The Story Behind Recruiting Intelligence: How Four Years of “Butchering” Led to Category Creation

Not every startup story begins with a stroke of genius. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Amit Bhatia shared how his company’s journey started with what most would consider a failure.

“The first four years of this company, I butchered,” Amit candidly admits. Before founding his recruiting intelligence platform, he had done “everything” – from investment banking to neural net engineering “before anyone called it artificial intelligence or anything cool.”

While at Morgan Stanley, covering recruiting tech companies like Indeed and Monster, Amit had two realizations that would shape his future. “My goodness, recruiting is massive,” he recalls thinking. “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.”

His second insight was equally compelling: “How much work there is yet to do in recruiting.” The contrast with other business functions was stark. “You could spend $100 in Google Ads today and you could target with incredible precision… 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.”

Instead of rushing to build a solution, Amit took an unconventional approach. He bootstrapped a job search engine with no intention of monetizing it. “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?”

This research period, which Amit describes as “doing a PhD on the space,” led to a breakthrough insight. “I had this epiphany. The same exact job can be written in five different ways with five completely different outcomes,” he explains. “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.”

When they finally launched their product in 2019, they didn’t just solve the job description problem – they recognized that recruiting’s fundamental issue was organizational. “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 explains. “In fact, the vast majority of recruiting activities are done by hiring managers.”

This insight shaped their entire go-to-market approach. Rather than building just another recruiter 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.

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. “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.”

The key to achieving this vision? Putting hiring managers at the center and bringing consumer-grade experiences to enterprise recruiting. “The only reason the hiring manager is not in the driving seat today is because… the tools or the processes are too complicated or too arcane and that has to change.”

By taking the time to truly understand the problem space before building a solution, Amit’s team has positioned themselves to potentially redefine how organizations think about and execute recruiting. Sometimes, the path to category creation starts with admitting what you don’t know – and being willing to spend years finding out.