From User Pain to Product Evolution: How Humanly's Founder is Rethinking High-Volume Recruiting

Personal experience often shapes the most compelling startup stories. For Humanly founder Prem Kumar, it was witnessing the stark contrast in interview experiences between himself and a female classmate at the University of Washington that first planted the seeds of his venture.

"We'd compare notes from the interviews and we'd be interviewing with the exact same companies for the exact same job, with the exact same interview panel," Prem shared in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. "It would just perplex me how different the interviews were... she was being grilled as a woman on a lot of questions that I wasn't on the technical side."

This early observation evolved into a deeper understanding of systemic inefficiencies in high-volume recruiting. Instead of viewing hiring teams as inherently biased, Prem recognized a technological gap: "Hiring teams aren't innately biased. They're not bad, they just don't have the tech to really engage with candidates at scale in these high volume scenarios."

The journey from insight to execution wasn't immediate. After ten years at Microsoft and a stint at TinyPulse, Prem's path to founding was marked by careful consideration, particularly around benefits and family impact. "That one thing probably held me back for two or three years," he admits, referring to healthcare concerns. "I might have gone sooner if I answered that question sooner or put in the research to answer it sufficiently to myself and my family."

Y Combinator proved transformative for Humanly's approach to product development. Rather than building comprehensive solutions immediately, Prem embraced focused iteration: "Build something that a small group of people love and hopefully that small group of people is representative of a larger market."

This philosophy led to systematic user research - 55 detailed interviews tracked in a spreadsheet breaking down industry, demographics, and pain points. The process yielded unexpected insights about candidate experience: "Even the candidates that didn't get the job rated it very strongly, which was a surprise... treating them with respect and kind of following through, even with a simple, not like auto generated follow up email, can go a really long way."

In crafting their go-to-market strategy, Humanly took deliberate steps to differentiate in the crowded HR tech space. "There's kind of two strategies I've seen founders take," Prem explains. "One is just getting very specific in who you're solving the problem for... In our case, it's a little bit of a combination of both. We're not helping you hire for engineers... We're very much focused on these high volume, entry level roles."

Their approach to category creation draws inspiration from Drift's conversational marketing playbook, but with a crucial distinction. "When people think conversational AI, they're thinking chatbot," Prem notes. "But to me, conversational AI for recruiting is about any conversations you're having with job candidates, not just the automated ones... how do you make that more efficient and more equitable?"

The emergence of advanced AI tools like GPT-3 hasn't derailed this vision. Instead, Prem sees opportunities for targeted application: "We're using our own generative AI built on top of GPT-3 to automatically generate follow up emails for recruiters... using the generative AI as well as other technology in ways that isn't just throwing technology to human problem."

Looking ahead, Humanly aims to scale their impact dramatically. "Can we turn that to a million [conversations] a month?" Prem asks. "I'm basically saying there's now a million screening conversations that might have been done in an unstructured way... but now all of those million per month are happening in a more structured, less biased and more efficient way."

This focus on measurable impact extends beyond traditional metrics. "These are numbers we share with our investors, the impact metrics as well, not just the financial ones," Prem emphasizes, highlighting how Humanly's mission drives both its product development and go-to-market strategy.