The Process Problem: How Four Years of Research Revealed Recruiting’s Real Challenge

Most founders rush to solve the first problem they see. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Amit Bhatia shared how four years of research revealed that recruiting’s challenges run deeper than broken job boards or outdated tools.

The Initial Hypothesis

Like many observers, Amit initially thought the problem lay with major platforms. “Until then, I thought, oh my God, why is LinkedIn so bad? Why is indeed so bad?” he recalls. But his research revealed a more fundamental issue.

The Research Journey

Instead of building a solution immediately, Amit took an unconventional approach. “The first four years of this company, I butchered,” he admits. “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.”

This period, which he describes as “doing a PhD on the space,” led to a surprising discovery. “I had this epiphany. The same exact job can be written in five different ways with five completely different outcomes,” he explains. “And then I realized, LinkedIn indeed aren’t bad. The jobs are terrible.”

The Organizational Challenge

But poor job descriptions were just a symptom of a deeper organizational problem. “Marketing is done by marketers. Sales is done by sales folks. Finance is done by finance people. Recruiting isn’t just done by recruiters,” Amit notes. “In fact, the vast majority of recruiting activities are done by hiring managers.”

This insight explained why traditional recruiting tools weren’t solving the problem. “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.”

The Market Gap

This misalignment created a striking efficiency gap. “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,” Amit explains. “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.”

Building the Solution

Understanding this organizational challenge shaped their entire product strategy. Instead of building another recruiter-focused tool, they created a platform that could be used across the organization. “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,” Amit notes.

Their approach has resonated across industries. “A large university doesn’t even use recruiters. They just hiring managers or department heads directly writing on our platform,” Amit shares. “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.”

The Future Vision

Looking ahead, Amit sees an opportunity to transform recruiting from a cost center into a strategic advantage. “Today, as an industry, we spend somewhere like $70 billion wastefully on recruitment, marketing and executive search,” he notes.

The key to unlocking this transformation? “Until we figure out how to truly build an organization wide system and process, recruiting will always be stuck in the dark ages.”

For B2B founders, this story highlights the value of deep problem exploration before solution building. Sometimes the most valuable insights come not from building faster, but from taking the time to understand why existing solutions aren’t working. The real opportunity often lies not in building a better tool, but in rethinking the entire process.