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HR Brew

Talent Acquisition

Adam DeRose

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HCM and enterprise software giant SAP plans to acquire the hiring platform SmartRecruiters.

Execs told reporters on a media call that the move would bolster SAP’s all-in-one suite with additional capabilities. The company announced the acquisition on Aug. 1.

“Bringing in talent isn’t just an HR priority, it’s a business priority,” SAP SuccessFactors Chief Product Officer Dan Beck said on the call. “SmartRecruiters has a robust portfolio with advanced capabilities [that] allows us to move more quickly to serve our customers.”

He pointed to SmartRecruiters’s AI expertise in candidate sourcing and screening, its rich sources of recruiting data that can help SAP further people intelligence for strategic workforce planning, and its robust end-to-end workflows that can help SAP deliver a better candidate experience, as well as a better experience for talent pros.

“Recruiters and hiring managers have really grown to love the brand and the product,” SmartRecruiters CEO Rebecca Carr said. “They’re using it every day in the flow of work, and it’s become not just a module or a bolt on, but really a system that is designed for hiring across all stakeholders in the hiring process.”

Beck said he expects the platform’s AI capabilities and data will help SAP better and more quickly serve its customers amid this moment of rapid technological transformation.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The move is still subject to regulatory approval, which Beck told reporters he expected in the last quarter of this year. The acquisition won’t change up the recruitment workflow for SAP or SmartRecruiters customers just yet. SmartRecruiters will remain an “agnostic vendor” for the “foreseeable future,” according to Carr.

“Whether you’re a SmartRecruiter customer or an SAP customer or both, we’re going to be able to create good value for you, and hopefully not a lot of complexity,” she said.

SAP to acquire SmartRecruiters to bolster its HCM suite and recruitment data

SAP execs say it reflects the increasing business value of successful talent management.

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

Have you ever tried to get close with someone but you just couldn’t click? For HR leaders, does your chief information officer immediately come to mind?

 for leading AI adoption, and the two being siloed can spell bad news for their company. As an example, recent Gartner research found that 

 CIOs focus on mitigating negative impacts to employee work or wellbeing when making generative AI investments.

, surveying more than 1,000 HR leaders and 500 CIOs at companies with 1,000 or more employees globally, found CHROs and CIOs aren’t seeing eye-to-eye with talent acquisition’s role.

HR leaders recognize tech’s growing role in talent acquisition (TA) strategy. A majority of CHROs (85%) say the TA tech used “is more of a priority today than it was two years ago.” And 22% said integrating AI into hiring processes was their single top priority for talent acquisition, while 20% said improving TA analytics and reporting was at the top of their list. Already, 60% of HR leaders say they’re using AI across the entire hiring process.

For their part, a significant majority (90%) of CIOs believe that a close relationship between HR and IT is essential for recruiting top talent.

Having a close partnership with the CIO has a myriad of benefits, said Laura Coccaro, iCIMS’ chief people officer, including allowing HR teams to be more innovative with AI and tech investments, and ensuring that these initiatives truly have an impact across the whole organization.

“It just helps accelerate that adoption curve for TA teams, for HR teams that are looking to leverage the technology,” she added. “Bridging that gap and having that partnership, and really figuring out the way to find the strategic value in leveraging AI, for example, is a huge step in the right direction. And you can’t, you shouldn’t, be doing that in isolation. It’s important to be thinking holistically and with your exec peers on that front.”

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of CIOs say they’re already working closely with HR on talent acquisition technology. But they pointed out several roadbumps that they’re running into with their HR peers, including strategic disconnects, limited budgets and resources, and lacking a shared understanding about tech capabilities. Some 42% of CIOs reported also running into pushback to change from HR.

“There’s still this perception, and in particular, a perception from the CIOs within their organizations about the delivery and the impact that those talent acquisition organizations are having,” Coccaro said.

In iCIMS’ report last year, 90% of HR leaders anticipated talent acquisition roles shifting to becoming 

. Today, 88% say they are “actively driving strategic change within their organizations.” Yet there’s a disconnect from how the rest of the organization values TA.

