Workplace

The hiring crisis is real. ZoomInfo thinks employer reviews are the answer.

The data broker is building out its TalentOS platform.

Jason Nazar

Comparably has been growing 150% year-over-year, Jason Nazar told Protocol,

Photo: Comparably

Job boards won’t cut it anymore — even for non-technical roles. That’s why ZoomInfo is buying the employer review site Comparably to build out its TalentOS candidate acquisition platform.

The companies announced the acquisition for an undisclosed sum on Monday, which will help ZoomInfo — a $19 billion data broker that sells to marketers and salespeople — level up TalentOS. Comparably will bring its employer branding service to TalentOS, which helps clients find candidates and contact them.

“It was always hard to fill engineering roles on job boards, but you could fill sales and marketing and finance and design, and certainly retail jobs,” said Jason Nazar, co-founder and CEO of Comparably. “Today, it’s a completely different dynamic, where you have to spend so much time and money directly sourcing candidates.”

Comparably has been growing 150% year-over-year, Nazar told Protocol, and saw more than 20 million visitors come to its reviews site last year. The site is free to job seekers, and doesn’t run ads.

Instead, employers — which range from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses — pay for branding and recruitment marketing tools, salary data and competitive analysis. (Comparably touts that it only allows current employees to post reviews, and doesn’t allow customers to remove or alter ratings or reviews.)

TalentOS has also taken off since it launched in June 2021. The platform has more than 1,000 customers, with TalentOS revenue growing 50% between Q1 2021 and Q1 2022.

Nazar said Comparably’s more than 15 million reviews should bolster the platform further.

“If you look at our combined reach of traffic, and what we add to the footprint of already the millions and millions of people that come to ZoomInfo every single month, that’s pretty powerful,” Nazar said.

Nazar, a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Docstoc to Intuit in 2013, co-founded Comparably in 2015 with Yammer co-founder George Ishii, InvestedIn co-founder Yadid Ramot and DebtMarket co-founder Michael Sheridan. Greycroft Partners led Comparably’s $7.25 series A investment round in 2017, with other investments from Comcast Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Upfront Ventures, Lowercase Capital, Alpha Edison, Cornerstone on Demand, Accelerator Ventures and Rincon Ventures.

Ramot and Sheridan remain at Comparably as its CTO and COO, respectively.

Nazar and the rest of the Comparably team will join ZoomInfo, Nazar said. ZoomInfo, which has 3,000 employees, will also grow Comparably’s team of under 100. The Comparably brand and product will remain intact, Nazar said, but will “integrate deeply” with the TalentOS platform over this year. Later in 2022, companies will be able to buy both products together, Nazar said.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

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FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

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Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

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Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

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Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

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