The following interview is a conversation we had with Amit Bhatia, CEO of Data People, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $21 Million Raised to Build the Future of Recruiting Intelligence
Amit Bhatia
Hi Brett, thanks for having me on the show. Great to be here.
Brett
Not a problem at all. And I’m super excited about this. So I’d love to just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Amit Bhatia
Absolutely. I have been a Founder now for quite a few years. Before that, I have done everything. I’ve been an investment banker. I’ve been a neural net engineer before anyone called it artificial intelligence or anything cool. But while I was invested banking, I spent a long time covering the recruiting tech space, specifically companies like indeed and Munster. And I was gobsmacked by how large the space was, and I just couldn’t wait to be a Founder in it. And that’s why I decided to jump in and start a company in the space.
Brett
I love it. What was it like to leave behind Morgan Stanley?
Amit Bhatia
It wasn’t too difficult, mostly because it was an incredible platform to build off of. I mean, Morgan Stanley is just one of those great places to build a career. You meet and work with some phenomenal people. But one of the things that I was really excited about was I’d worked at one of the places which I thought had one of the best recruiting programs in the world, and yet it felt like it was still at its very infancy. And actually, when I was at Morgan Stanley, as covering companies like indeed, and Monster and Ziprecruiter and all of these incredible recruiting companies, I had two big epiphanies. One was, my goodness, recruiting is massive.
Amit Bhatia
Even when you think about the size of these companies, even the company like workday, which is nearly $100 billion, it’s not even a drop in the ocean in terms of how big this market is. But two is how much work there is yet to do in recruiting. I mean, you think about, you could spend $100 in Google Ads today and you could target with incredible precision, you could target specific demographics, you could get exactly how many leads, what the cost per lead is. But an average company can spend millions of dollars on hiring and not know how many candidates they’re going to get or when their jobs are going to get filled. That dissonance in our enterprise is staggering to me and I was just excited to go tackle that space.
Brett
Why did we see marketing evolve so fast and yet become so data driven while recruiting seems to have been stuck in the past and it hasn’t evolved as quickly?
Amit Bhatia
It sounds like I have a couple of theories. Theres obviously the very obvious theory, which is the revenue functions evolve quicker and marketing got a huge impetus in 2008 when the financial crisis hit. Suddenly all of the paid media did not work anymore. And then came along HubSpot and the idea of search and inbound and sort of all of these new methods of marketing came about that was so much more efficient. Recruiting is sort of having that epiphany now, right? I mean what Google did for inbound marketing in the mid two thousands, LinkedIn and indeed are starting to do for recruiting today, effectively having made every passive candidate an active candidate. But there’s a second aspect, which is why recruiting is a little bit slower, which is it’s a process problem. Marketing is done by marketers. Sales is done by sales folks.
Amit Bhatia
Finance is done by finance people. Recruiting isn’t just done by recruiters. In fact, the vast majority of recruiting activities are done by hiring managers. The job gets written by a hiring manager, the interviews get conducted by a hiring manager, the decisions get made by a hiring manager. But all of the systems of recruiting are built for the recruiter. Until we figure out how to truly build an organization wide system and process, recruiting will always be stuck in the dark ages.
Brett
Are you selling to recruiters or who’s the primary user of the tool? Is it recruiters or is it hiring managers?
Amit Bhatia
That’s where we’re a little bit different. We sell to recruiting teams, we sell to talent acquisition leaders, but with a lot of our customers, we end up activating usage both amongst recruiters as well as hiring managers. We end up having hundreds if not thousands of users across the company. We end up becoming one of the most used tools in their stack. Outside of LinkedIn, one of our large tech companies brings in every hiring manager. They have hundreds of hiring managers making decisions about hiring, about writing a job, about scoping wrecks on our platform. A large university doesn’t even use recruiters. They just hiring managers or department heads directly writing on our platform. And I think that’s an understated part.
Amit Bhatia
In the past, it used to all be emails flying back and forth, word documents being written in anger, and now it starts to happen in a systematic, thoughtful, data driven process.
Brett
Can you take us back to 2015? When you first founded the company? What did the first, let’s say, three to six months look like? What were you focused on, and what was your experience like then?
