Humanly Bought CareerArc. The Staffing Business Is Next.
Posted on October 15, 2026 Leave a Comment
The recruiting industry has spent years selling employers software that helps them do more work. Humanly would rather sell them the candidates.
That’s the more consequential, if somewhat buried, story behind Humanly’s acquisition of CareerArc. The announcement describes recruitment marketing meeting AI-powered hiring, which sounds sufficiently familiar to disappear into the usual acquisition coverage. Another platform gets bigger; another funnel gets consolidated. Somewhere, someone updates a sales deck and messaging framework.
In our briefing, Kumar described a much more explicit ambition: building a technology-enabled staffing business, with AI doing more of the work and employers buying access to qualified, engaged candidates.
CareerArc gives Humanly another way to find those people. Social is one channel in that strategy, and an intermediate step toward a business that doesn’t have to buy a fresh introduction every time a customer needs to hire. The immediate target is job advertising spend. The longer-term ambition, Kumar said, is to compete for budgets going to companies like Manpower and Adecco. That should get considerably more attention than the integration roadmap.
Read MoreWhy I Ghosted My Own Blog (A Boomerang Hire Returns)
Posted on October 15, 2026 Leave a Comment
On April 29, I published a post about candidate fraud and then disappeared for almost six months. Somewhere, a vendor is turning that sequence of events into a case study, I’m sure.
The argument, as I remember it, was that job seekers have always embellished their experience, and recruiters who’ve described a dysfunctional workplace as “fast-paced and entrepreneurial” might want to put down the stones before inspecting anyone else’s glass house.
Then I stopped showing up to my own website. Apparently, my commitment to covering the candidate experience extends to reenacting it. So, yes, I ghosted my own blog. Consider this post the content equivalent of a boomerang hire, complete with a suspicious employment gap and the expectation that onboarding will be abbreviated because I already know where everything is, who to avoid and what to expense. That’s probably an imperfect metaphor, but you get the idea.
I do owe you an explanation, even if you likely didn’t notice. Unfortunately, it involves admitting that I spent six months giving people advice I wasn’t taking. Business, on the plus side, has been better than expected. My time management skills? Not so much.
Read MoreUnderstanding Candidate Fraud: Beyond the Hype
Posted on April 29, 2026 2 Comments
Let’s start with the awkward truth. Candidates have always lied – or at least, hyperbolized a tiny bit. This is something widely considered a best practice – taking the mundane, back office BS every worker has to deal with and making it sound impressive.
For example, you didn’t have to distribute handouts or make copies; you created and scaled an enterprise wide document management process.
You didn’t roll phone calls; you served as a technology liaison between executives and company stakeholders. And you never had to manage meeting room availability and coordinate schedules; you oversaw facility operations and created/implemented internal processes.
You get the picture. Every recruiter (who know a thing or two about, uh, little white lies, like total rewards, company culture or “it’s not a job – it’s a career,” or that whole “work family” cliche) is familiar with situational subjectivity, to put it innocuously.
Read MoreWhy Career Sites Are the Future of Recruitment
Posted on April 22, 2026 3 Comments
There was a time, not that long ago, when owning ‘career discovery’ was dominated largely by job boards, a “feature” that was less core product functionality than SEO strategy, a convenient way to drive more traffic – and higher ad rates – by targeting ‘passive’ candidates exploring career development as opposed to active applicants browsing active, open roles.
This process was relatively simple and straightforward – you bought more targeted traffic than the competition, designed the UI/UX around conversion optimization, and hoped to drive enough sign ups and applies to their associated ad inventory to keep customers’ pipelines packed with high intent, career focused, highly niched professionals.
This approach wasn’t particularly complicated – and, largely, this approach has historically worked fairly well, sort of like a CAPTCHA for careers. This focus on career development as a shibboleth for job ads, in fact, was the business model that allowed behemoths like Glassdoor and LinkedIn to successfully scale in an otherwise overcrowded, cutthroat market for job seeker traffic.
Those days, however, are quickly coming to an end. As talent acquisition evolves, the structural changes are forcing a fundamental shift in not only how career discovery works, but also, who owns this foundational human capital function, too.
Read MoreSolving Talent Acquisition’s Conversion Problem
Posted on March 24, 2026 Leave a Comment
Here’s a secret that few talent acquisition organizations are aware of, and even fewer would admit to: most every recruiting strategy is predicated on a fundamental fallacy (or a “big lie,” if you’d prefer). See, most TA leaders today – at least when asked about their most pressing hiring challenges – are likely to respond with some vague approximation of what’s been called the “TA Capacity Crunch.”
Even if you’re not familiar with the term, if you’re a recruitment practitioner or talent acquisition leader, you’re probably overly familiar with its implications. Since 2022, recruiter headcount has dropped by an estimated 25%; meanwhile, the average number of reqs per recruiter has more than doubled to 56%.
This means less recruiters handling more roles – and, perhaps most pressingly, a dramatic increase in application volume, too. In the past 48 months alone, the average open role receives a whopping 3x more inbound applicants (currently estimated at 242 applications per opening).
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