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How TalentHub is Creating the Category of Candidate-Centric Recruitment

When a customer told TalentHub CEO Daniel Birkholm, “We are really not in the business of recruiting. We are in the business of rejecting,” it sparked a realization that would reshape his entire approach to the talent acquisition market. This single conversation revealed a critical blind spot in enterprise recruiting: companies had no systematic way to understand or optimize the experience of the 99% of candidates they reject.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Daniel shared how this insight led to TalentHub’s mission to pioneer the category of candidate-centric recruitment, offering a masterclass in category creation through data-driven awareness and strategic product evolution.

The Power of Customer Problems in Category Creation

The seeds of TalentHub’s category creation journey were planted in that pivotal customer conversation. As Daniel recalls, after learning about the massive scale of rejections, he asked the crucial question: “What are you doing with the remaining 9900 and what do they feel about your company after that?” The answer revealed a complete black box in talent acquisition.

This insight led Daniel and his team into a meeting room where they identified a fundamental gap in the talent acquisition tech stack: while companies had tools for managing employee engagement, they had no equivalent for understanding and optimizing candidate experience.

Breaking Free from Traditional Market Categories

Rather than building another tool in the crowded recruitment technology space, TalentHub recognized an opportunity to pioneer an entirely new category. “I truly believe that recruitment is becoming candidate centric and it’s going from being company centric,” Daniel explains. “The job ad is created by the companies. It’s the companies today owning the applicant tracking systems… I believe that because of the power dynamics are changing in recruitment, that recruitment is getting more on candidate terms.”

This shift in market dynamics provided the foundation for TalentHub’s category creation strategy. Instead of competing in the established applicant tracking system market, they focused on creating a new category centered around candidate experience optimization.

Data as a Category Creation Tool

TalentHub’s approach to establishing their category started with generating awareness through data. “Before, talent companies didn’t have any insights into this, meaning that they did not understand that they potentially had a problem and that data can bring awareness and that awareness very often also create innovation,” Daniel shares.

This data-first approach served two crucial purposes. First, it helped enterprises quantify and understand a problem they previously couldn’t measure. Second, it created natural pathways for product expansion, leading to innovations like their candidate learning center.

Enterprise-First Go-to-Market Strategy

While many B2B software companies start with SMBs and move upmarket, TalentHub took an enterprise-first approach. They focused on “bigger companies with several recruiters hiring manager driven approach to recruitment, where you have a centralized talent acquisition team that are responsible for the recruitment process, but where the execution can be in several departments, several countries.”

This strategy aligned perfectly with their category creation goals. Enterprise companies, with their complex, distributed recruitment processes, had the most to gain from understanding and optimizing their candidate experience at scale.

Market Evolution and Geographic Expansion

TalentHub’s experience across different markets has revealed interesting patterns in category adoption. “I think the US market might be a bit quicker at actually deciding, to be honest, to implement our product. We have a bit shorter sales cycles in the US than we have in Europe,” Daniel notes. This insight has informed their expansion strategy as they approach their Series A round.

Their growth trajectory – from tripling growth in their first year to doubling it in the next – validates their category creation approach. With annual recurring revenue approaching $2 million and usage across more than 160 countries, they’re demonstrating that creating a new category can be a powerful path to market leadership.

The Future of Candidate-Centric Recruitment

TalentHub’s vision extends beyond just creating tools for companies. As Daniel explains, their roadmap includes “launched more products for the companies but we have actually also launched services for the candidates.” This dual-sided approach further reinforces their category leadership position and sets the stage for continued innovation in candidate-centric recruitment.

TalentHub’s journey offers valuable lessons for B2B tech founders about the power of category creation through deep customer insights, data-driven awareness, and strategic product evolution. By identifying a fundamental shift in market dynamics and building solutions that address emerging needs, they’re not just creating a new category – they’re reshaping how enterprises think about talent acquisition.