What we’re hearing:
- In a big marriage particularly for the talent-management/human resources world, Saba is buying Halogen. The first is known for learning management, the latter for performance management.
- WayUp, a college recruiting site, is buying Looksharp, a company in a similar field. WayUp first took notice of Looksharp due to its strong placement on Google when people did college-related job searches.
- I’ve been talking to one of the familiar faces in talent-acquisition, Tom Janz, about an interesting startup he’s working on, Plenarium. In case you don’t know Janz, he’s a big name in behavioral interviewing, and an author of a book on the topic. Plenarium aims to make interviewing more objective through “semantic analysis” to automate the analysis of text in an interview … or, other kinds of text. (If you’ve ever administered a survey, and then had an open-ended question for “other comments,” and then had to wade through those comments, you know what I’m talking about.) Deloitte is trying it out not for talent acquisition but in deciding which customers to go after based on the text of proposals. Plenarium is working on partnerships with Harqen, WePow, and eTeki. It’s talking to a large financial company, a large cable company, and a large industrial company. As an example, the industrial company might use Plenarium to analyze comments in performance reviews – such as comments by managers about employees, or the reverse – to see patterns, rather than having to have people comb through thousands of words of reviews to get a read on what people think of a manager or employee.
- Relink says it has “increased its seed funding to $1 million.” It’ll go toward customer acquisition and R&D.