Just one-third of HR leaders, for instance, say their organization views talent acquisition as a strategic function, and the rest view it as a support function or simply as a transaction process. With CIOs specifically, only 27% believe TA has a “significant impact on business outcomes,” while the majority think it has only moderate or minimal impact.

That perception of how CIOs view TA is “telling,” Coccaro said. “We’ve got some ways to go in terms of how we continue to elevate the strategic view of that function based on what we saw and heard from the CIOs.”

It’s even more important that HR leaders ensure that they are building and improving that partnership with IT, particularly as they try to alleviate the administrative burdens that prevent their TA teams from serving in more strategic capacities. And, the issue will only get more pressing: 53% of CHROs, for example, are spending more time on TA than they were two years ago, and 70% expect hiring to increase in 2025 from last year.

“There’s so much opportunity for us to bridge that gap across from our talent function to our CIO function,” Coccaro said. “They need to be in lockstep today in the environment that we’re operating in. With AI coming to the forefront, making decisions around technology [and] how we’re using it, they need to have that mutual, strategic seat at the table.”

Disagreements over talent acquisition are hurting the CHRO-CIO relationship

HR leaders still have a long way to go to convince peers in IT of their strategic value.

The CHRO-CIO partnership is more important than ever but disagreements over talent acquisition are getting in the way

Hiring software company Greenhouse announced a new feature this week that allows job seekers to identify and signal that a job opening is their top choice.

Dream Job, the feature Greenhouse announced Thursday, gives applicants the ability to select one job per month as their “dream job” and the platform will share that information with the employer, offering a new data point for recruiters to consider when looking to fill open roles.

“Everybody's falling into an AI doom loop, where, for really logical reasons and sensible things, each person’s optimizing locally, and it’s creating a really bad thing,” Greenhouse cofounder and president Jon Stross told HR Brew, pointing to AI assists with writing job descriptions, candidates optimizing cover letters and resumes with AI, and the AI tools recruiters use to match and grade those applications. “It just feels like noise…The whole system kind of breaks down for everyone.”

Many recruiters are addressing these current top-of-funnel issues by relying more on referrals and outbound recruiting, according to Stross, because recruiters are looking to different signals in order to help organize their workflow amid all the noise.

“It’s not that those 1000 applicants are unqualified,” he said. “There’s wonderful folks in there. It’s just really hard to tell apart.”

The Dream Job feature can help sort that pile with a new limiting signal: This is the job a candidate wants most. It’s a concept borrowed from other high-volume selection problems—like college admissions and dating apps.

“You had an opaque or friction-filled process,” Stross said of applying for college before the Internet era. “I had to use a typewriter to apply to colleges. I’d write different essays for every school—so I applied to three schools.”

After the college admissions non-profit Common App grew in popularity and its application became accessible online, a similar volume problem occurred for colleges and universities.

“You fill out your information once, and you hit 25 check boxes. You’ve just applied to 25 schools. So in some sense, it solves the problem, because it made it easier to apply,” Stross said. “But what it really did is it just created this huge inundation of applications…As an applicant, or somebody trying to go to college, it’s tremendously stressful, because you have to apply to all these places and all the rejection rates are really high.”

It made the situation worse for schools, too. Stross said to address the volume issue, colleges and universities turned to a different constraint: early decision. Applicants could still apply to those 25 schools, but it’s only possible to apply for an early decision from one university, and if an applicant is accepted to that school, they agree to enroll.

“What schools figured out is, we would love to have a class of people who truly want to be here. It takes away all of the uncertainty for them that they’re going to accept people [and] they’re not going to come,” he said. “They realized that the intent signal is as valuable as the grade point average in SAT scores.”

