Salary.com Wants to be a "Playa"

About This Episode

Dallas, Texas - PitchMe, the data enrichment and talent intelligence platform for recruitment and staffing agencies, today launched SONAR, a new search product designed to eliminate one of agency recruiting’s most stubborn workarounds: searching an ATS or CRM for known candidates, then opening a separate sourcing tool to find everyone else. Live now in early access across the UK, US and Europe, SONAR searches public data sources across the web and returns enriched candidate profiles recruiters can review and contact from one place. The product works alongside systems such as Bullhorn, Avionte and Vincere, giving agencies a modern sourcing layer without requiring an ATS migration or disrupting the system of record their teams already use. The launch is the first step in PitchMe’s plan to bring an agency’s internal database and the external talent market into one search experience. A second module in development will synchronize candidates from an agency’s ATS or CRM into PitchMe, display internal and external candidates side by side, and automatically route qualified candidates back into the ATS as they advance through a hiring pipeline. SONAR organizes each hiring effort as a Project, which can be private or shared with a team. Inside a Project, recruiters create Searches in one of two ways: describe the candidate they need in plain language and let SONAR build the query, or use more than a dozen structured filters covering job title, geography, experience, education, skills, employers, credentials, and languages. Link LONDON — Global learning and testing giant Pearson announced on Tuesday an agreement to acquire Workera, a Silicon Valley-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence-powered skills verification and enterprise assessments. The transaction marks Pearson’s latest strategic push into corporate upskilling, aiming to address mounting corporate anxiety over workforce readiness in the age of generative and agentic AI. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2019 in Palo Alto, California, Workera operates an adaptive assessment platform that combines agentic AI, psychometrics, and role-specific simulations to benchmark what employees can actually do, rather than relying on self-reported résumés or static quizzes. The roughly 60-person startup serves high-profile enterprise and defense clients, including Accenture, ServiceNow, and the U.S. Space Force. Following the acquisition, Workera will fold into Pearson’s Enterprise Learning & Skills unit. Workera’s co-founder and chief executive, Kian Katanforoosh, will join Pearson’s leadership team. https://hrtechfeed.com/pearson-acquires-workera/ WALTHAM, Mass. — In a bid to upend conventional human resources workflows, compensation data veteran Salary.com announced the launch of SalaryTalent, an AI-native talent management platform designed to place real-time compensation intelligence at the center of everyday workforce decisions. Built on Salary.com’s foundational job ontology—which encompasses over 1.4 million leveled job titles across 30,000 organizations in 140+ countries—SalaryTalent is powered by the company’s Max AI engine. The suite debuts with five interconnected products designed to cover the entire talent lifecycle: Product Focus & Strategic Capabilities Recruiting Pre-configures job requisitions with compliant, pay-transparency salary ranges to streamline offer negotiations from day one. Candidate Sourcing Matches active and passive candidates by skills and experience while aligning market pay expectations early in the pipeline. Performance Management Connects employee reviews, goals, and career paths with live market pay and skill demand; leverages AI to flag rating and compensation anomalies. Workforce Management Unifies shift scheduling, attendance, leave management, and overtime compliance with an auditable time-to-payroll pipeline. HR Agent Orchestration Implements human-in-the-loop governance for AI agents, featuring permission scopes, configurable approval gates, and audit trails SalaryTalent is available immediately across desktop and mobile. To accelerate adoption, Salary.com has introduced the SalaryTalent Bootcamp, a 30-day, risk-free pilot program allowing enterprise clients to test the suite using their own job architecture, pay bands, and market conditions before committing. https://hrtechfeed.com/salary-com-expands-into-talent-management-with-launch-of-ai-native-salarytalent-platform/ SAN FRANCISCO — HiringCafe, an AI-powered job discovery search engine, announced Monday that it has raised $6.8 million in pre-seed funding and launched a new automated “AI Talent Agent” designed to search open roles on behalf of candidates. The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Nonfiction Capital, Silicon Gardens, and angel investors from hiring giants ZipRecruiter and Indeed. Unlike legacy job boards that operate primarily on sponsored-listing and advertising business models, HiringCafe positions itself as an exhaustive internet-wide search engine. Traditional aggregators typically surface about 20% of active job openings—mostly sponsored posts from large corporations—leaving millions of applicants to fight over the same visible positions. By deploying automated agents and web-indexing algorithms to crawl company career pages directly, HiringCafe claims its index exceeds 5.7 million open roles—up to 400% more than leading traditional job boards. https://hrtechfeed.com/hiringcafe-secures-6-8-million-to-tackle-the-hidden-job-market-with-ai-talent-agents/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices