Thus far in 2024 Syelo Ventures has evaluated over 32 new companies building TA solutions in our ecosystem and it has proven to us that recruiting will never be automated but indeed optimized.

Our Venture team has seen two consist profiles of companies building in the space:

1. AI resume review/stack ranking, AI Sourcing, AI interview/screen, AI note taking.

2. We are trying to build an agent to automate recruiting, but a recruiter must operate it, train it, and optimize it.

The reality is our job in Talent is too nuanced, empathetic, and human to be replaced by Artificial Intelligence and the tools being built in the space prove that. The investments in the second category will fail but the companies who build and win in the first category will create a new class of recruiter. These tools are a bit rudimentary for the time being but they will get significantly better, quickly. With the brute functions of TA largely automated a new recruiter must be born.

During our fireside chat this month with Syelo Ventures Senior Advisor Carla McIntosh we discussed a bit about what this person needs to look like:

1. Data Analyst. The new recruiter is a Data Analyst as they will be the ones evaluating and making decisions on the data produced by AI tools. We strongly recommend a “bootcamp” credentials program.

2. Business Strategist. The new recruiter should prioritize their relationship with Finance. Understand the business inside and out.

3. Jack of all Trades. The new recruiter is less specialized in niche roles (GTM, Tech, Product etc.) and able to source and execute across the corporate stack. HR skills will also be highly valuable when working for early stage companies.

2025 will see some stability return to the Talent Acquisition ecosystem, but the days of 2021/2022 where corporate philosophy was to spend and grow at all cost is long gone. Talent Leaders should expect the new normal of doing more with less. Now more than ever it is important for practitioners to refine their skillset and stay at the cutting edge of our industry.

Syelo Announcements:

• Extremely excited to be welcoming our newest Venture Partners: Simon Liu, Maple Law, Danny Arango, Scott Schaffer.

• Our team scraped the entirety of Syelo community chat history & downloaded, organized, and are now sharing all of the collected data that has been aggregated. This is an absolute goldmine of TA data. The new and improved resource center will let you search and sort with ease:

• Very excited that this month we have onboarded a new Senior Advisor to the Syelo Community! We are incredibly excited to be learning from an executive with over 30 years leading and building and leading world class teams at brands like Amazon/AWS (2003-2017), Outreach, Compass, and Stitch Fix. Over the next few months our newest advisor will be hosting multiple events here at Syelo (office hours, roundtables, etc.), including being the featured executive for our monthly fireside chat in October.

-Syelo Venture Partners