Amit Bhatia
I didn’t really start this company in 2015, and I want to clarify that for the audience. The first four years of this company, I butchered. And I started because I knew I wanted to work in this space. I knew I needed data, and I didn’t know how to go about it. So I started by bootstrapping and building a job search engine. For the first four years, I didn’t monetize it. I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to know, how do candidates search for jobs? How do companies post them? And why is it so frustrating for both candidates and employers? And during that time, it was fascinating. I call it doing a PhD on the space. I had this epiphany. I was like, my God, the same exact job can be written in five different ways with five completely different outcomes.
Amit Bhatia
In fact, until then, I thought, oh, my God, why is LinkedIn so bad? Why is indeed so bad? And then I realized, LinkedIn indeed aren’t bad. The jobs are terrible. That’s when I realized, and the reason these jobs are written differently wasn’t deliberate. Whatever the hiring manager thought of that morning, it was completely non gated. And so that’s when I had this epiphany scenes. I started to see products like Moz on the marketing side, like Grammarly. And I started to say, what if we had a product like that in recruiting, where you could write a job with data and you could think about how this job would perform in the market? And that’s when we raised our first round of funding and released the product in 2019, and it just took off.
Amit Bhatia
And so those first four years were fascinating, terrifying, because I was eating through my savings, but it was just an enormous, phenomenal experience of learning about consumer behavior and user behavior at its very core.
Brett
How did you begin to acquire customers then, in 2019, when you launched that first version or the next generation of your platform?
Amit Bhatia
We knew a couple of people who were struggling with certain types of jobs, and weren’t even sure, will our algorithm work and will some of the datasets work? But we knew we would because we had been running the search engine. And so we had a lot of really great data. We started to test it out with them. I remember we had this tech company in New York that was struggling with a handful of jobs, and we had a biotech company here and we tested it out and were just amazed. One is the experience for writing the job is so much better. But when they put it out there, not only were they able to get great qualified candidates, they were starting to solve all of their problems almost systematically. They were starting to get diverse candidate tools.
Amit Bhatia
They were starting to get more women applying to their roles. They were starting to get really thoughtful inbound applicants applying cold off LinkedIn. And so were like, wow, this is actually solving more problems than we realize. We were onto something. And then those customers started referencing us and referring us to other customers. Next thing you do, we had like a Fortune 500 customer calling us up on a Friday night saying, are you guys Soc two compliant? And I’m like, what’s Soc two compliance? We’re still four people, like, working out of a two bedroom apartment. But that’s, you know, we got another round of funding quickly. We did get SoC two compliance. We got enterprise ready pretty quickly, and we started to build out even more integrations, and it started to come together.
Amit Bhatia
But we knew were onto something at that point when we started to get more imbalance than we knew how to deal with.
Brett
How were you positioning the product then in those early days?
Amit Bhatia
In those early days, there was a couple of, definitely a push towards Deni. So theres a couple of companies who were very de and I forward, and they wanted to make sure that they were avoiding, some companies were just trying to avoid any massive employer brand for pause, or they were trying to avoid unconscious bias in their job descriptions. We had a few companies that were trying to make sure their titles were more SEO friendly so they could reduce the amount of money they were spending on promoting job descriptions on platforms like LinkedIn. And indeed. So the way were almost positioning our product was almost very tactical. At that point in time, if you were spending money on certain types of things, were trying to help you save money in those ways.
Amit Bhatia
We hadn’t really figured out at that point that there’s a workflow component, there was analytics component, there was hiring managers to all of this. We were still just targeting different point solutions you were using and helping you with a better solution that worked a little bit better.
Brett
So is your software a new line item that they had to create, or did it consolidate existing tools that they could eliminate altogether.
Amit Bhatia
At the time it was really about consolidating a lot of existing tools because what had happened all the way through the late 2010s was there been such a plethora of point solutions in recruiting. And so the stack had gotten cluttered up with lots and lots of point solutions that people liked and needed but didn’t quite know how to make work. They didn’t work really well with their stack. The budgets had bloated and recruiting ops was getting increasingly frustrated that none of these tools really worked very well together. What we started to figure out was we could replace them, but also really tightly integrate very well with the applicant tracking system and with the workflows so we could make our solution effectively solve so many systematic problems, but also drive usage and adoption in an organization. And that got some, that got them really excited.
