BrightHire’s Community Building Playbook: How They Built a Non-Commercial Community That Drives Category Leadership

Most startups approach community building as a marketing channel. BrightHire took a different path, creating a community that deliberately avoids commercial interests – and in doing so, discovered a powerful engine for category creation.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, BrightHire CEO Ben Sesser revealed how their community strategy emerged from studying successful category creators like Gainsight. “They built a really strong community in customer success, which was kind of nascent at the time. They did a tremendous amount of education and content development around best practices to codify what great looks like in customer success and create thought leadership.”

Finding an Underserved Need

BrightHire’s community journey began with a surprising discovery: talent acquisition professionals lacked strong peer networks. As Ben explains, “It kind of became evident almost in a surprising way over the first year, maybe a year and a half of our business, that talent folks didn’t have great communities to the level we would expect to just simply share best practices.”

This insight led to the creation of Shine, BrightHire’s community for talent acquisition professionals. But rather than using it as a marketing vehicle, they made a conscious decision to keep it separate from their commercial interests.

The Non-Commercial Strategy

“We don’t use it for commercial purposes. We don’t advertise and talk about BrightHire in there. It’s really a separate space for the Ta professional,” Ben emphasizes. This decision wasn’t just altruistic – it was strategic. The talent acquisition space, they discovered, was uniquely suited for open knowledge sharing: “It’s not like a highly competitive space in terms of company A won’t tell Company B what they’re doing. Well, people are really open to sharing.”

Building for the Long Term

BrightHire’s approach to community building reflects their broader philosophy on category creation. As Ben notes, “We know that over the long arc of our business, this is a space that we all care about and are passionate about.”

This long-term mindset shapes how they measure success. Rather than tracking immediate ROI, they focus on facilitating connections and knowledge sharing: “We do some facilitation and some best practice sharing and that sort of thing. But we know that over the long arc of our business, this is a space that we all care about and are passionate about.”

The Hidden Benefits

While the community isn’t used for direct marketing, it provides invaluable benefits:

• Product feedback and development insights
• Deep understanding of industry challenges
• Strong brand associations
• Natural category education

As Ben explains, “We know that by facilitating that, ultimately it’ll pay dividends in terms of the associations that folks have with our brand and our ability to tap into that community for feedback and product development and a variety of other things.”

Lessons for Category Creators

BrightHire’s community strategy offers several key lessons for founders building new categories:

1. Community needs should drive strategy, not marketing goals
2. Long-term trust building trumps short-term commercialization
3. Facilitating peer connections can be more valuable than pushing content
4. Category creation happens through organic knowledge sharing

BrightHire’s approach shows that sometimes the best way to lead a category is to step back and let the community lead itself. As Ben acknowledges, the full impact of this strategy may take years to realize: “We’ll do the V two of this interview in five years and we can talk about how successful Shine was and whether or not some of the things that we’re talking about ultimately paid all the dividends that we hope they would pay.”

For founders building new categories, BrightHire’s community strategy offers a compelling alternative to traditional marketing-driven approaches. Sometimes the best way to create a category is to first create the space where it can naturally emerge.