Pinned straw:
One pattern i've seen in tech companies that don't want to let employees go (first hand) is they stop replacing people that leave, and they cease or severely restrict hiring.
I was curious if I could spot anything on the wayback machine with careers at Alcidion that might hint at something that might have surfaced the trouble they were having late last year.
There are a bunch of snaps dating back to 2020. Keep in mind that these snaps are not the exact point in time when the change occurs in the website, but just a coincidental point at which wayback machine chooses to index the page. At Alcidion's peak of hiring in 2021-2022 they had something close to 16 job ads open at one point. At their lowest point, September 28th 2023 they had 0 job openings.
So let's look at LinkedIn and see what we can find out about recent hiring at Alcidion in the last year
First of all, LinkedIn thinks you're a bot if you open 149 profiles quickly.
- Alcidion have been hiring a tonne in the last year. More than the careers page would have you believe - I guess they got internal referrals or people contacting them with applications.
- It seems like Alcidion generally fills positions really fast.
Since January 2023 Alcidion has hired:
- Multiple business analysts (3 at my count)
- Testing and test automation leads (I wouldn't usually expect to see testers or writers being hired by a company in trouble, that being said given its healthcare tech - test automation is a bit more critical than your typical software product).
- Marketing content developer
- Project managers
- Security analysts
- A director of marketing
- Data visualization specialists
- etc etc (probably more, but I got sick of LinkedIn challenging me with logins and finding the people again).
At my last count before LinkedIn decided get in my way, there were 18 new hires in the last 12 months.
So what did I learn?
- Unfortunately, Careers page history isn't really a proxy for anything.
- Opening 149 profiles and looking at the history is tedious, I really need to look into a quicker way to aggregate new hires of the last 12 months.
- If Alcidion is struggling, their hiring practices don't appear to show it.
Really good insights @Seasoning, thank you!
- As ALC is modular, and one of the key pluses is its ability to integrate into other solutions, you need people to tie systems together robustly, so (1) Business Analysts (2) Testing and Test Automation Leads (3) Security Analysts make good sense.
- For good deployment, Project Managers are key.
- For Data, Data Visualisation Specialists make complete sense - that is a whole world in itself.
So, the roles ALC have hired make sense to me, in that they are in the areas where proper focus is needed to ensure a good robust and sustinable solution, and it lines up with ALC's broader business approach of (1) land a module, integrate it, then upsell the rest and (2) its all about the data ...
But we need to see the revenue so that this approach and the carrying of this cost is sustainable ...
Nice detective work @Seasoning
CEO Kate Quirk is booked to come speak with us in early March, so it'll be good to ask her about this.