Amit Bhatia
And I think this is a problem that will continue to happen as the market works itself out because we still have sea stacks that are just massively bloated and there’s a lot of point solutions that probably just need to get refactored out of these stacks in the long run.
Brett
And when it comes to your market category, what is the category? Is it recruiting intelligence?
Amit Bhatia
I think recruiting intelligence is an emergent category today. It’s a category that people understand and buyers understand. But there’s still a lot of dissonance in the market as to what it exactly means. And so there’s a lot of players, including us and a lot of other players that lay claim to being recruiting intelligence. And I think in the next three or four years you’re going to see a lot more clarity and standardization about exactly what does recruiting intelligence mean and entail. In the meantime, the market we are in today continues to be a very fragmented market because of the plethora of point solutions. So we’ve got lots and lots of micro categories so that we for example, operate in multiple micro categories. We operate in categories like job description management, we operate in categories like employer brand.
Amit Bhatia
We operate in a category like De and I. And there’s many players that overlapping interests. And I think over time some of those categories start to get consolidated.
Brett
Preston, is there anyone that doesn’t want these to be consolidated? Or maybe a better way to say it? I’m sure the companies that are in these micro categories don’t want them to be consolidated. But from a buyers perspective, and just from the market’s perspective, is there anyone saying they want to have it fragmented? They want to have these solutions that are just the best in the world at one thing. And then try to piece them together. Is there anyone in the market saying that or is everyone very much on board with this idea of consolidation? Let’s bring it all in under one platform.
Amit Bhatia
Thats actually a really thoughtful question. Its a little bit like the go to market stocks as well. I don’t think anyone out there says oh, we want to have fragmented categories. But what people often the way the categories get fragmented dependent on the pace of innovation. And if the pace of innovation of certain categories far out exceeds the pace of innovation of others and if theres early adopters. We saw this in the last five or six years when there was an enormous amount of venture capital money in recruiting tech broadly. And there was a lot of pace of innovation in specific areas that created a lot of point solutions. So those specific areas tend to be areas like sourcing candidate marketplace.
Amit Bhatia
And a lot of them tended to be areas where, you know, in recruiting they were porting ideas from marketing and from sales into recruiting better ways to outreach better ways, and then you reach a saturation .1 of the reasons why for the next three or four years I don’t see that trend continuing apart from perhaps less venture capital based recruiting demand sort of dominating the industry. I think whats happening now is theres been a consolidation happening in the applicant tracking space as well. Theres about 250 major applicant tracking systems were starting to see a little bit of consolidation happening there finally. And as you start to see that, you start to see more maturity around the stacks and better integrations and start to see that happen.
Amit Bhatia
And I think that’s a good thing because it means that you’re starting just like you saw around the Salesforce stack, the HubSpot stack, you start to see a better ecosystem develop around three, four, five players. Instead of having very fragmented point solutions because nobody wants to integrate because they don’t know who the right winners are going to be at the core platform level.
Brett
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Brett
Something I’ve seen in a lot of other emerging categories is exactly what you just described, where there’s all these different companies that are talking about the term, but everyone talks about it in a different way and it really becomes a war or a battle to get your definition of the category to be what the market buys into and the analysts buy into, and then they end up running with it. What are you doing on your end to make sure that your definition of how you define recruiting intelligence becomes that definition that everyone buys into and agrees with?
Amit Bhatia
I think you listen to the best customers and you try to build the most diverse customer base. One of the things that we’ve tried to avoid, it was very commonplace in the last ten years in recruiting tech and I think at any part of tech to go and build customers that were other tech startups or other tech companies. And there’s a temptation to do that because it was easier, faster sales cycles. One of the things that were very judicious about was we didn’t want a customer base that was entirely tech companies because it’s very, the problem of recruiting is so large that we wanted to make sure that whatever were solving truly generalizes. Today our customers just span advertising agencies. They spend the Fortune 500. We work in 80 countries around the world.
