As the news settles in on WillHire’s acquisition by Pro Unlimited, we wanted to talk in a bit more detail about what it means for our customers, our partners, and the industry as a whole.
As a market-leading direct sourcing and talent pool platform for all job categories, this first-ever direct sourcing acquisition validates the entire industry. In fact, SIA reported that direct sourcing solutions will grow in implementations by 60% within the next two years. With roughly half of all organization’s workforces now external and nearly $5 trillion spent on contingent labor annually, the time to capitalize on this global talent channel is here.
That trend, along with our aligned company synergies, our passion for bringing the best technology to the market, the importance of continuously innovating our customer’s HR tech stack, and our collective commitment to better the worker and enterprise experience, made this acquisition an easy decision for all involved.
This acquisition “enables PRO to leverage WillHire’s comprehensive end-to-end campaign management technology for recruitment marketing, as well as its ‘marketing automation-like’ self-scheduling and communication with talent,” said Chris Dwyer, Senior Vice President of Research and Managing Director of the Future of Work Exchange at Ardent Partners.
For WillHire, the acquisition allows us to continue to build on our software-as-a-service model. The timing is imperative as businesses of all sizes require future-built technology, economies of scale, and a quick implementation of direct sourcing services that make immediate business impact during a time of severe labor shortages.
For our customers — both our direct clients and the VMS and MSP partners we support — we will continue to be a stand-alone solution to implement direct sourcing and total talent management. In the same way Microsoft has great tools like Word, Excel, and PPT that I can download onto my Mac, our partners and customers will be able to utilize our services regardless of our ownership. It’s the reason why the public SaaS industry reached over $157 billion in 2020 and why 73% of organizations indicated nearly all their apps will be SaaS by the close of this year.
We will continue to integrate to all VMS and EWS platforms. We will remain, as we’ve always been, a neutral party. We will continue to build out our partner ecosystem and bring value to our partners and their customers to reduce contingent labor spend, find top talent faster, engage talent in a more meaningful way, and achieve their overall organizational goals.
This is an exciting time for the WillHire team, and it only means great things for our partners, customers, and the industry as a whole as we collectively move towards the future of work. The changes in the global market over the past several years require a new approach to truly achieve total talent management. We look forward to this journey with all of you.
