Inside BrightHire’s Category Creation Strategy: 5 Counterintuitive Decisions That Paid Off
Most startups are advised to avoid category creation. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, BrightHire CEO Ben Sesser revealed five unexpected decisions that helped his company establish and lead the interview intelligence category.
- Embracing Category Creation From Day One
While many startups try to fit into existing categories, BrightHire took the opposite approach. As Ben explains: “Early on were bright eyed and bushy tailed and we’re excited about this prospect of bringing something new into the world. That’s one of the, I think, traits of founders, is you’re excited about bringing innovation. And so we quickly said, hey, this is a new category because we felt it was so different from what existed before.”
- Prioritizing Customer Success Over Marketing
Instead of relying on marketing to establish their category, BrightHire focused on customer success. Ben emphasizes: “No amount of marketing is going to create a category. What’s going to create a category is extremely happy customers telling their peers how great something is, and more people adopting it such that it hits a tipping point and goes to that sort of classic adoption curve.”
- Building a Non-Commercial Community
BrightHire created Shine, a community for talent acquisition professionals, but made the counterintuitive choice to keep it separate from their commercial interests. “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 notes.
- Rethinking Sales Conversations
Rather than traditional feature-benefit selling, BrightHire transformed their sales approach: “If we are bringing a slightly different, newer version of something that people are already using today with existing budget, we would be having much more of a features, functionality, and pricing conversation… But for us, there’s a lot more discovery and then there’s a lot more conversation that we have where we’re connecting the value our product delivers back to pain.”
- Focusing on Future Technology Trends
Instead of competing with existing solutions, BrightHire positioned themselves as part of an inevitable technological shift. Ben explains their thinking: “Did we believe that five years from now all of that would exist but hiring would still be pen and paper notes and people’s memories? That was not a feature that we felt reasonable.”
The Strategy Behind These Decisions
These counterintuitive choices weren’t random – they stemmed from a clear observation about the market. As Ben explains: “If your team is the most important grief for your success. And hiring is how you build your team. Then hiring is among the most important activities that you do as a business. But the way it’s done day to day doesn’t necessarily reflect that at all times.”
This disconnect between importance and execution created an opening for a new category. “At the heart of the hiring process is a series of conversations and decisions that drive every outcome. And those conversations and decisions are our black box and kind of random,” Ben notes.
Learning from Category Creation Masters
BrightHire’s strategy was informed by 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.”
For founders considering category creation, Ben acknowledges it’s not an easy path: “Category creation is definitely always a challenge, even if the rewards are great. You’re educating the market on a new, better way to work. So it takes a lot of time and it’s always a work in progress.”
But when executed well, category creation can align business success with meaningful impact. As Ben puts it, “We’re very lucky in that this opportunity sits in the middle of a Venn diagram. That’s like a big opportunity that has a real mission to it that I’m inspired by personally. Right? There’s lots of big opportunities that I’m not inspired by. There’s a lot of missions that aren’t big opportunities, but I truly believe that we sit in the middle of that Venn diagram.”