The Hidden Playbook Behind BrightHire's Category Creation Strategy

Creating a new software category is often portrayed as a marketing exercise. But for BrightHire co-founder Ben Sesser, the path to establishing "interview intelligence" as a standalone category has required much more than clever messaging – it's demanded a fundamental rethinking of how hiring should work in modern organizations.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ben shared the strategic decisions and counterintuitive approaches that have shaped BrightHire's journey to define and own a new category in the talent acquisition space.

The Decision to Create vs. Join

While many startups are advised to join existing categories rather than create new ones, BrightHire took the road less traveled. 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... we felt it was so different from what existed before."

This wasn't just founders' optimism – it was grounded in a clear observation of market dynamics. "If you look at things like OpenAI GPT... 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," Ben notes.

Learning from Category Creation Masters

Rather than reinventing the wheel, BrightHire studied successful category creators like Gainsight. Ben points to their playbook: "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."

This insight led to a crucial realization: "No amount of marketing is going to create a category," Ben emphasizes. "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."

The Long Game of Community Building

Instead of pursuing quick wins, BrightHire invested in building Shine, a community for talent acquisition professionals. Their approach was deliberately non-commercial: "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 explains.

This long-term mindset extends to their sales approach. Rather than traditional feature/benefit selling, BrightHire's team engages in deeper discovery conversations "connecting the value our product delivers back to pain."

The Education Challenge

Category creation requires extensive market education, but Ben's team discovered an unexpected advantage: "The companies that were talking to use the phone and Zoom and Google meet" rather than existing video interviewing technology. This meant they could focus on solving immediate pain points rather than displacing incumbent solutions.

Their education strategy centers on demonstrating transformational value: "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 explains. By making these critical moments visible and actionable, BrightHire helps organizations treat hiring with the same rigor as other mission-critical processes.

Looking Ahead

For founders considering category creation, Ben's experience offers a valuable framework: focus on delivering transformational value, invest in community before commercialization, and prepare for the long game of market education. As he puts it, "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."

The goal isn't just to create a new software category – it's to fundamentally change how organizations approach critical processes. In BrightHire's case, their mission is clear: "to give everyone the hiring experience they deserve... We truly believe that there's an opportunity for us to transform the way hiring works forever."