Stross also pointed to a similar problem arc in the dating landscape. Finding a romantic partner out in the wild was hard. Meeting folks in bars and through friends was challenging and time consuming. Dating apps helped increase candidate pool for dates, but this new system also introduced a challenge for users looking to assess if someone was swiping right because dating is a numbers game or if they’re swiping right because they too enjoy hiking, cats, and cuddling up on the couch on Friday nights watching trashy TV.

Enter Tinder’s Super Like, SuperSwipes on Bumble, and Roses on Hinge. This new signal tells users this person isn’t just swiping right but is

. So far, the Super Like has not aided me in finding love, but there’s always tomorrow.

“When folks use those, they tend to match at a higher rate,” Stross said, suggesting that the same principle can apply to jobs.

Dream Job submissions, according to Greenhouse, are already moving faster through hiring pipelines. Dream Job applicants see application review after about six days, compared to 19 days for standard applicants.

For candidates, it’s a chance to improve the odds in a crowded field, but for recruiters it can provide new insights about fit. Who doesn’t want someone working for their company that really wants to be there? Greenhouse’s new Dream Job feature is available for free for applicants who sign up for a MyGreenhouse account when they apply to jobs.

More than 300,000 candidates have signed up for MyGreenhouse since its April launch, and more than 10,000 jobs have been identified as a Dream Job, according to the company.

In addition to the monthly Dream Job signal, MyGreenhouse users have access to quick apply, which allows them to input their information once and then use auto-fill to apply for job openings across all Greenhouse customers. Job alerts allow users to subscribe to companies they want to work for, and the system flags openings that might match their profile. MyGreenhouse users also have access to additional information about the status of their applications, Strauss said.

“We’re trying to generate more and more signals beyond what’s on the resume. That’s more about, what do they want? What’s their ideal job? What are their deal breakers, things like that that we think only helps both sides,” he said.

drawing of a stick figure thinking about his dream job

What do college admissions counselors, dating app users, and recruiters all have in common?

They can make more informed decisions about choosing people by using intent signals.

It's a tough hiring environment these days. Many businesses have slowed or paused hiring amid economic uncertainty. So, any employer increasing its hiring volume is like a magnet for job-seekers.

That’s the case for Progressive. The insurance giant recently announced plans to hire more than 12,000 employees for 2025, up from 10,000 new hires last year. Additionally, the company’s talent acquisition team expects to receive hundreds of thousands of applications this year, Progressive’s business leader of talent acquisition, Neil Lenane, tells HR Brew. Lenane shared how the company plans to manage that volume of résumés while supporting the business’s growth.

Much of Progressive’s growth stems from booming business. Last year, Progressive added more than 5 million policies while net premiums collected grew by 21% to $74.4 billion. On top of that, the company has already added 1.3 million policies in the first quarter of 2025.

The largest bucket of new hires this year, around 5,000, will account for this growth, Lenane said. The remainder will be to fill vacancies created by internal promotions which Progressive must hire externally for, and lastly, to fill attrition.

Most of the roles Progressive will hire for involve claims and contact center roles—50% of the company’s workforce is in claims.

“[We’re] always making sure that we have folks to be able to handle claims and or to replace the folks who have moved into trainers and leadership and all those things,” Lenane said.

They’re bulking up their legal team as well. “Lawyers is a big focus this year again as we get more policy holders, more claims, you need more lawyers to be able to represent our insurance when they're in accidents,” Lenane said.

At a time when many hiring teams are getting flooded with 

, any employer growing its ranks can expect a tsunami. Progressive receives an average of 800,000 applications annually, and Lenane said volume for roles that typically don’t attract much interest has spiked. For example, a recent opening for a digital and communication manager role netted 178 applications when historically it would not have received more than 30, according to Lenane.

“I’m not struggling to find people. Where you’re always challenged is to find the right folks based on the skillset and people who are going to thrive in a very inclusive culture,” he said.

But it’s not just actively hiring during a recruitment slowdown that’s attracting talent to Progressive. The insurance company has an advantage over some of its competitors, as it has established a remote or hybrid-friendly policy for most roles including in claims, customer care, IT, analyst, legal, and corporate functions, while competitors like 

 have implemented return-to-office mandates. And, as firms in other professions that Progressive employs, such as tech, implement strict RTO mandates, that will drive talent its way as well.