Amit Bhatia
We have multinational pharmaceutical companies, we have Allianz in Europe, we’ve got Densu in the largest advertising agencies here we’ve got Conagra, one of the largest food distribution and manufacturing brands in the world. We’ve got obviously tech companies like Block and DoorDash having this kind of diversity of customers, but also having those types of customers on our advisory board and our customer council, sort of giving us product feedback, helping us understand how to think about the problem of recruiting is enormously rewarding because it means that it allows us to start to think about the market in a really thoughtful and sophisticated way. And I think thats why I back ourselves to win as the definition in the market starts to emerge.
Brett
What about from a marketing perspective then, and then evangelizing your definition of recruiting intelligence, what are some of the tactical things that you are doing to get that message out to market?
Amit Bhatia
Theres a couple. One of the things that we like to do is to lead with data. We sit on an enormous amount of data. And if there’s one thing that recruiting has always been enormously hungry for and starved off, it’s great data sets. It feels like all the other functions in our organization have great benchmarks, have great data, but in recruiting they never seem to. But a year ago we put out this incredible tech hiring report. Six months ago we put out a report on the state of distributed and remote hiring we recently put out a bunch of data about deni trends. Each of those become enormously valued because there’s such a dearth of great benchmark data in our industry. And we want to continue to do that by putting out these types of metrics.
Amit Bhatia
I think the best way to ultimately influence the way we think is by helping define the metrics by which we measure success in our industry. And that’s the way we think about it.
Brett
What was the most surprising finding that came from that most recent report?
Amit Bhatia
The thing that continues to surprise me is the massive equity disparity that report work continues to have the equity disadvantage. So when the pandemic first hit, twice as many women applied to remote and hybrid remote jobs as applied to on site jobs. And that made sense because there’s such a disproportionate amount of caregiving burden and parental burden that falls on women in our society. But fast forward today with a more normalization. Not only are we seeing that two x hasn’t gone back to normal, it’s close to three and a half x. More women apply for remote roles than for non remote inequities. Baffling. But it also, it’s a phenomenal arbitrage opportunity for any company that’s struggling to hit DEI goals.
Amit Bhatia
Or this becomes an unlock, this becomes a mechanism with which you can potentially diversify your talent pipelines very quickly, and it behooves you to look into it. It’s these types of data driven advantages that companies can take advantage of to achieve their goals that we are interested in and process interventions that you can put in place.
Brett
I’m a huge fan of original research like this, and I’ve done quite a few of them. One thing that I always hear when I’m talking about it with companies is what’s the ROI? Or what’s the value of doing these types of research reports? So how would you articulate that? What’s the value that putting these research reports out into the world has brought the company?
Amit Bhatia
I think it shapes our thinking. I mean, we are studying the ultimate decision problem. And to think about putting a research report simply in terms of marketing pipeline is understates the role of such research and the role we see our company play. I think of this research as fundamentally core to our product. You had asked, how are we going to become the defining company, an emerging category of talent intelligence, effectively, how are we going to become $100 billion company in a trillion dollar market? And the only way we’re going to become $100 billion company in trillion dollar market is if we become the company that gets the defined, the defining metric. The reason HubSpot became a massive company is because they got to define customer acquisition cost and benchmark it, and everybody else rallied around their definition.
Amit Bhatia
We’ve got to be able to define the cost of hire metric in our industry that everybody rallies around. So to me, the ROI of the original research is the delta between a average startup outcome and $100 billion outcome. And everything else is cloth.
Brett
Just so we can understand the scale that you’re operating at today, are there any numbers or metrics that you could tease our audience with?
Amit Bhatia
Sure. Today we’ve got hundreds of customers, millions of dollars in ARR. We raised oversubscribed Series A in late in 2022, continue to see great growth in 2023. And what was also really great in 2023 was were able to successfully push up market both through landing great customers in the enterprise segment, but also by systematically driving expansions with our enterprise customers. In fact, 2023 was one of our biggest expansion years and were able to drive up our NRR in that cycle.
Brett
From my conversations with other founders and recruiting tech, a lot of them were having a kind of a hard time last year and in 2022 because a lot of companies hiring slowed and when hiring slows and recruiting slows, and then they don’t need recruiting tools and recruiting technology. Did you not experience that because you had diversified the customer base? Because a lot of those layoffs, that was in tech, at least until last week when it seemed like it expanded outside of tech. But is that why you were able to still grow last year?
