Jobvite’s had a busy month. They’ve launched a new suite of products, a partnership with Charthop, and began to operate as a single business with sister companies JazzHR and NXTThing RPO. The new business’s name: Employ. It has more than 12,000 customers and 1,200 partners, hosts 1.2 million open jobs and manages more than 270 million candidates.
Today we’re joined by Jobvite’s CEO, Peter Clare. We’re going to talk about consolidating three businesses into one, the impact on product development and customers, and what some of its new capabilities are all about. All of that, on this edition of PeopleTech.
Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer.
Mark:
Jobvite’s had a busy month. They’ve launched a new suite of products, a partnership with Chart Hub, and began to operate as a single business with sister companies JazzHR, and NXTThing RPO. The new business’s name? Employ. It has more than 12,000 customers and 1200 partners, posts 1.2 million open jobs, and manages more than 270 million candidates.
Mark:
Today we’re joined by Jobvite CEO Peter Clare. We’re going to talk about consolidating three businesses into one, the impact on product development and customers, and what some of its new capabilities are all about. All of that, on this edition of People Tech.
Mark:
Peter, thanks for joining me today. The news came out, I think last week. Jobvite, JazzHR, and NXTThing RPO are going to start to operate as a single company. What’s that mean for the business, and also, what’s it mean for your customers?
Peter:
Yeah, that’s a great question. We started, around 2019 Jobvite partnered up with K1 Investment Management. We set a vision to become the premier talent acquisition solution in the market. Our goal was to address recruiting. Talent acquisition only. But to do so in a very broad and deep way. In many ways, we had two announcements in the last two weeks, that are the culmination of that effort that began in 2019.
Peter:
I look at it as, we got to the starting line. There was an awful lot of work to get to the starting line. But what it means ultimately, is that the company now, on a broader basis, is known as Employ. Employ is the provider of Jobvite, JazzHR, and NXTThing RPO.
Peter:
Our viewpoint is that that creates an unrivaled solution set to bring to the market as Employ. Where we’ve got JazzHR, which is purpose built for SMBs. It’s priced for SMBs. Its functional sophistication is there for SMBs. Its support model. They do an exceptional job of it. Jobvite, purpose built for medium to large size enterprises, to cover everything from talent attraction, engagement, all the way through the hiring processes. Then given what we’ve seen in the labor markets, NXTThing RPO provides full cycle hiring services, for companies that just need the problem solved.
Peter:
Our ability to manage from the smallest companies to the largest companies, and provide both the solutions and the services in support of that, we believe is unmatched.
Peter:
From a Jobvite perspective, each of those business units is going to run independently. Our go to markets are different for different types of solutions that we provide, and for different markets. As a Jobvite customer, there’s not that much that’s changing. Other than, as a broader organization, we now have more resources to pour into our product development. We have more opportunities to share technologies, share service delivery options, and bring things to market faster for our customers.
Mark:
Okay. How do you see the companies working together now?
Peter:
At this point, the companies are working together really, really effectively in a shared services model. If you think about, what are the common things that are going to be in shared services? HR, finance, where we obviously get the economies of scale. But also seeing really interesting opportunities emerging now in our partnerships, and how we go to market in a very partner friendly way, given the breadth and depth of our overall scope. We’ve got over 12,000 customers, which obviously is something that is interesting for the partner ecosystem out there.
Peter:
We’ve consolidated the partnership area of the business, to make it easier for partners to work effectively with us, and bring their solutions to our customer base. We’ve also got some strategic alignment, as it relates to sharing product capabilities, and transferring customers between business units where it’s appropriate.
Peter:
You’ll often see, a really successful JazzHR customer graduates to becoming a Jobvite customer. Similarly, you might see a Jobvite customer that needs more services and more hiring help, if they’re opening a new division or a new company. Or a new facility or location, where they can take advantage of the NXTThing services. That shared cross sell, upsell motion, as well as shared partnerships, are really the biggest intersecting point, followed by product capabilities that we can offer one another.
Mark:
Okay. Now obviously you make a move like this because you see benefits to it. You touched on this just now, but I’d like to ask the question separately. What do you think the benefits are going to be, both for the business and for your customers?
Peter:
I think any time you think about it from a business perspective, our ability to segment and really focus via the multi-brand, multi-business unit structure, the benefit is that we can get in really close, and not try and be all things to everyone. In our operating themes, and our go to market, and our sales, and our service, and support.
Peter:
The benefits to our customers as we scale up the organization, is obviously the increased investment. The increased knowledge base. The increased internal abilities to get ahead of where the market’s going. We’re seeing that with what Jobvite’s done in particular, over the last three years, since we acquired Talemetry, RolePoint, and Canvas, and brought those to market last week, in the EVOLVE Talent Acquisitions.
Mark:
I have to imagine that this is going to change methodologies and your roadmaps. Is that correct?
Peter:
Well here’s what I would say. Jobvite in 2019 started focusing our efforts on larger mid-market and enterprise companies, and purpose built our roadmap for that. There’s no change relative to that, other than, again as we’re seeing success, we have the ability to accelerate the roadmap.