“The more companies that are dialing back remote, hybrid work, the more those people tend to be in my hiring pools,” Lenane said.

To accommodate the rapidly growing number of job applicants, Lenane’s team is leveraging AI.

With recruitment, AI is used to forecast growth expectations and shape hiring strategy, source candidates, and cut down recruiters’ workloads.

“I get 800,000 applicants. I can’t talk to every single one of them,” Lenane said. As a result, Progressive has adopted asynchronous interviews, allowing candidates to answer questions sent to them over video at their own convenience. AI is used to help hiring teams understand how that individual would succeed in that role, though a recruiter ultimately makes the decision on who to move forward with.

“AI is enhancing our ability to make decisions and solve problems,” Lenane said. “But at the end of the day, the humans are driving the bus.”

As AI speeds up the hiring process, Lenane’s team must be mindful about candidate experience. Around one in every four candidates are current or prospective Progressive customers, he notes, and poor experiences can turn away future business—especially if people air out their frustrations online.

“We’re moving a lot faster through the process because we’re leveraging technology. So that changes people’s expectations,” Lenane said.

Lenane’s team has increased focus on providing candidates with feedback, such as suggesting how they can improve their interview conduct, or recommending other roles they are better suited for.

“We’re able to have a little bit more of those types of interactions…because some of the systems are helping them do some of the back end admin work,” Lenane said.

People waiting on line for interviews. (Credit: Tom Merton/Getty Images)

Inside Progressive’s plans to hire more than 12,000 employees in 2025

Thanks to booming business, Progressive has increased its hiring forecast again.

Progressive’s head of TA goes in-depth on insurance giant’s plans to hire more than 12,000 new employees in 2025

Anyone who has applied for a job in the last year knows the easiest way to get started is to toss a job description and your résumé into ChatGPT and ask the digital Shakespeare to pen three to four paragraphs with your accomplishments as its muse and then fire off the application in a matter of minutes. Not sure if TA pros would suggest that strategy, but it is definitely one that applicants have adopted since the OpenAI platform changed the game.

AI—a tool prized for tackling repetitive work and making mundane tasks easier—might actually be making one aspect of talent acquisition (TA) more difficult for pros, as the technology is making it easier for everyone—not just the qualified, but also the "hey why not" crowd—to submit applications.

 from LinkedIn, which surveyed more than 22,000 consumer respondents and more than 8,000 global HR professionals in Q4 of last year, HR pros are spending more time sifting through résumés and applications. Some 22% report spending between three to five hours on the task daily, and almost three-quarters said that fewer than one-half of the reviewed applications meet all of the criteria on the job posting.

“It’s hard for everyone right now,” said LinkedIn’s own VP of global TA, Erin Scruggs. “There’s this not so virtuous cycle where applicants aren’t hearing back [and] hirers aren’t finding the right quality.”

The tools that applicants are using to fire off a volume of applications is creating a logjam at the front of the hiring process, leading to some alternative strategies by TA pros to find the right talent.

She said recruiters are now turning to “passive” sourcing on LinkedIn in order to find a smaller group with potential “versus the 100,000 people” that apply. “It’s figuring out where you want your teams to spend their time, whether it’s sourcing or reviewing applicants. And so then the applicant has to do something different than just clicking the button to apply and making sure that their application goes in.”

Everyone in the process still has leg work to do. 

According to Scruggs, applicants should focus their efforts on roles that they’re actually qualified to apply for—for instance LinkedIn’s new tool to assess if a member is a good match based for an open role, she added. Applicants should also focus on strategic networking with connected company employees or fellow college alums who now work there.

“It’s about understanding what you’re qualified to do, and then instead of clicking the button, it’s how you use the power of the network—that hasn’t changed—to make sure that you’re having the right conversations to become a better candidate,” she said.

