When we announced our acquisition of Comeet back in 2023, it certainly raised some eyebrows.
“A video interviewing company acquiring an applicant tracking system? Isn’t it usually the other way around?”
Yes, that’s true. Typically, you see platforms acquiring point solutions.
Generally, it’s because of many shared customers and/or something special about the product that makes more sense to buy than build.
The “platform”, in this case, the ATS, can then deeply integrate the acquired product, shut down the standalone solution, consolidate costs, etc.
This was not the M&A journey for Spark Hire.
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An Untraditional Path
Here’s an inside look at the great opportunity we saw and what we’ve done about it.
[Image courtesy of Tenor]
In 2012, we didn’t start as a pure video interview solution. I made the classic early Founder mistake of asking our team to build too much. While we offered video interviewing, it was primarily a hiring marketplace (with video).
Pretty soon, we realized that most companies signing up for Spark Hire were mainly intrigued by video interviews.
So, we pivoted.
We found product market fit and the next ~10 years were a whirlwind.
We saw many entrants and exits from our space, became an established category within HR tech, and grew to thousands of customers.
It was 2022 when I started to consider – now what?
Exploring Our Options: What Else Did Our Customers Need?
There was a lot of consolidation happening in HR tech and it felt like there were many paths we could take, but the big question was: stay “just” a video interview solution or do more?
“Doing more” certainly brought me back to my early days as a Founder, and probably some PTSD from trying to do too much.
And while this was a big question to answer, the decision couldn’t be any more clear.
We just had to focus on our customers.
For historical context, Spark Hire’s ideal customer profile is a small or medium-sized employer, which we define as 50-500 employees (give or take) with some exceptions and a few other factors.
Within this customer group, we saw…
- A significant number with no applicant tracking system
- A big group with an applicant tracking system that were unhappy
- Another segment with an applicant tracking system that came with their HRIS/payroll software and needed more
- All HR and TA teams were being asked to consolidate as much of their HR tech stack as possible (after an explosion of standalone tools/apps in the “marketplace era” over the last decade).
Further, we saw a couple of themes emerge as major challenges for our customers:
1. Screening & Selection
The volume of applicants and/or open roles relative to the talent acquisition resources was increasing.
Some of this volume was related to market conditions, but some was also related to companies asking their HR and TA teams to “do more with less”.
This increased pressure, especially at the top of the funnel, created many screening and selection challenges.
2. Hiring Manager Collaboration
As a result of being asked to “do more with less”, it became apparent that hiring manager participation in the hiring process was more critical than ever; not only to get a better hiring outcome, but also from a pure capacity standpoint.
And, HR and TA teams were not properly equipped to empower their hiring managers.
Given these observations, we saw an opportunity to deliver a more comprehensive hiring software solution to our customers that aims to enable small and medium-sized organizations to overcome the core challenges they faced with screening and selection, plus hiring collaboration.
With our focus on video interviews, we already had a vision for expanding our screening and selection capabilities with a multi-assessment solution.
But, this alone wouldn’t allow us to fill the other gaps our customers were experiencing with their current tech stacks.
Enter Comeet and our subsequent acquisition.
The Next Chapter of Spark Hire Begins
When I first saw Comeet, I was impressed by the platform’s capabilities and its early investment in AI, but what really sparked my interest was the adoption from hiring managers.
It was the applicant tracking system that hiring managers worked within, not around.
With flexible and customizable hiring workflows per position (and even per candidate) along with a task-based system for automatically assigning ownership of specific responsibilities, I knew the Comeet team was on to something.
So, we made the big splash while at the same time expanding our video interview solution to include a behavioral assessment and automated reference checks.
At this point, it’s 2024: the year of pulling it all together and creating clarity, both inside and outside of the organization, about what we’re doing.
Definitely a huge undertaking on so many levels and I can’t thank our team enough for the patience 🙏
So…what are we doing today?
Looking Ahead
Well, you may have seen my recent post about Spark Hire AI, which dives into how we’re thinking about AI across our solutions: Meet and Recruit.
The company is Spark Hire and we have two core solutions: Meet and Recruit.
- Spark Hire Meet is our talent assessment solution consisting of video interviews, our Predictive Talent Assessment, and automated reference checks.
- Spark Hire Recruit is our applicant tracking system, which comes with all assessment functionality from Meet.
This is where things get interesting compared to your traditional platform/point solution acquisition.
Since we did the acquisition “in reverse”, we’re unique in that you can use Meet (our assessment solution) on its own or part of Recruit (our ATS).
See, when most platforms acquire a point solution, they abandon the point solution go-to-market strategy and force you to use their platform if you want to use that point solution (which just becomes a feature).
Our approach is different.
We realized that customers need flexibility.
And, that buying an applicant tracking system is a much bigger undertaking (with many more variables) than choosing to use an assessment solution.
So, why force it?
Instead, we made that a differentiator.
We’re committed to being our customers’ partner in hiring, no matter where that journey starts.
This is why we make it easy for our customers to get started with the solutions they need now and to add functionality as their hiring process evolves.
To recap:
- Many of our customers needed their first or a better applicant tracking system.
- Screening and selection + hiring manager collaboration were (and still are) the top two challenges our customers face.
- We aim to help our customers solve these challenges more comprehensively, flexibly, and better than any hiring software on the market.
And, we took an M&A approach to get where we are now with Meet and Recruit.
Call our M&A process non-traditional.
Call it the “reverse order”.
Call it whatever you’d like to.
But, just know, it’s customer-led.
And that’s how we roll.
