Breaking the Tech Bubble: How Customer Diversity Became a Strategic Advantage in Recruiting Tech

Breaking the Tech Bubble: How Customer Diversity Became a Strategic Advantage in Recruiting Tech

When most recruiting tech startups chase quick wins with tech companies, they create a dangerous dependency. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Amit Bhatia shared how his company took a contrarian approach that proved crucial during market turbulence.

The Common Trap

“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,” Amit explains. The temptation was clear – faster sales cycles, easier adoption, quick growth. But his team saw a bigger opportunity.

Building for True Diversity

Instead of focusing on tech, they deliberately built a diverse customer base across industries. “Today our customers just span advertising agencies. They spend the Fortune 500. We work in 80 countries around the world. 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.”

The Insight Behind the Strategy

This wasn’t just about risk management – it was about building a better product. “The problem of recruiting is so large that we wanted to make sure that whatever were solving truly generalizes,” Amit notes.

This diversity has shaped their product development and market understanding. “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.”

Resilience During Downturns

The strategy proved particularly valuable during the 2022-2023 market downturn. “Tech is less than 25% of our customer base in our pipeline,” Amit shares. “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.”

Enterprise-Ready Evolution

This diverse customer base has also shaped their enterprise evolution. “My top priority is continuing to get us enterprise ready,” Amit notes. “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.”

Their platform has achieved remarkable penetration within large organizations. “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 explains. “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.”

The Future Vision

Looking ahead, this diversity positions them to tackle what Amit calls “the ultimate decision problem” in enterprises. “Today, as an industry, we spend somewhere like $70 billion wastefully on recruitment, marketing and executive search,” he notes.

Their goal isn’t just to build another recruiting tool – it’s to transform how organizations think about talent acquisition. “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.”

For B2B founders, the lesson is clear: while focusing on tech customers might offer faster initial growth, true category leadership often requires looking beyond Silicon Valley. By building for diverse industries from the start, you can create more resilient businesses and products that solve deeper problems.

The tech bubble is comfortable, but the biggest opportunities often lie beyond it.