Rival’s 2025 Year in Review: Scaling and Democratizing Workflows
2025 was a year of reckoning for HR technology. After a decade of big promises and bigger stacks, organizations needed proof that their investments could actually make work flow. This recap looks at where the industry stands now and how Rival's 2025 launches have started delivering on that promise.
The State of the HR Tech Stack Today and Rival's Take
Over the past decade, HR technology promised transformation: automation would simplify operations, AI would elevate decision-making, and integrated systems would finally give teams the visibility they needed. The HR tech market has more than doubled in size within the past ten years, from more than $15 billion in 2014 to about $36 billion in 2024. With that growth came big promises: more automation, more efficiency, and more simplicity. Yet despite massive investments, most HR and TA organizations ended up with the opposite: more tools, more handoffs, and more operational drag. The HR tech stack proliferated, but the value never fully showed up.
In 2025, Rival focused on solving this problem holistically. We invested in our core products to give HR the orchestration layer they desperately need, including AI-powered recruiting that can be orchestrated in conjunction with any ATS, and AI-driven workflows orchestrated across the employee lifecycle alongside any HCM or HR tool. Let's recap the launches and analyst highlights that illustrate how Rival's 2025 investments are solving this challenge in a modern, scalable way.
2025 Win: Democratization of Automated Workflows Across HR and Managers
In 2025, we rebuilt the workflow environment from the ground up to make structures clearer, updates easier, and lifecycle processes more consistent. Instead of opaque, IT-owned flows, HR practitioners and managers can see and manage the steps and dependencies in a way that actually reflects how their business runs. This creates greater transparency into what needs to happen and when, ensuring fewer delays and smoother handoffs across teams. For employees, it means predictable, coherent experiences powered by cleaner workflows, rather than disconnected tasks and one-off requests.
A major part of the orchestration story is ROSI, Rival OS Intelligence. In July, we unveiled ROSI, the first conversational AI agent purpose-built for HR and employees directly inside Rival Workflow. ROSI changes how work happens by eliminating dashboards, reports, and manual data chasing. Rather than forcing HR teams to hunt for insights, ROSI surfaces what matters in the flow of work—answering questions, surfacing key metrics, and reducing the everyday friction that slows everyone down.
With ROSI, we focused on removing the complexity that weighs HR down. Form creation becomes faster and more intuitive. Workflow summaries turn intricate processes into something managers can instantly grasp. And our conversational AI agent gives every team member the power to pull answers, metrics, and insights the moment they need them to keep work flowing.
Kyle Lagunas, Founder and Principal Analyst at Kyle & Co, put it best: "In a market flooded with promise and light on proof, ROSI stands apart, not by dazzling with hypotheticals, but by delivering impact where it counts. It's not just another chatbot. It's your system's truth-teller, surfacing signals through the noise so HR teams can stop chasing data and start driving outcomes."
Together, Rival's AI and automation capabilities launched in 2025 make workflows not just easier to build, but also smarter, more adaptive, and far more scalable.
2025 Win: Launch and Adoption of AI-Powered Outbound Recruiting
On the talent acquisition side, we unlocked outbound recruiting directly inside any ATS on the market. Instead of forcing TA teams to juggle disjointed sourcing tools, Rival Recruit adds modern AI-powered outbound capabilities right into their existing environment. Recruiters can build proactive pipelines without leaving the tools they already live in every day.
With Rival Recruit, teams can:
- Access 750M+ global candidate profiles with skills-based matching
- Discover talent anywhere using the Recruit Chrome extension that captures candidate information in context
- Automate personalized outreach at scale with generative AI that adapts to role, segment, and seniority
- Layer proactive sourcing on top of Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS, Level, SmartRecruiters, and more
- Track full-funnel sourcing performance instantly with embedded analytics—without ever leaving their ATS
Outbound sourcing in any ATS gives TA teams a competitive edge in a market where inbound alone is no longer enough. It turns the ATS from a system of record into a system of action that helps recruiters move faster, stay organized, and build the relationships that lead to better hires.
2025 Win: ROSI Across Rival Talent Suite
By October, ROSI came to Rival Recruit, not as a separate tool or an add-on, but as an always-on partner working alongside HR to improve efficiency in hiring. We are ending the year by bringing ROSI to performance as well, extending that same conversational intelligence into how organizations evaluate and grow their people.
Beyond hiring and workflows, 2025 was also a meaningful step forward in how organizations develop and evaluate talent. In Learn, we made learning journeys cleaner, certificates more consistent, and admin tasks easier. These changes help HR teams and managers design and deliver learning paths that feel cohesive, not cobbled together, so employees can see where they're headed and what it takes to get there.
In Perform, conversational AI and advanced analytics bring reviews, goals, and feedback into a clearer, more actionable view. Managers can quickly understand what's changed since the last cycle, where employees are thriving or stuck, and how individual performance connects to broader priorities. Performance conversations become more informed and forward-looking, helping leaders spot trends earlier and act with confidence.
Together, these updates extend Rival's orchestration philosophy into development and performance, creating a more connected and insight-driven talent experience across the entire employee lifecycle.
2025 Win: Analyst Highlights and Validation
As we advanced our orchestration story in 2025, analysts took notice. Brandon Hall Group recognized Rival for solving HR's orchestration problem, calling out three major differentiators:
- AI-powered outbound sourcing at scale
- Conversational intelligence through ROSI
- Self-service workflow configuration built for HR, not IT
Chief Strategy Officer Michael Rochelle described Rival's approach to making work flow as "low-key revolutionary," underscoring how these capabilities move beyond point solutions and dashboards to change the way work happens.
For the second year in a row, Nucleus Research named Rival a Leader in both its Talent Management Technology Value Matrix and its Standalone Talent Acquisition Technology Value Matrix, recognizing our strength in functionality, usability, and ROI. That repeat recognition reflects what we see every day with customers: when you pair a modern TA experience with orchestration across the rest of the stack, adoption and outcomes follow. Curious how we support large-scale adoption? Our customer stories bring those results to life.
The Next Chapter of HR Orchestration
Rival's investments across all products in 2025 follow the same ethos: HR tech shouldn't add complexity, it should remove it. Recruiting should be proactive, not pieced together. HR operations should be adaptive, not brittle. AI should enhance clarity, not obscure it. And workflows should belong to the teams who depend on them.
The future of the HR tech stack is smarter orchestration. Rival is building that future across the talent lifecycle: helping teams find great people, bring them in smoothly, and support them with processes that finally work the way the business works.
When HR has the right tools, everything flows: faster hiring, smoother onboarding, and employee journeys that actually drive growth and performance.
