WorkTech

Bullhorn is the clear market leader for staffing tech. CEO and Founder Art Papas has been at the helm for 24 years. He’s led the company from its startup roots in South Boston to a global staffing industry powerhouse with offices and team members on several continents. In the early 2000s, when Bullhorn had just a handful of customers, Art was known to say “All roads lead to Bullhorn.” Seems like he’s paved the way for that to sound more like an observation of current staffing tech adoption than the goal it was back in the day.

Art stopped by WorkTech to check in with Founder George LaRocque on the state of staffing and staffing tech, and to chime in on some of the trends George has been noticing in the market. The result, a conversation that quickly ties the past, present, and future of staffing and staffing tech. LaRocque sees tech-forward staffing firms tying into employer’s Work Tech stacks while providing a high level of service. Papas sees a relationship-driven industry that requires humans in the loop.

In this conversation, you’ll learn about Bullhorn’s culture, leadership, and strategic view of the market and the trends that are shaping it.

UK-based Gigged.AI announced a $1.95 million Seed Round led by Par Equity, bringing its total raised to $2.93 million. CEO and co-Founder Rich Wilson discussed the round and Gigged.AI’s product with George LaRocque. In this interview you’ll learn:

• What’s happening in the market and internally at Gigged.AI that made this the right timing for its Seed Round.

Economist Andrew Flowers of Recruitonomics (https://recruitonomics.com) addresses the questions on everyone's minds:

VensureHR CEO Alex Campos and PrismHR CEO Gary Noke discuss the merger of their firms and the subsequent merger with Namely, with WorkTech Founder George LaRocque. While the merger wasn’t kept secret, you’ll probably find the breadth, scope, and scale of the resulting entity a surprise. PrismHR is the leading back-office technology that powers the Professional Employer Organization (PEO) industry. In the same way that it powers the PEO industry, it powers the VensureHR family of PEOs, and now with Namely in the mix they provide a path for employers growing out of the PEO model. They do this in a modular fashion, providing the ultimate flexibility for customers.

In this interview, you’ll learn the following: 

• Why the merger happened now? 

Harri CMO Jennifer Ravalli introduced their Hospitality industry-focused employee experience platform with WorkTech Founder George LaRocque. When you’re in the hospitality industry, you know that what others view as back-office HR functions like shift scheduling, time and attendance, and communications are a core part of the employee experience for front-line workers. When hospitality front-line workers have a better employee experience, consumers have a better customer experience.

Jennifer and George discuss:

• How Harri was born out of the hospitality industry

Hiring and talent assessments have largely seen incremental innovation from the days of filling bubbles on paper with number 2 pencils to web and then mobile interfaces. While the experience became digital, it is essentially the same as it was. Traitify set out to change that when it took assessments to a visual format using pictures and a user experience that candidates can easily engage wit. Their mission was “to make assessments fun, enjoyable, and offer some reciprocity to the employee or candidate.” These aren’t terms we usually hear about the assessment experience. This visual experience, supported by rigorous behavioral science validity studies and user testing, has been a success. The Traitify assessments have been taken more than 20 million times with a completion rate higher than 96%. Its visual and mobile native format was attractive to Paradox, the enterprise recruiting conversational AI platform, which acquired the firm in 2021.

After the Paradox acquisition, Traitify didn’t stop innovating the assessment experience. In fact, well before conversations about that started they had set out to make the experience even more fun and engaging while adding an added goal of making the process more inclusive with rigorous validation studies to ensure neutrality across gender, race, and age. Earlier this year, Paradox introduced their customers and the market to Ash, an animated assessment avatar.

The Traitify team stopped by WorkTech to discuss Traitify’s journey of innovating assessments, Ash’s launch, and how it’s been received by customers. Have a look at Ash in the video version of this podcast.

In this interview you’ll learn:

• what sparked Traitify to bring assessments into the visual realm

Look at the latest data on the independent workforce, aka the contingent workforce, with WorkTech founder George LaRocque. An already rising trend, its adoption has been accelerated by COVID like so many things.

• About half of the US workforce is currently or has worked as an independent.

This episode's interview is with Shahar Erez, CEO of Stoke Talent. George and Shahar dig in on the trends and opportunities for today's business leaders related to this trend.