A well-written cover letter isn’t enough to set one candidate apart from the thousands of others to find the gems, but TA pros can be on the lookout for the candidates that go the extra mile in today’s AI-powered world of work such as networking and brand affinity.

TA pros and recruiters also have work to do, including better pointing 

 towards tackling parts of the hiring process the technology is currently best equipped for: transcribing notes from calls with hiring managers, developing interview guides, recording and transcribing candidate interviews, 

“There’s a lot of ways that we can use it where we’re not worried about bias or anything like that creeping in,” Scruggs said. “It’s solving a ton of different problems. When you talk about the needle in a haystack problem…it’s great at the passive sourcing of helping identify proactively… I don’t think we’ve necessarily cracked the nut on what does it do for applicant volume.”

 about candidate selection or assessment and 

 into the hiring process. Though, AI tools can help with passive sourcing and firm up a recruiter’s talent networks, according to Scruggs.

“There’s all these things that we’re doing that we’re using AI to be faster and smarter. It’s just not to make a yes-no decision on a candidate,” she said.

Wait. Is AI making TA more challenging?

64% of HR pros say finding qualified talent has become more difficult in the last year.

To Twill founder and CEO Michelle Volberg, instead of improving the recruiting landscape, ChatGPT and the salvo of generative-AI powered tools are actually making it more difficult for recruiters to find the right candidates and make the best hiring decisions.

Tools like ChatGPT can help candidates tailor their résumés and cover letters to individual job descriptions, taking résumé embellishment to the next level.

“AI has made it really difficult for both candidates and hiring managers,” she said. “[Recruiters are] historically used to getting 1,000 bad résumés and having to spend hours to find one great one, sometimes never finding one at all. Now they’re getting 1,000 perfect résumés, thinking that they’re good, reviewing 20 résumés, interviewing 10, hiring one. And the person that shows up for the job is someone completely different.”

The phenomenon, Volberg contends, means the hiring process is more difficult and takes longer for TA. And it’s harder for qualified and right-fit candidates to stand out in a sea of pristine résumés. So she’s channeling her experience in executive search and boutique recruitment and shipping new recruiting technology that leverages the networks and relationships of working tech professionals with her referral platform for tech professionals, Twill.

Founded in February, 2024, Twill turns its members into vetted lead generators for tech companies to improve their hiring in engineering, sales, product, marketing, and ops. On Monday, the platform announced a $1.4M in pre-seed funding round.

The funding round was led by Bloomberg Beta, with participation from Vitalize VC, Correlation Ventures, and Purpose Built Ventures.

Twill boasts of an invite-only community of experienced tech professionals and their networks to recommend qualified candidates for open roles inside the platform. Volberg told HR Brew the company was focused on recruiting diverse members, “because the diversity in members directly correlates the diversity in referrals.”

This approach ensures hiring managers receive pre-vetted, tenured candidates personally vouched for by industry experts. The recommended candidate is screened by Twill before being sent out to the recruiting team.

Twill members split the contingent search fees with Twill 50-50. Members can earn between $5,000–25,000 per placement, and TA pros can fill open roles with the right talent quickly, typically in 30 days or less, according to Volberg.

Volberg told HR Brew her background and experience in executive search inspired the idea for the platform. What started as a sales placement firm morphed beyond its original scope because clients kept asking for help filling technical roles, and so she tapped into the networks of technical professionals.

“I had actual engineers from Google and Meta and Amazon just recommending their friends on the side from their W2 job,” she said, “And they were really good at it. Engineers knew really great engineers, PMs knew great PMs and so forth.”

Twill, which is currently in a private beta testing phase and specific for technical roles for startups and tech companies, will launch publicly in Q1 of next year. Volberg said the company plans to build out the platform and grow its team with the funding support from Bloomberg Beta and others.

Wooden blocks with silhouettes depicting a network

New referral technology aims to help tech recruiters find vetted talent

Twill platform finds support from Bloomberg Beta and others in pre-seed funding.

