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Highlights
From Recruiter to Founder: How Kula is Transforming Recruiting Into a Team Sport
Sometimes the most compelling startups emerge when founders deeply understand their industry’s pain points from hands-on experience. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Achuthanand Tanjore Ravi shared how his decade of recruiting experience at companies like Stripe and Uber led him to build Kula, a recruitment automation platform that’s raised $14 million to transform how companies approach outbound recruiting.
The Evolution of Recruitment Technology
The recruitment industry has historically lagged behind other business functions in technology adoption. As Achuthanand explains, “If you look at Martech, if you look at sales tech, those businesses are very far ahead in terms of the adoption of technology in their day to day use cases.”
This technology gap stems from recruitment’s historical evolution. “Recruiting actually started in World War Two, where they were just posting ads on papers to recruit folks to fight,” Achuthanand notes. “It moved from paper ads to online ads. Like job boats came. And what the next evolution after job boats? There was literally nothing much.”
The Market Shift That Created an Opportunity
A fundamental shift in the recruitment landscape created the opportunity for Kula. “Earlier organization post jobs and we as a candidate will probably go and apply and pray that they respond to us,” Achuthanand explains. “But now candidates are not actively going and applying for opportunities, and opportunities basically being seized by the talent folks within the organization and they’ve been head ended.”
This transition from an employer-driven to a candidate-driven market demands more sophisticated tools. Traditional applicant tracking systems focus on organizational workflows – moving candidates through stages, managing interviews, and handling onboarding. But they miss a crucial element: the recruiter’s workflow.
Building a System of Action for Recruiters
Kula differentiates itself by focusing specifically on recruiter workflows. “We are the only system of action tool which solves for recruiter workflows,” Achuthanand emphasizes. The platform concentrates on two critical channels for building top-of-funnel recruiting:
- Referrals – Creating a new category with Kula Circles
- Passive outbound recruiting – Competing in the existing recruiting automation space with Kula Outreach
The company’s mission is ambitious but focused: “Our mission at Kula is to sort of make every single one a recruiter within the organization,” says Achuthanand. “Recruiting is a team sport, not an individual sport.”
Finding Product-Market Fit
Since launching their alpha product in February 2022, Kula has gained significant traction, particularly among tech-forward companies. Achuthanand notes their sweet spot: “We generally focus on organization less than 1500… organizations between one to 50 or one to 60, generally the founders are the decision makers.”
The company’s go-to-market strategy varies based on company size. For smaller organizations, they sell directly to founders. For companies with more than 50 employees, they target “the head of recruiting or their first recruiter or their sourcing organizations.”
The Road Ahead
Looking forward, Kula is expanding beyond top-funnel activities. “The next path forward for us is mostly around concentrating on the midfunnel,” Achuthanand shares. “That is mostly around how do I bring all those comms in one centralized place, how do I get in touch with the candidate, how do I call directly on the platform.”
For Achuthanand, who started as an engineer at Microsoft before accidentally discovering his passion for recruiting through a chance meeting with a startup founder, the vision is clear: transform recruiting from an individual pursuit into a true team sport, empowering everyone in an organization to contribute to the hiring process.
Actionable
Takeaways
Adopt a Design Thinking Approach:
The impact of design thinking on product development, as influenced by the book "Creative Selection," illustrates the importance of user-centric approaches in building SaaS products. Even for founders without a background in product design, adopting a design thinking mindset can lead to more innovative and user-friendly solutions.
Focus on Specific Workflow Solutions:
Kula's success in addressing recruiter workflow challenges demonstrates the effectiveness of developing solutions tailored to the specific needs of a target user base, rather than broad organizational needs. This strategy can be a differentiator in crowded markets, providing clear value to users.
Embrace a Global Mindset from the Start:
Kula's approach of being a global company from day one is a testament to the advantages of thinking beyond local markets and considering a diverse customer base early in the product development process. Tech founders should consider a global perspective to maximize their potential market and address universal pain points.
Identifying and Experimenting with Distribution Channels:
One of the primary GTM challenges Achuthanand mentioned was identifying scalable distribution channels for Kula. The process involves continuous experimentation to determine whether inbound or outbound strategies are more effective. For B2B tech founders, this emphasizes the importance of agility and willingness to test different approaches to find what works best for reaching their target customers.
Making Every Employee a Recruiter:
Kula's mission to make every individual within an organization a recruiter speaks to a broader GTM philosophy of embedding their tool into the fabric of the company's operations. For tech founders, considering how your product can become indispensable to an organization's workflow and culture could be a pivotal aspect of your GTM strategy.
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