Contact: Thejeswi Venkatesh
The spree of HR software M&A continued on Monday with Oracle announcing the purchase of recruitment SaaS startup SelectMinds. The tuck-in acquisition adds social recruitment features to the core platform Oracle gained via its $2bn pickup of Taleo in February.
In the past few months, the same three firms that consolidated the top end of the BI market a few years ago (SAP, Oracle and IBM) have shifted their buying to the human capital management (HCM) market. Collectively, the trio has spent roughly $7bn on HCM providers. While SAP and IBM got social recruitment tools with their acquisitions of SuccessFactors and Kenexa, respectively, Oracle-Taleo was left with a hole in its portfolio. The reach for SelectMinds is meant to close that gap.
Twelve-year-old SelectMinds provides social media-recruiting SaaS, allowing companies and employees to distribute job openings via social media. The vendor says this targeted approach increases the quality of sourced job candidates. SelectMinds, which only raised $5.5m in venture funding, has marquee customers including eBay, McGraw-Hill, Qualcomm and Visa.
We’d note that the transaction comes barely a week after rival HCM vendor iCIMS announced a similar deal, acquiring its former partner and social media-recruiting firm Jobmagic. All of this points to increasing commoditization of the HCM market, where platform providers have to offer more features to compete effectively.