decisions but at an accelerated pace. Decision Point helps automate the recruitment process but also challenges the way hiring decisions have previously been made. The real differentiator in Decision Point is that recommendations are based on candidates who actually became quality hires, not just automating a process that has and will continue to provide suboptimal results.   

The result? More quality hires, reduced turnover, decreased operating costs, increased revenue, mitigated bias in the hiring process, and a workforce with greater diversity and inclusion. 

Based on extended trial programs, Decision Point is already helping companies make better hiring decisions. For example, a business services firm currently applying Decision Point expects to see significantly improved employee tenure using Decision Point. The firm stands to save tens of millions of dollars annually because of reduced turnover alone. That does not include the benefit of increased revenue due to enhanced customer experience due to a more experienced workforce. 

“For the past 15 years, we have collected data from large companies and have analyzed applicants and new hires and benchmarked key characteristics that are most likely to predict success,” said Stuart Nisbet, chief data scientist for Cadient Talent. “Decision Point uses the intelligence it gathers and applies metrics to identify which candidates have a greater potential to be high performing based on this historical data.”

About Cadient Talent

Cadient Talent is a leading end-to-end talent acquisition software solution built specifically for the needs of high-volume, hourly hiring industries such as retail, restaurants, hospitality and healthcare. This intuitive and flexible platform provides managers with a constant pipeline of quality candidates. Cadient Talent reduces variation and human error, resulting in faster, better hiring and a more productive workforce by streamlining hiring workforces. For more information, visit www.cadienttalent.com. 

The Happiness Report: 1 in 4 Workers Are Less Satisfied With Their Job Than One Year Ago

by Assessment Tools

While pandemic-induced uncertainty takes its toll on America’s workforce, there is much HR can do to make employees happier.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

BALTIMORE — Traitify, a human insight platform for enterprise HR departments, today announces the release of The Happiness Report, a detailed look at the satisfaction and wellbeing of America’s high-volume workforce. While a plurality of respondents maintain a constant level of happiness in their current roles, more than a quarter are less happy in their job than they were before the pandemic began. The Happiness Report examines what HR practices, managerial interventions and benefits most impact employee happiness and serves as a guide to HR professionals managing high-volume workforces in common jobs (ie. those roles represented by numerous employees in the company such as a cashier, medical assistant, cargo loader or custodian).

“A majority of our lives are spent at work, and through the pandemic we are all working in extreme circumstances,” said Dr. Heather Myers, Traitify’s chief psychology officer. “When we think about COVID as it relates to work, we think about our physical safety, but workers also have a focus on practical needs such as job security and income being met. Psychological safety is just as important as physical safety for our high-volume workforces, and shouldn’t just be a focus for office workers.”

Traitify surveyed 1,103 workers of common jobs across the United States. Findings demonstrated the breadth of repercussions the pandemic had and continues to have across high-volume industries as diverse as retail, hospitality, logistics, healthcare and more.

Key results from the report include:

A plurality of employees didn’t experience a change in happiness, but more than a quarter are less happy than one year ago

  • While nearly half of respondents (48.15%) indicated they were “about [as happy] as [they were] before”, more than 1 in 4 (26.8%) suffered a drop in satisfaction — a considerably greater percentage of respondents than those that experienced a happiness increase (18.2%).

In a year of uncertainty, job security is sought after

  • Nearly the same number (66.4% of respondents) selected job security as a top-three factor in determining their happiness with a job as those who selected “How much I am paid” (66.7% of respondents).

Most employees think their employers responded well to the pandemic

  • When asked to rate how well their employer responded to the challenges of the pandemic, respondents’ mean response was 71 on a scale from 1 to 100. Notably, the most frequent response, provided by 9.3% of workers, was the maximum value of 100.

Around half of job seekers rank communication and easy-to-use apply experiences as priorities when applying for jobs 

  • Half of survey-takers (49.23%) cite updates as something they’d like while applying for a job. Similar numbers point to easy job-search (52.67%) and job-application (50.14%) experiences.

“Now more than ever, a focus on helping people find their happiness is of the utmost importance. Traitify does this by tapping into the power of human insight to bring actionable understanding of job fit and employee development to employees and employers,” said Traitify CEO Dan Sines. “Employee benefits are too often focused on salaried workers like those who have been able to telecommute throughout the pandemic, but high-volume workforces (recently considered essential) also find value in them. HR should look for creative ways to bring things like flexibility, additional compensation opportunities, and paid time off to all parts of their workforce.”

The data suggests that employers should focus on trust-building tactics with candidates and employees. This includes communication of clear COVID protocols, transparency from managers and the establishment of meaningful connections between managers and employees.

Survey Methodology
Traitify partnered with an independent research firm to survey 1,103 US-based respondents ages 18 and up in December 2020. 

To learn more, visit https://hubs.li/H0N594-0 and download the full report.

About Traitify: 
Founded in 2011, Baltimore-based Traitify is a human insight platform that uses patented mobile-first, visual-based assessment formats to unlock the potential of high-volume workforces. Their product solutions deliver the fastest insights in the industry, allowing HR to optimize the talent experience from attraction through employment. Traitify’s current customers include more than 1,000 organizations in a range of industries. The Traitify team is made up of technology-industry veterans with experience in software, design and multimedia as well as an in-house psychology team. For more information visit www.traitify.com.

Media Contact:
Joel Weyrauch
BLASTmedia for Traitify
317.806.1900 ext. 117
Joel@BLASTmedia.com