Amit Bhatia
That’s exactly right. I think our tech, we certainly saw that tech was challenged like every other SaaS company serving tech. Fortunately, tech is less than 25% of our customer base in our pipeline. And while that was challenged, many parts of our business outside of tech were on fire. There’s both huge demand and enormous labor market tightness and a real focus on process. And then as the year progressed, we started to see a number of tech companies come back and started to see sort of demand slowly come back in tech. I wouldn’t say techs back, but I think theres certainly a portion of tech buyers ready to come back and start to think systematically about process and gear up for hiring again. So its really about diversity of customer base, both in terms of industry as well as in terms of geography.
Brett
That helps when it comes to your go to market, what would you say is the number one go to market lesson that you’ve learned so far?
Amit Bhatia
I think I’ve been surprised at how much a company can speed up an enterprise sales cycle by making the process data driven and immersive. So we’re not a PLG company, but one of the things that we’ve strived to do is use our datasets to make the process very rich and immersive. So when a company comes on board, every conversation we have with them is about their jobs, about their process, about their data sets. And because of that, even with our enterprise customers, with the land and expand motion, we’re able to keep sales cycles down to 30 days, often 40 days, without any struggle, even in tight times. And that has been a huge unlock for us all through our journey. And that’s a lesson that I’ve learned. People think, oh, enterprise sales cycles, they’ve got to be like six months a year.
Amit Bhatia
I fell into that trap early too, and I realized, no, they don’t have to be. You can keep them much tighter, much shorter. There is a lot more demand, even the land, and expand away if you’re willing to unlock it.
Brett
As you look to the year ahead, what’s your top priority and what would you say is keeping you up at night?
Amit Bhatia
My top priority is continuing to get us enterprise ready, and we’ve made a lot of progress on that. But it’s a journey, and you’ve got to get your whole organization, you’ve got to change every part of your process, every part of your thinking, your workflows around it. And thats been a really rewarding part of the journey, but a really exciting part of the journey. What keeps us up at night is the market coming back and us not being ready to really take advantage of it. I actually think that these tough market conditions have given us a wonderful opportunity to get out ahead of the market, get out ahead of the noise and be really disciplined and be really sort of present and try a lot of different things. And we’ve really taken advantage of it. And i’ve just quite excited by the year ahead.
Amit Bhatia
And I’m just dreading that the market conditions change on me. Again, final question for you.
Brett
Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building here?
Amit Bhatia
I think you’ll be solving the ultimate decision problem today. As an industry, we spend somewhere like $70 billion wastefully on recruitment, marketing and executive search. All of these sort of excessive amounts of discretionary recruiting, spending. Not to mention it continues to be the single most frustrating thing experience that both recruiters, hiring managers and candidates go through in their careers. I think we have an opportunity to make it not only not a frustrating experience, but make it the single biggest competitive advantage a company has. And the way to do that is by putting the hiring manager in the front and center in the driving seat. The only reason the hiring manager is not in the driving seat today is because we don’t want that hiring manager to be using birthday or we don’t want the hiring manager to be using greenhouse.
Amit Bhatia
The tools or the processes are too complicated or too arcane and that has to change. I think our vision in three to five years is to bring truly consumer ready user experiences and true intelligence and take the power of all of the AI innovations that we’ve seen in 2023 and bring them to recruiting and really level up recruiting teams to harness ten x efficiency gains. Because I think that’s possible and I think that it’s going to have a game changing effect both on our enterprises, but it’s also going to have a game changing effect on the way belt is distributed equitably in our society.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and I really love this conversation and I know it’s going to be a real hit with our audience. We are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired and they want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go?
Amit Bhatia
LinkedIn is the place to be. I’m pretty active on there. I have a regular webinar and virtual event series with some of our best customers and talent leaders. So hit me up on LinkedIn.
Brett
Amazing. Amit, thanks so much. It’s been a lot of fun.
Amit Bhatia
Brett, thank you for having me. This was great.
Brett
Keep in touch.
Brett
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