Is it Q4 already? In the talent acquisition market, it’s hard to keep track—things are moving along at the same swift pace.
On the funding side, the marketplace is red-hot and continues to be very liquid; there’s plenty of money out there, and we’re seeing more unicorns than ever. Although, now that there’s 141 of them, can we still call them that? All that said, valuations are creating a little less liquidity in the talent market because there’s more risk for that side of the equation. High quality engineering and product talent are often happy where they are, and are likely working towards their current company becoming the next unicorn. Thus, if things are going well in their current role, they question the risk versus reward trade off of jumping into a company already valued at billion dollars or more—especially with what has been a less than favorable IPO market for tech companies of late. And as to attracting people from everyone’s favorite high profile public tech companies, well, we’ve already commented on the difficulty there. So while there are plenty of opportunities out there for engineers and product developers, attracting rockstars is becoming an increasing challenge.
No matter what, you can be sure that that the market will continue to evolve. Here at Rivi, we’re not in the business of predicting market turns (we’ll leave that to the experts), but we are committed to our continued investment in our technology and our people. Which means we’ll be prepared to deliver the best service and experience to our clients and candidate customers, regardless of market dynamics.
John Simonelli is COO of Riviera.
