Ten-year-old US-based jobs listing and review platform Glassdoor has been acquired by Japanese HR giant Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion – one of the biggest acquisitions in this space. The Tokyo-based firm has been on an acquisitive spree recently, having bought jobs site Indeed in 2012, and Simply Hired in 2016.
Glassdoor, which shot to fame as a platform where employees and former employees could anonymously share their workplace experience and review companies, has 59 million active monthly users and data on more than 770,000 companies across 190 countries.
Post-acquisition, the company that is popularly referred to as the “TripAdvisor for Employment’ will retain its independence, with Recruit Holdings promising to keep it a “distinct and separate part” of its HR technology business segment. Analysts view it as a valuable addition to Recruit’s portfolio as Glassdoor has 40 per cent of Fortune 500 companies as its customers. Also, its revenue has been growing 30 per cent year on year.
Talent crunch
Everyone keeps talking about vanishing jobs. Now, a new report ‘The Global Talent Crunch Study’ by Korn Ferry presents the other side of the picture.
By 2030, demand for skilled workers will outstrip supply and there will be a global talent shortage of over 85.2 million people, it says.
The financial impact of this talent shortage could be as much as $8.452 trillion in unrealised annual revenue by 2030. However, India is the only economy among the 20 countries studied that has a talent surplus, forecast to have an excess of 245.3 million workers by 2030. In terms of highly skilled talent or what the report terms as Level A talent, India will have a surplus of 1.3 million workers.
By contrast, China will feel the talent shortage most acutely, predicts the report.
Blockchain block
Only 0.25 per cent of India’s estimated two million software developers are equipped to work on blockchain platforms, says a research report by Belong, a predictive hiring solutions company. At present, only 5,000 developers in the country have all the skills (data science, algorithms and cryptography) to work on blockchain platforms, it says, though there is potential to train 10,000 developers quickly as they have experience in the fintech industry. According to Belong, ITES is the top recruiter of blockchain talent at 60 per cent with financial services lagging behind at 3 per cent.
Bengaluru emerged as the top hub for Blockchain Developer talent followed by NCR Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai.
A bot at the front desk
The scene-stealer at the recently concluded fourth SHRM HRTech conference in Hyderabad was Mitra the bot developed by Bangalore-based robotics firm Invento. Taking the stage to announce the first speaker at the event, the bot showed off some of its touted capabilities, including that of an emcee. Amit Tripathi, head of delivery at Invento Robotics, also pitched the bot’s facial recognition capabilities and a conversation engine as an ideal receptionist.Great idea, but what if its programmed responses cannot answer some of the questions it is asked?
Benefits with bottlenecks
It’s standard practice for companies to offer benefits to their employees to help them save tax. Yet, a study by Zeta India, a fintech startup working on employee benefits, released at the conference, found there are huge pain points in claiming reimbursements. For starters, 94 per cent of the 194 companies it surveyed had a paper-based process. Seventy-one per cent companies took over eight days to process a claim. There was also some mismatch in what employees wanted as reimbursements and what companies were giving them. The least popular tax benefits were meals and gifts while the most popular were communication (mobile and broadband bills), fuel, LTA and gadgets. It found that 35 per cent of companies had discontinued one or more reimbursements due to high employee opt-out. They preferred to get higher salaries in hand. Clearly, a lot of bottlenecks need to be addressed to make claims easier.