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‘Recruitment Marketing’ Category

With labor markets in Atlanta and beyond being tough, a startup in Atlanta, Grayscale Labs Inc. may have found a breakthrough method in order to boost recruiting.

Using a more innovative and swift method, Grayscale focuses on leveraging technology to help recruiters go through candidates in high volumes that could be a good fit for a company.

Grayscale was founded back in 2018 by Ty Abernathy and Hubert Liu, who came up with devising and sending automated texts to help companies screen candidates. According to an Atlanta Business Chronicle article, over 200 customers in the organization include Amazon, Peloton, and Wayfair.

The recent funding of $7.5 million will be used towards doubling the 32-person staff in the next 18 months with a focus on hiring in sales, engineers, marketing, and customer support.

A partner at Atlanta Ventures, Jon Birdsong said that Grayscale has a massive market opportunity.

Grayscale’s vision is to simplify the recruiting process, particularly from a technological perspective so that organizations can communicate more efficiently with candidates and vice versa.

In 2021, Grayscale raised $3.3 million by Atlanta Ventures to double its team.

Why this is important and can help other organizations adopt a similar method for hiring is that one of Grayscale’s specialties is geared towards business-to-business software that could simplify the recruiting process down the road.

Abernathy wants it to be known that Grayscale is assisting both candidates and organizations alike finding the best fit for different roles.

“We make it easy to engage candidates via SMS,” Abernethy said. “The power of Grayscale is being able to automate the touchpoints of the candidate journey.”

More recently in the third quarter of this year, Georgia startups did experience a 28% decrease from venture funding in the third quarter that sparked organizations to lay off more employees.

“I think we’ve got a cold winter ahead of us from a venture funding point of view,” said David Cummings, founder of Atlanta Tech Village and CEO of Atlanta Ventures said in an Atlanta Inno article.

Many organizations have opted to allow employees to work remotely with a good portion of organizations adapting to the new normal following the pandemic.

If organizations do not allow for remote work all the time, a hybrid option is another option that gives employees the chance to telework from home two days out of the week and shows up in person to the office for example.

A survey from MSH, a global consulting firm polled 1,023 people in September 2022 about the differences between different generations about how remote work and higher pay correlated.

The pandemic affected employees and their day-to-day routines and what made people happy about their jobs MSH founder and chief executive officer, Oz Rashid said in an SHRM article.

There have been some challenges with people who transitioned into working remotely such as feelings of isolation at home and from not being around other workers in their organizations.

A shared sentiment among 90% of executives that were surveyed said that the organizational culture and connection could use improvement for their remote workers and approximately 70% of their workers feel there is a lack of socialization when working remotely according to SHRM.

One employee, Tim Hirzel who worked from home in Quincy, Mass., during the pandemic acclimated to the new normal and was excited about going back to work in an office in a recent New York Times article.

“The feeling of being in a room with three or four people and a whiteboard, it’s amazing,” he said. “You can see people’s body language; you can hash it out.”

Even before the pandemic happened, there were some organizational trends that both remote and hybrid work options were increasing. From January 2019 to December 2019, approximately 12% of workers in the United Kingdom worked from home one day in the previous week and around 5% worked from home most of the time according to the UK Parliament.

With uncertainty in the tech sector about jobs and layoffs, there is hope according to a recent report for tech companies looking to bring on new talent in Atlanta.

According to a recent Dice Tech Job Report, those looking for opportunities in the tech market may want to keep Atlanta in mind with 12,050 job postings spanning from January 2021 to June 2022.

The Dice report considered calculated 3 million tech jobs that were posted from January to June and how they compared to this time last year.

Approximately 83 percent of companies are anticipating and concerned with a possible recession in 2023 according to the 2023 State of IT Report. There is a possibility that some companies may opt to freeze hiring or implement some structural changes within organizations.

Reducing non-essential spending seems to be what most organizations are considering implementing to prepare for a recession next year.

Atlanta remains a popular pick among applicants ranking third behind New York City and Chicago. The city ranked higher than other tech powerhouses across the country such as Charlotte, North Carolina, in 10th, Tampa, Florida, 16th, Miami, 20th, and Raleigh, 23rd.

While the job availability is there, Atlanta did not rank in the top 25 portions of markets for a year-over-year job growth category. The top markets were Orlando, Florida with a growth of 111%, Miami at 104%, and Detroit at 90%. For postings in Atlanta, those grew by 17% from the Dice report in the first portion of 2022 from the previous year.

When looking at other states, Georgia was ranked seventh in overall tech job openings and grew 39% when compared to the first half of 2021. States that were at the top for openings were California, Texas, and Florida.