Compensation platform Payscale is acquiring Datapeople, an AI-powered recruiting platform, the company announced on Sept. 16.
Payscale executives say they hope Datapeople’s features will help talent acquisition (TA) and recruiting professionals think more strategically about compensation in their job postings, and remain compliant with pay transparency laws taking effect across the world.
Bridging the gap between compensation and talent. Datapeople, which launched in 2015, helps compensation and talent professionals write and edit job descriptions that integrate with their applicant tracking systems. The software also has a feature that monitors compliance with pay transparency laws, and flags any job postings that are missing salary information.
Its compliance capabilities were of particular interest to Payscale, as they align with how the company thinks about pay transparency and compensation strategy, explained Peh Keong Teh, chief product officer.
As employers seek to comply with laws that require them to post salary ranges for open roles, Payscale sees an opportunity for compensation, recruiting, and TA teams to be more aligned, Teh said. He described the “typical process” for pay transparency currently as being “manual and disconnected,” with hiring managers drafting a job description before it’s reviewed by the compensation team to benchmark the role and determine salary ranges.
Integrating these two processes into one workflow should “drive much better standardization, compliance,” and ultimately help organizations fulfill their pay transparency and pay equity goals, he predicted.
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Driven by a belief that pay transparency “starts at the very beginning” of the hiring process, Payscale hopes integrating Datapeople into its platform will allow “the hiring manager, the TA person, to make sure that the postings they’re putting out are as compliant as possible,” said Payscale CEO Chris Hays.
Tapping into TA. Over the next four months, Payscale will integrate Datapeople’s products into its portfolio, Teh said.
While Payscale’s typical customers currently work in the total rewards space, Hays said the company hopes this acquisition will strengthen its value for TA professionals and hiring managers. Eventually the company may monetize certain functions geared toward these customers, but such discussions are still in development, Hays said.
As compensation becomes more complex, vendors like Payscale are turning to AI to help HR pros make better pay decisions. In a statement regarding new AI solutions that the company rolled out in May, Hays spoke to the critical role data plays in helping HR and business leaders “make decisions about any job, anytime, anywhere.”
It seems Datapeople’s tools help Payscale expand on this vision, as the startup provides analytics based on more than 100 million job posts and candidate outcomes. This capability, Hays said, is “very attractive to us from a data asset perspective.”