Alongside its Q4 and annual results, Workday announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire HiredScore. Founded in 2012 by Athena Karp, HiredScore leverages the power of data science and machine learning. This delivers deep hiring efficiencies, enhances talent mobility, and helps organizations adapt for the future of work.
What is HiredScore
Karp has built a firm using responsible AI, safe automation, and deep integrations, notably to Workday, Oracle and SAP HR applications. In October last year, it achieved Workday Certified Integration status for its Talent Orchestration Solutions.
The solution helps companies create a fully explainable, unbiased and global candidate scoring for internal and external applicants. The solution will help surface passive talent and qualified internal applicants for new job opportunities. It will visualize diversity slate and hiring goal alignment, and provide diverse talent job qualification calibration. In combination with Workday Talent Management and Workday Skills Cloud, it will increase screening efficiency by 70%.
Carl Eschenbach, CEO Workday, commented, “People are at the heart of every organization, and investing in new and innovative ways to unlock the potential of talent is more important than ever. HiredScore is the perfect complement to our product portfolio as we look to provide AI solutions that deliver real business value for our customers. The combination of our AI technologies that keep humans at the center, along with a deep understanding of the workforce landscape, will help organizations thrive and move forever forward.”
Athena Karp, Founder and CEO HiredScore, said, “We’ve only just begun to see the opportunities of what is possible with responsible AI in the workforce and how organizations can use it more efficiently and effectively to deliver on HR transformation goals related to recruiting and employee experiences. By combining our efforts and innovations with Workday, we’ll be able to deliver even more value to companies around the world as they look to build their future HR function.”
Why the acquisition matters to enterprises
Enterprises are facing greater talent challenges. The World Economic Forum estimates that 23% of jobs are expected to change by 2027. With 69 million new jobs created and 83 million eliminated. These changes are triggered by the introduction of new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, that will change how people work in the future.
With every likely organisation impacted, enterprises must consider how they can retain staff and corporate knowledge whilst retraining and transferring people from their internal talent pool to these new roles. The cycle of job losses and hiring is costly. And any technology solution that will assist organisations to avoid that is welcome. What the combination of the Workday Skills Cloud and Talent management with HiredScore will enable organisations to do, is achieve the evolution of the workforce without a revolution.
Already closely integrated, the combination of solutions can only improve in the future. Workday calls out the key benefits of the solutions, noting:
Solve Recruiting Challenges ethically and in a compliant way
Both companies are committed to responsible AI and keeping humans at the centre of decision-making. The joint offering will provide an explainable and trustworthy way for customers to match, hire, and manage talent from across their talent ecosystem.
Better Manage the Talent Lifecycle
With Workday and HiredScore, HR leaders will have a holistic view of and ability to manage the talent lifecycle. The solution will better enable recruiters to use data to connect talent to open opportunities in an unbiased way. It will assist with identifying candidates whose skills and experience most closely match a customer’s open jobs, accelerating screening using data-driven insights. It will also identify passive candidates, both internal and external.
Improve Internal Mobility
Research by M Andresen et al. (2020) noted that “IWE (Internal Work Experience) is positively related to subjective financial success and promotions. The combination helps this by enabling employees to better identify and prepare for opportunities.
Elevate the Recruiter and Hiring Manager Experience
Recruiting and selection can be a long process. The addition of HiredScore into the Workday platform will reduce the workload of hiring managers and recruiters and also ensure that their processes are automated, compliant and ethically conducted.
Workday expects the transaction to be completed by April 30, 2024, during the first quarter of its fiscal 2025. The deal is subject to closing conditions and regulatory approval. Terms were not disclosed but may be available at some level in the accounts once the deal is completed.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a good acquisition for Workday. With HiredScore already integrated into the Workday platform, it should not present much of a technology challenge to bring the organisation on board. It may also be defensive, especially if Oracle or SAP were also interested in acquiring the company.
There are, however, several unanswered questions about the acquisition. What is Karp doing next? She is a leading voice for ethical and responsible AI. Karp has worked with national, international governmental and NGO task forces. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers. Her background is as an investor, and it is not easy to see her fitting in with Workday. However, her expertise in AI would have huge value to the company as an advocate.
Secondly, what is the roadmap, both technical and from a brand point of view, for HiredScore? Will it be subsumed into Workday as a module or continue to run as a business unit maintaining the integrations with Oracle, SAP and other applications it integrates with?
Thirdly, what about customers? How will this impact them? Will the pricing change? If they are Workday customers, what will that mean? Existing HiredScore customers include Sentara, Dell, GM, Brown-Forman, Lam Research, Pruitt Health, Vanderlande and Southwest.
