Cornerstone RPO co-founders Rodney Ashby (left) and Dave Kenworthy. (Courtesy Cornerstone RPO)
A longtime local recruiting company is under new ownership for the first time since its founding 20 years ago.
Cornerstone RPO (an acronym for “recruitment process outsourcing”) was acquired last week by Hudson Talent Solutions, a larger firm out of Tampa, Florida.
The deal closed on Nov. 2. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
Cornerstone RPO was started in Richmond in 2005 by Rodney Ashby and Dave Kenworthy. The company does both traditional and project-based recruitment process outsourcing for companies, as well as “recruitment process augmentation,” assisting companies’ already-existing talent acquisition teams with things like scheduling interviews, onboarding and orientation.
Cornerstone has worked with companies both locally and nationally, as well as some in Canada and Mexico. Its local clients through the years included online job portal Snagajob and the packaging company formerly known as MeadWestvaco, as well as other major firms like Google, Ashby said.
“A lot of different industries, from hospitality to construction to financial services. We did Capital One for a long time … just kind of continuing to grow the company,” Ashby said of the firm’s work over the years.
Ashby told BizSense that Cornerstone had started talking to Hudson Talent Solutions, which he described as a known player in the industry, about a potential acquisition several years ago, though the COVID-19 pandemic put that on pause. He added that Cornerstone has been looking for a while for resources that could help it expand its services beyond North America into other regions.
“We had some clients that we were pitching deals that needed (Asia-Pacific region) and European presence, and we needed a partner for that, because we weren’t going to build those capabilities,” Ashby said. “We definitely have broader services and deeper capabilities with Hudson.”
Hudson and Cornerstone pitched several deals together, and as time went on and conversations evolved with Hudson CEO Jake Zabkowicz, Ashby said the timing felt right to again work on an acquisition.
Hudson was founded in 1999, and, similarly to Cornerstone, is a recruitment process outsourcing firm, providing services like sourcing contingent and permanent workforce and working on consulting for recruitment branding to attract talent. The company has over 1,000 employees and has acquired several other recruiting firms in the U.S. and across the globe in recent years.
“The addition of Cornerstone RPO to HTS immediately bolsters our presence in the U.S. RPO market, the world’s largest, and brings a roster of blue-chip clients, marking an important step in our growth strategy,” Zabkowicz said in a press release.
Hudson, according to its website, uses an “AI-enabled” recruitment platform for some of its work called Hudson TalentFusion that automates sourcing, candidate screening and provides market and talent data. Ashby said the type of technology Hudson is able to deploy wasn’t something available to Cornerstone prior to the acquisition.
“There’s a lot of big technology in our industry, so it’s a significant investment, and with that investment you have to be able to have scale in order to get the return on investment … we just weren’t in a position to do that,” he said.
Following the acquisition, Cornerstone has retained all of its roughly 50 employees, and thus far, all of its clients, but the Cornerstone name and brand will be retired in favor of the Hudson brand going forward.
Cornerstone has a small office at 5540 Falmouth St. in the Vistas Office Park where a few employees (including Ashby) work, but the company’s workforce is largely spread throughout 26 states.
The Falmouth Street office will be retained following the acquisition.
Ashby and Kenworthy will also stick around as part of the deal. Ashby said he will be responsible for business development and revenue in the Americas, while Kenworthy will work on program and delivery management, which has been much of his role at Cornerstone since its founding.
Ashby said that within the recruitment and talent acquisition industry, he’s seen somewhat of a trend of consolidation and private equity investment because of what he sees as a large investment required to compete in the industry.
He noted that Hudson Talent Solutions is a “private-equity backed, public company.” A Hudson representative confirmed this description, adding that Hudson is a portfolio company of Connecticut-based Star Equity Holdings, whose stock trades on Nasdaq.
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