Peter:
But what we’re finding is, not only are we able to accelerate it just based on the business growing, and being able to increase investment levels. But we’re also seeing, there’s technologies that JazzHR has, or technologies that Jobvite has, that rather than having to build from scratch, we’re able to share with each other from a shared services perspective.
Peter:
What I’m trying to articulate is, I don’t see there’s a change to the roadmap. I see that there’s opportunities to accelerate what’s already on the roadmap. JazzHR never aspired to be serving mid-market and enterprise customers. I think Jobvite grew out of the SMB market several years ago, and has really been focused on climbing upstream, versus meeting those needs of the SMB.
Mark:
Will this change the way you approach customers and partners, for that matter? Or are you going to be [crosstalk 00:07:30]-
Peter:
Partners, definitely. We have, as I’ve mentioned, there’s over 12,000 customers in the combined organization. We are going to partners as Employ, representative of the much bigger opportunity than our three business units had on their own. But as it relates to the go to markets for customers, again we just believe in the expertise that we have in JazzHR for SMB, the expertise that we have in Jobvite for mid-market and enterprise, and the expertise and services at NXTThing RPO.
Peter:
We don’t see that there’s a tremendous amount of synergy of how you would go after a services deal, versus how you would go after an enterprise software deal, versus how you’d go after an SMB deal. I say deal, but the same thing in terms of how you implement, how you support, the language that you speak in, and in many cases who you’re working with on the customer side.
Mark:
Shifting gears a little bit, last week you launched the EVOLVE Talent Acquisition suite. What’s that all about, and how do you think it positions Jobvite?
Peter:
When I think about how it positions the Jobvite team in particular, it really is the culmination of three years of effort. To create from RolePoint, Canvas, Talemetry, and Jobvite, a unified suite. We spent the last three years taking stock of everything from talent attraction, to engagement, to hiring. We looked at it from the perspective of, what does the end suite look like, with all of the data flowing together? How do we build from the ground up, based on the expertise and the products that we acquired, a unified platform?
Peter:
One of the things that we thought was important is, particularly as you get into enterprise accounts, is that you can’t necessarily buy everything at once. Keeping a modularized approach was really important to us, so that we’d be able to meet customers where they are. Instead of saying, “Look, you’ve got to buy the suite, and that’s all that we offer.”
Peter:
We think that this is a game changer in the talent acquisition space, because you have, I think it’s Madeline Morano’s stack, but there’s 11 different technologies in the tech stack for most TA departments. How are you supposed to change your strategy on a dime, when something like the pandemic hits, or when we have these historical labor shortages, when you have to work through 11 different vendors? I think Jobvite is uniquely positioned to be able to replace all 11 of those vendors. But our go to market is such that you don’t have to do it all at once, and you can deploy the strategy that makes sense for where you are as an organization, and help you to grow into a highly optimized talent acquisition machine.
Mark:
Shifting gears a little bit once again. We’re obviously in the middle of a really weird market. You have a talent shortage. The way of getting work done, doing business is changing. How is that impacting your business?
Peter:
I think what we’re seeing, is that talent acquisition practitioners and providers are just overwhelmed in general. It’s never been this difficult. We’ve seen, Mark, you’ve been around for a long time, I’ve been around for a long time. We’ve seen, in the early 2000s, engineering hiring where they’re sending Roles-Royces to pick people up at the airport. Now, recruiters are the most in demand talent available. There’s this unprecedented amount of pressure on talent acquisition.
Peter:
What we’re starting to see is, at first it was this getting overwhelmed. Now we’re starting to see TA leaders really step up inside of their organizations. They’re finding their voice. They’re able to start to think about driving the business strategy, from a talent acquisition perspective, in a way that we’ve all been talking about a transition needing to occur, for 20 years. I think this is starting to really happen, and I think it’s really exciting.
Peter:
As a guy that has spent the last 21 years building technology and services for recruiters, I think it’s a really exciting time. But you’re right, it’s absolutely unprecedented. As a vendor in this space, we certainly feel the pressure that these folks are under. It’s really awesome, seeing some of the great leaders emerging, even within our customer base. Just changing the direction of talent acquisition inside of organizations.
Mark:
Now with all of this as background, I mean all of this, what kinds of things are you working on for release over the next two or three years?
Peter:
I think when we think about where we’re at today, we think we have the most comprehensive solution. From everything, as I said, from attracting, engaging, and then working through the hiring process. Managing key operations. We have the depth to compete on a CRM or recruitment marketing only deal, against those point solution providers. Or on an ATS only deal, against those providers.
Peter:
But we also now have the foundation for being able to deliver targeted solutions, to accelerate results. When we think about what’s next for us, there’s not an additional segment that we need to go create. We don’t need to go do video interview. We have video interview. We don’t need to build AI matching, we have that. Our focus over the next three years is going to be on killer use cases within the platform.
Peter:
How do you completely optimize and automate as much as you possibly can, where it doesn’t require recruiter intervention? To make it seamless and easy for the candidates, for the hiring managers, and most importantly for the recruiters.
Mark:
Well Peter, thanks very much for taking the time today.
Peter:
You bet.
Mark:
My guest today has been Peter Clare, the CEO of Jobvite, and this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. To keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
Image: Jobvite
