Now Is the Time We Dance: Humanly Acquires Qualifi, Sprockets, and HourWork

If you’ve been around HR technology long enough, you already know how this is supposed to work.

Company A buys Company B, puts out a press release, maybe an official blog post and some splashy graphic announcing how the acquisition aligns with the company’s “long term vision,”  or how it “unlocks value,” or maybe even talk about how the combined product will revolutionize the very future of talent acquisition and hiring. Or something similarly specious.

Then, there’s the breathless, totally speculative and esoteric insider takes from the pundits and the podcasters (present company included) wildly overstating the implications of what’s often a pretty niche, fairly nuanced transaction.  

Of course, this is accompanied by the posting of the official LinkedIn announcement from the brand (followed by furious liking and reposting by every employee, all of whom are either “proud” or “excited” by news most haven’t even been briefed on yet). 

And let’s not the email to customers and partners talking about how this transaction is an investment in the “future of work” (even if it’s just slapping on some golden handcuffs or overcoming a capability gap). Then, six months later, the company quietly kills the product, never to be spoken of again.

Hey, I know what you’re thinking, and that’s not cynicism; it’s called pattern recognition. 

Let’s be honest: today’s news that Humanly is acquiring Qualifi, Sprockets, and HourWork, is tempting to dismiss as just another HR Tech acquisition that’s the kind of M&A theatre that starts off with a Medium post by the founder no one asked for, and ends with a slick slide deck destined for the dustbin, never to be seen again.

Consider the fact that it was only a little over a year ago that Sprockets (not to be confused with the recurring Mike Myers SNL sketch) announced that it was acquiring HourWork, which itself had only been around for a little longer than your standard enterprise SaaS contract. 

According to the announcement from August 2024, “this strategic acquisition … of HourWork’s assets, with a goal of building an hourly workspace that works for everyone, perfectly aligns with Sprockets’ values. This move enables Sprockets to accelerate its growth and continue enhancing the hourly workforce experience while improving employers’ bottom lines.”

And yet, here they are again, the subject of yet another acquisition announcement. In talent acquisition. In this economy. By a company that, by all indications, was itself just another point solution in the constellation of early stage vendors? That just raised a relatively small $7M “momentum round” just a few months ago?

Talk about momentum. Today’s news from Humanly isn’t the splashiest M&A transaction in the industry, but it signals a strategic shift from what’s traditionally been considered a fairly narrowly focused point solution into a comprehensive talent acquisition suite. 

With Sprockets, Qualifi and Hourwork joining earlier acquisition Teamable, a talent CRM, under a single platform, it’s clear that Humanly is being built not for a short term exit, but as part of a long term product strategy to diversify and enrich its existing offerings. 

This acquisition seems designed to gain market share, increase total contract lifetime values, unlock account expansion opportunities and (most importantly), generate a flurry of top line revenue and logos that should serve as a pretty solid foundation for its nascent platform play. 

At least, I hope so – this is the part where I add the disclaimer about how I’m an investor and advisor in Humanly, so this post is probably a bit biased – but it’s not bought. I didn’t have to write anything on this announcement, and probably shouldn’t, with its inherent conflicts of interest.

But even I didn’t see this announcement coming, and, because I have just as much insight or information on this news as anyone else in this industry, I thought it was worth breaking down the bigger picture. 

Trust me, though: if my blogging had the ability to positively impact valuation, I wouldn’t be writing blog posts about HR Technology.

Roll Up: Humanly Tries for the Suite Spot

Humanly isn’t trying to buy growth. It’s buying time. And I mean that quite literally.

According to Gartner’s 2025 HR Technology Report, the average recruiter spends nearly two-thirds of their day buried in backoffice BS. You know the kind: screening resumes, scheduling interviews, coordinating followups and sending out forms. 

The kind of asinine administrative tasks  that are inevitably low on value, high on time and energy wasted, and frustrating enough to trigger the occasional fit of professional existential angst. Humanly, like so many startups out there, wants to reduce that burden and make it all go away. 

Their solution is an end-to-end hiring platform that touts its conversational intelligence and AI capabilities designed to automate the repetitive and amplify the human. Which sounds, admittedly, like the product and go to market messaging of pretty much every other recruitment technology provider out there right now.

But here’s the thing: with this roll-up, Humanly finally has all the pieces in place to make that claim, without irony or hyperbole:

• Qualifi automates phone and voice screening, instantly replacing one of the most painful bottlenecks in high-volume hiring.
• Sprockets adds sourcing, screening, and frontline manager tools (the infrastructure for hourly and frontline recruiting at scale).
• HourWork extends Humanly’s reach into retention, re-engagement, and post-hire communication, giving it a full employee lifecycle platform.

