Rec Tech: the Recruiting Technology Podcast

Boomband, a new talent intelligence platform founded by Monster.com creator Jeff Taylor, officially rolled out across all six New England states on Wednesday. Headquartered in Wakefield, Rhode Island, the startup is directly targeting the region’s dense concentration of tech, healthcare, finance, and higher-education employers, bringing nearly 500,000 local, hybrid, and remote roles to the platform at launch.

According to Boomband, the traditional online job board model has collapsed under a flood of low-signal, AI-generated applications. The average job posting drew 244 applications in 2025, more than double the volume from 2022, while the regional search cycle for candidates now stretches to an average of 6.6 months.

“In a roundabout way, I helped build the system that is now breaking hiring,” said Taylor, Boomband’s founder and CEO. “With Monster.com, we took the Help Wanted section from the newspaper to the internet… Now overlay AI on top of that broken foundation, and you have a full collapse. Everyone is drowning in volume and starving for signal.”

By debuting regionally, Boomband aims to give New England employers a localized network that bypasses the flood of irrelevant, nationwide resume-spamming while surfacing local candidates based on actual skill alignment and commute preferences.

https://hrtechfeed.com/boomband-expands-to-new-england-for-debut-of-new-ai-talent-platform/

SAN FRANCISCO & LONDON — AI-native hiring marketplace Jack & Jill has raised a $40 million Series A round to upend traditional recruitment and make warm professional introductions at scale.

Founded by Matthew Wilson (CEO) and Saaras Mehan (CTO), the platform operates on a dual-agent model designed to eliminate cold outreach, resume spam, and traditional job boards:

Jackis a voice agent dedicated to job seekers, holding conversations with professionals to deeply understand their career ambitions, preferences, and ideal roles.

Jillis an embedded recruiting agent for companies, learning team dynamics, technical bars, and culture to surface vetted talent.

Rather than candidates submitting resumes into applicant tracking systems (ATS), the two autonomous agents negotiate on behalf of their respective sides. When both agents agree on mutual alignment, they directly facilitate a warm introduction between the candidate and hiring team—skipping the application phase altogether. The company says they have already registered 389k candidates and count 5k employers as clients.

https://hrtechfeed.com/jack-jill-secures-40m-series-a-to-replace-job-applications-with-ai-agents/

NEW YORK — BoomerangHR has closed a $12.7 million seed round to expand its AI-powered offboarding and corporate alumni platform, targeting a talent market where trusted candidate signals are becoming increasingly scarce.

Founded by CEO Jeff Wald, BoomerangHR is designed to democratize the structured alumni networks historically reserved for elite consulting firms and investment banks.

The platform plugs into existing HRIS and ATS stacks in under an hour, focusing on three core operational pillars:

Automated Offboarding:

Alumni Network Management:

Talent Migration & Reporting:

“A company’s relationship with great talent shouldn’t end when they leave,” said Wald. “We built BoomerangHR to automate offboarding and transform former team members into an active growth network. Through Boomerang, companies can easily access warm rehires, referrals, and sales leads—because your best next hire is someone who already knows your culture, your customers, and your mission.”

https://hrtechfeed.com/boomeranghr-secures-12-7m-seed-round-to-turn-offboarding-into-an-ongoing-talent-engine/

The Las Vegas Raiders have selected human resources and workforce technology provider UKG to manage and streamline operations across the franchise’s business, football, and gameday staff.

Under the new agreement, the NFL franchise will deploy the UKG Pro suite to consolidate human resources, payroll, and workforce intelligence onto a single operating platform. The move is designed to connect a wide-ranging employee base—from coaches, trainers, and front-office executives to hourly and frontline stadium workers.

https://hrtechfeed.com/ukg-lands-an-nfl-team/

Workday, Inc. has named Sarah Kennedy Ellis chief marketing officer, effective October 5, 2026, reporting to Aneel Bhusri, Workday co-founder, CEO, and chair. Kennedy Ellis will lead Workday’s global marketing and communications organization and will be responsible for championing the company’s brand narrative and growth strategy for the AI era.

Kennedy Ellis brings more than 20 years of marketing expertise to the role. She joins Workday from Google, where she led global marketing for Google Cloud and Google Workspace and helped build the engine behind one of the fastest growing businesses in enterprise technology. Prior to joining Google, she was chief marketing officer of Adobe Experience Cloud, and chief marketing officer of Marketo, playing a critical role in Marketo’s successful acquisition by Adobe in 2018.

https://hrtechfeed.com/workday-has-a-new-cmo/

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Linkup published their august 2026 jobs report;

Key Takeaways

Job openings stayed flat: Active job listings rose 0.1% in August 2026, to 4.96 million from 4.95 million in July. This suggests that underlying labor demand in the U.S. remained steady, alongside seasonal recruitment adjustments.

