On the morning of Monday, November 4 Symphony Talent the recruitment marketing services and technology firm formerly known as Hodes announced its acquisition of Smashfly Technologies, recruitment marketing and CRM platform for large enterprise employers. That afternoon Symphony CEO Roopesh Nair joined Madeline Laurano of Aptitude Research and George LaRocque of HRWins in the Talent Product Plays (TPP) Facebook group to discuss the deal. That conversation is now available to you here on HRWins.
Smashfly had been rumored to be on the market for many months. Their sale was no surprise, but it’s always interesting to dig in a little and understand why the deal happened and what may be in store for customers and forthcoming product development.
From HRWins perspective, this deal makes sense. Symphony has been becoming more and more of a technology player for recruitment marketing and the acquisition of Smashfly brings complimentary capabilities and customers. The Smashfly platform started as a stand alone application for job ad distribution in the early 2000s. It has since extended in a very modular fashion across the recruitment marketing tech landscape. This sort of modular expansion is normal for tech vendors that “grow into” a market opportunity as it defines itself, but it brings along challenging issues related to portability/integration of data across modules which has a direct relation to scale for customers. Smashfly’s automation/conversational capabilities were also added in a modular fashion, a “white labeled” implementation of Olivia by Paradox. Symphony Talent, on the other hand, has completely re-architected its CRM, Internal Mobility, Programmatic media, Employer Branding, and candidate experience offerings into one code stack relatively recently. Along with a fresh new, scalable architecture comes a fresher user and candidate experience. All tech platforms have weak points or gaps, and in this case the strengths of both product offerings seem to compliment each other. From a pure technology perspective, Roopesh reported in the TPP Facebook thread that the core technologies are well suited for integration, based on Symphony’s architecture and design.
Roopesh goes on, in the interview to outline a very patient timeline for product integration that should have current customers of both products feeling good about short term gains of complimentary capabilities, and “no rush” for long term integration of the platforms. “Job one is getting it right for customers,” Roopesh told HRWins off-line.
Enjoy the conversation with Roopesh from Symphony Talent. If you’re interested in getting more immediate access to this kind of breaking news join HRWins as a Data Access or Insights & Advisory member and keep an eye on the TPP Facebook group, a closed group for HR and talent practitioners and technologists.