Having already integrated LinkedIn data into Microsoft’s product suite prior to founding Humanly, CEO Prem Kumar is positioning Humanly one step further up the value chain by essentially building (and buying) a huge database of job seekers – hourly and exempt, from AI engineers to fast food cashiers – much like LinkedIn or most every other candidate marketplace or resume database out there. 

The difference is that rather than simply stack rank candidates against job postings, or screen applicants’ skills at scale, or conduct fully automated “AI Interviews,” Humanly is trying to build something new: the world’s largest database of “AI interviewed” talent that, instead of providing just a source for resumes or profiles, contains candidates who are prescreened and prequalified, too. 

Interviewing’s Greatest Strength: Talent Intelligence

The use cases for this are manifold, from significantly shortening the hiring process by automating candidate qualifications and submissions to having a searchable database of structured interviews with existing workers, enabling employers to approach internal mobility and professional development proactively.

This is, as CEO Kumar likes to call it, the ability to “interview the world.”

Yeah, I know. Eyeroll inducing, sure – but at least it’s not another ATS promising to “streamline the candidate experience” with an extra login screen.

It’s an attempt, however much of a moonshot it might be, to capture the sort of soft skill and anecdotal data that separates new hires from silver medalists, to structure and standardize those responses, and to do so at scale. 

And maybe, just maybe, fix the flaming dumpster firing that is talent acquisition today.

Let’s be real: hiring right now is entering uncharted territory. Between automated résumé generators, ghosting epidemics, and recruiters stretched thinner than ever, the talent funnel of today is pretty much a giant dumpster fire, only with a LinkedIn Premium account. AI seems to be adding more complexity than clarity, amplifying existing hiring obstacles without fixing the problems it purports to solve.

It’s no secret that candidates apply en masse to hundreds of jobs using different GPTs; it’s even less of a secret that employers widely leverage AI to screen this tidal wave of incoming active applicants, meaning that most recruiters won’t see a single one of those applications to begin with. 

Of course, recruiters not reading resumes and job seekers not reading JDs or applying for roles where they don’t meet a single basic qualification is nothing new. And HR vendors keep selling “artificial intelligence” as a way to make hiring more efficient and more effective, despite the fact that few (if any) hires are actually happening. 

Humanly’s fix isn’t that superficially different from the myriad other AI recruiting vendors out there: automate grunt work so recruiters can focus on engaging with candidates and developing relationships with internal stakeholders. 

What’s different is the execution.

In our conversation in advance of today’s news, Humanly CMO Birch Faber put it bluntly: 

“Our moat is the data. We’ve built one of the largest datasets of recruiter-candidate conversations in the world.” 

– Birch Faber, humanly CHief marketing officer

That’s not a buzzword. That’s a competitive advantage. Because while there are a ton of vendors out there talking about “conversational intelligence,” Humanly’s intelligence is literally built on billions of data points extracted from real candidate interactions.

Think: thousands of hours of recruiter conversations, real interviews for real roles with real hiring managers, structured scorecards and searchable transcripts. This is the type of data that gives algorithms actual context – and the first step on fulfilling the yet empty promises of AI-powered recruiting. 

It’s not automation. It’s understanding.

And that’s the difference between conversational intelligence that parrots – and one that performs.

What’s Next: The Future of Humanly

Of course, this vision depends on a lot of variables. And we’ve all seen tons of these acquisitions before in this space: three logos, one website, a joint webinar or product demo, and a “seamless integration” that’s anything but.

Faber insists Humanly won’t fall into that trap. Qualifi and Humanly already share customers and API connections, meaning their systems were functionally integrated before the acquisition ever hit the wire. Sprockets and HourWork will take a few months longer, according to the current roadmap.

In their attempt to broaden their capabilities into the foundations of a platform play, Humanly is attempting to partner with, rather than compete with, applicant tracking systems like Workday, iCIMS or SAP – unifying all the disconnected elements of enterprise hiring into a single, simple solution.

“We’re not an ATS,” Faber told me. “We’re the intelligent layer that actually makes ATS systems usable.”

And it’s about damn time, too.

When I asked Faber whether more acquisitions were on the horizon, he laughed, and then said the one thing you never hear from HR tech execs: “we’re good on acquisitions for now.” Instead, the next 12 months will be about integration, optimization, and customer impact; basically, all the hard stuff. 

The plan is to keep Qualifi, Sprockets, and HourWork semi-independent while their data models and UX layers are gradually unified. That’s a rare show of discipline in an industry that measures success in how many logos you can fit on a PowerPoint slide.

By resisting the temptation to chase more M&A headlines – and frankly, to downplay this one to an extent.  Humanly’s leadership seems focused on building something that actually works before selling something that sounds good.

That’s progress.

Humanly’s roll-up is risky, ambitious, and overdue. It could fail spectacularly, or it could finally deliver on recruiting’s oldest promise: to make hiring faster, fairer, and a little more human. Either way, they’re betting on people, not prompts.

And that’s a future worth rooting for.