Broad-based industry gains: Industries that saw an increase in job postings include Wholesale Trade (2.7k), Construction (1.6k), and Real Estate and Rental and Leasing (1.2k). However, Retail Trade saw the largest decrease (-4.8k).

Major occupation drops: Office and Administrative Support occupations experienced the largest drop (-9.4k) followed by Installation, Maintenance, and Repair (-7.0k), and Production (-6.1k).

https://hrtechfeed.com/august-2026-jobs-recap/

UKG has introduced several new AI-driven capabilities aimed at supporting frontline workforces, accelerating bulk recruitment, and preventing costly payroll discrepancies. Key among these updates is UKG Bryte Voice, a voice-enabled assistant integrated with UKG Pro that allows deskless staff—such as retail and healthcare workers—to execute routine tasks (like checking schedules, reviewing timecards, or updating direct deposit information) hands-free via Siri or Google Assistant.

For talent acquisition, the platform now provides AI-assisted high-volume hiring tools, including candidate job recommendations, profile summaries, and a "Bulk Apply" workflow capable of processing up to 100 applicants simultaneously. Finally, UKG rolled out Agentic Pay, which allows administrators to examine historical pay data and resolve discrepancies before processing payroll through natural language queries to eliminate costly errors.

https://hrtechfeed.com/ukg-launches-voice-enabled-ai-and-agentic-pay-tools-to-support-frontline-workers/

TORONTO — 7shifts, the restaurant HR platform, today announced the launch of Employee Training, a restaurant-specific training solution built directly into 7shifts. The new offering gives restaurants a simpler way to train their teams without adding another standalone tool. The launch expands 7shifts’ role across the restaurant employee lifecycle, bringing hiring, onboarding, training, scheduling, pay, and retention together in one platform. Formerly known for scheduling and payroll, 7shifts has now fully evolved into a comprehensive HR platform.

“Operators are done paying for separate software to hire, onboard, train, schedule, and pay their staff, they want one system for the entire HR employee lifecycle, not a patchwork of tools that don’t talk to each other,” said Jordan Boesch, chief executive officer at 7shifts. “When it’s all in one place, teams get strong faster and managers get time back to actually develop their people.”

https://hrtechfeed.com/restaurant-hr-platform-adds-employee-training-feature/

In HR tech partnership news

Match2, the platform powering the Universal Candidate Profile™, today announced that its Connected Talent Solutions™ is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings.

PageUp, a global leader in talent acquisition software, and Sapia.ai, the pioneer in conversational AI for talent evaluation, today announced an enhanced strategic partnership. Building on their established relationship, the deepened integration links Sapia.ai’s autonomous, skills-based interviewing with PageUp’s newly advanced AI functionality.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, and ADP, a global leader in HR and payroll solutions, today announced an expanded, strategic partnership. The partnership affirms AWS as ADP’s strategic cloud provider, enabling its continued AI transformation and ongoing innovation of generative and agentic AI solutions for its more than 1.1 million clients across 140 countries and territories.

https://hrtechfeed.com/hr-tech-partnerships-in-the-news/

And finally the CEO of Hackajob Mark Chaffey share d on Linkedin today that the company will now be known as its core product name, Archer.

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Joining me today is John Nurthen, Executive Director of Global Research at Staffing Industry Analysts. John has spent more than three decades in the staffing industry—and he has just authored a global research report titled The Digital Workforce in Recruitment 2026.

In it, John maps out how digital worker agents——are moving from the fringes directly into the recruiting lifecycle. We’ll be breaking down why the future isn't about fully replacing human recruiters, the hidden risks of 'AI sprawl' and compliance liabilities, and how leaders must learn to manage a mixed workforce of employees, contractors, and algorithms.

https://www.staffingindustry.com/who-we-are/john-nurthen

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In this weeks episode sponsored by Dalia.co

* Hibob gets infusion of cash, Recruiter.com acquires Feenyx, Staffmark's report on AI in recruiting, new features from ICIMS and Vervoe.

READ ON https://hrtechfeed.com/

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In this episode Chris Russell explores how job seekers are taking transparency into their own hands with new consumer tools like DidTheyGhostYou.com and JobScamScore.com. We break down how public ghosting leaderboards and AI scam-detection tools actually work, why they are becoming an early-warning radar for your employer brand, and the practical steps recruiters can take to protect candidate trust and optimize their ATS workflows.

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