Have you jetted off to any far-flung destinations recently? Even if you haven’t, your recruiting strategy may be headed overseas.

Recently published data from ADP suggests that more companies plan to grow their workforces internationally. The findings are based on a survey of more than 1,700 business owners, senior HR or payroll leaders, or decision makers conducted earlier this year.

Some 32% of mid-sized companies employing 50 to 1,000 workers in the US plan to expand their workforce globally, and 36% of large companies with 1,000 or more employees in the US plan to do the same. Currently, 75% of mid-sized and 46% of large companies surveyed by ADP do not have workers outside of the US.

Several factors may be driving companies to hire internationally, Jason Delserro, ADP’s chief talent acquisition officer, told HR Brew. The primary reason, he said, is that as more US companies expand operations into foreign countries, they need boots on the ground to support their growing business. And quite a few companies are doing that; 56% of US businesses reported considering expanding into other countries earlier this year, 

“Companies need to grow,” Delserro said. “A lot of the times you expand and you have to increase your geographic footprint, so you have to have people that are on the ground.”

But there are also other factors at play, Delserro noted. Talent in other countries may be cheaper to recruit than in the US. In recent years, US companies including 

 have outsourced corporate roles to foreign countries. In 2023, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom 

 that 10%–20% of service support jobs, including software developer, HR, and payroll, could be outsourced over the next decade.

Moreover, advancements in remote work and collaboration tools have made it easier to hire abroad, he added. Separate research from the World Economic Forum 

 that the number of digital jobs that can be performed anywhere in the world is expected to grow from 73 million in 2024 to 92 million by 2030.

 Just as a long-planned vacation can go completely off the rails, hiring abroad may have obstacles that HR teams aren’t prepared for.

ADP’s survey uncovered discrepancies in anticipated and actual challenges experienced by companies hiring internationally. For example, the four most common challenges anticipated by large employers were navigating cultural differences (chosen by 44% of respondents), equality of compensation across a global workforce (34%), retaining employees (32%), and performance reviews and appraisals (32%). But similarly sized employers that have hired globally said the top issues they actually ran into were addressing compensation equality (34%), recruiting and talent acquisition (27%), global alignment of systems (27%), and varying HR policies by region (27%). While compensation equality was correctly anticipated, other compliance issues were seemingly overlooked by large employers ahead of expansion.

The two key missteps likely at the core of employers’ expansion headaches, Delserro said, are lacking a strong grasp of the culture in the country they’re hiring in, and not being fully prepared for the complexities of navigating local compliance and regulatory laws.

“For companies that haven’t expanded, they probably don't understand the level of customization that you actually need,” he said.

Before hiring in another country, HR teams should ensure they’re fully prepared by budgeting for higher-than-expected labor costs, as these can vary widely from country to country.

“It’s important to invest and get the infrastructure set before ‘Go.’ A lot of the times, companies will run behind it and try to fill the airplane with the gas as it’s flying, whereas they probably should have filled it when they were still on the runway,” Delserro said. “Maybe just take a little bit more time to expand, be set up for their clients and the talent they’re trying to attract.”

 for attracting talent, but the branding that a company uses in its home community may not work in another, Delserro cautioned. HR teams should be mindful of local cultures to ensure their organization’s brand and image fit in and resonate with job seekers. He suggested companies consider enlisting the help of a recruiting outsourcing provider that has experience hiring in these new areas.

“All companies considering an expansion should really be packing their arsenal with at least the idea that they should leverage an RPO [recruiting process outsourcing],” Delserro said. “You can tap into and partner with international RPOs that actually already have had the presence on the ground in some of these countries, and have already worked through a lot of the legislation, compliance concerns, and regulations.”

Illustrated tabletop world globe with pins marked on various locations.

ADP research: More employers eye recruiting outside of the US

A third of mid-sized and large companies plan to start hiring non-US workers. But jumping into international hiring prematurely can be like trying “to fill the airplane with the gas as it’s flying.”