Revolutionizing Hiring: Ben Sesser on Building BrightHire and Transforming Talent Acquisition

Ben Sesser, CEO of BrightHire, discusses creating the interview intelligence category, transforming hiring with AI, and building better, fairer hiring experiences for companies and candidates alike.

Written By: supervisor

0

Revolutionizing Hiring: Ben Sesser on Building BrightHire and Transforming Talent Acquisition

The following interview is a conversation we had with Ben Sesser, CEO & Founder of BrightHire, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $36 Million Raised to Build the Interview Intelligence Category

Ben Sesser
Thank you for having me. 


Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, absolutely. So. Yeah, I’m Ben. I’m the co-founder and CEO of BrightHire. We’re a venture backed, SaaS company built to make hiring better, more effective, fast, and fair. And before building BrightHire, I’ve been in growth stage tech companies as an operator for the last dozen years or so. But my roots were in the HR and talent space where BrightHire operates. So I started my career at a publicly traded company that was a research advisory firm with a lot of focus on the HR space. And I was doing corporate development and strategy there, so MNA partnerships and that sort of thing. And I actually majored in labor relations. So was one of the few people that went to school related to HR that carried it through for their career. 


Brett
And what was it about HR that drew you in early on in your career? 


Ben Sesser
That’s a good question. I think actually my earliest interest was really around kind of like education empowerment. So my entree into the world of HR was through careers being a vehicle for economic empowerment for individuals. Education is a part of that. The career you land is part of that. And so that was an area of interest of mine going back to Undergrad and something that I felt really passionate about and beyond education. Started to think about just how important the decisions that one is able to make and does make around their careers and what they’re going to do for a living is for their life. Right? Their family and their personal success in life and how to bring more order into that, how to bring more equity into that was something that was very top of mind. 


Brett
Nice, makes a lot of sense and super interesting. Now, two questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder and entrepreneur. First one, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them? 


Ben Sesser
This is a pretty hard question. I honestly wouldn’t say that there’s like, a single founder that I idolize or look up to. I think I’ve certainly been inspired by a lot of famous entrepreneurs and their stories. So I love Shoe Dog about Phil Knight and draw things from that. But a lot of the entrepreneurs that I look up to, I know personally, and I say I draw inspiration from very specific traits that they have, be it their energy, their empathy. Some entrepreneurs are very risk taking. Some of them have incredible analytical abilities to break down problems. And so I in general, try to spend time around other founders role. And I’m inspired by primarily their resilience. It takes a lot of resilience to be a builder and to go through ups and downs. And that’s something that I will always respect anyone who’s kind of put themselves in the arena and tried to build. 


Ben Sesser
So it doesn’t necessarily need to be someone who’s famous or successful because I think there’s a little bit of survivorship bias around some of those. Now, of course, there’s like repeat entrepreneurs that have built businesses over and over again. And I always find that to be astonishing because there’s so much timing and luck involved. But I draw a lot of inspiration from people that I know personally and I try to spend some time with. 


Brett
Nice. Love that. And you mentioned Shoe Dog there. Are you aware that there’s a movie? I just found out there’s a Nike movie coming out soon. 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, I just saw that. Somebody famous. Is it like a Ben Affleck movie or I can’t remember exactly who’s in it. But yeah, I did see that and I’m definitely excited to check it out. And I think a lot of entrepreneurial stories, there’s always a lot of crazy twists and turns, and that one’s certainly no different. And so definitely a book worth picking up if you’re looking for something to read about and learn about a CEO and a business builder. 


Brett
Yeah, absolutely. And what about other books? Are there any other books that have had a major impact on you and this can be one of the classic business books or just a book that really influenced how you personally view the world and how you interact with people. 


Ben Sesser
And all of that? Yeah, it’s another good question. So there’s definitely again, it’s kind of similar answer. There’s not like a single business book that is my sort of bible for entrepreneurship. It’s not like I opened The Art of War every night, but definitely I was influenced by ideas from the lead startup the first time I read it, way back when, and how you approach kind of hypothesis driven business building. I was inspired by ideas in sort of zero to one and others. But honestly, from an entrepreneurship perspective, I think the book that I was most inspired by is actually not a business book, it’s Endurance. So it’s the story of Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to Antarctica. And I think I started reading that right around the time we started building BrightHire. And it’s just one of those stories that’s almost so unbelievable, you can’t imagine that it’s true. 


Ben Sesser
And again, a lot of startups is about enduring and moving forward and finding a way. And that book is, if you haven’t read it, very inspirational in that regard. It’s one of the most amazing stories that you’ll ever read. 


Brett
Yeah, I read that and it was like, one of my nighttime books. So I try to read books to try to somewhat put myself to bed or distract my brain. And I read that and then I finished it and then they found the boat or the ship, like, the next week. I’m like, wow, this is crazy. I was so excited. I can’t believe they found me. 


Ben Sesser
I know. It’s pretty amazing. 


Brett
Do you have any other adventure books like that you like? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, so after I read that one, I went on a kick and read some others. There’s a book called river of Doubt which is about Teddy Roosevelt in South America, kind of like traversing the rivers in Brazil. Incredibly dangerous voyage. I actually almost died in that. So that one was pretty amazing. I read a story about Merryweather, like Lewis and Clark and their voyage across the country. So I went on a kick after the Shackleton book and read a bunch of those types of stories which all of which were fantastic and inspiring and gives you a little bit more mojo to the work that you’re doing every day. 


Brett
Nice. Yeah, we’ll have to exchange notes on that because I had a very similar journey and I haven’t heard of those. But I really. 


Ben Sesser
Definitely recommend river of Doubt. It’s a good one. 


Brett
Nice. I’ll check it out. Yeah. It’s refreshing, I think, to get outside of the traditional business books. I feel like at some point they’re all just kind of saying the same thing. But when you read books like Endurance, I think you learn a lot of valuable business lessons and just life motivation that’s outside of business. But it certainly seems to apply, I think, in a lot of cases as well. 


Ben Sesser
Totally agree. 


Brett
All right, well, let’s dive deep now into BrightHire. So can you tell us about the origin story behind the company? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, as I mentioned a few minutes ago. So my connection to impassion for the people side of business goes pretty far back and kind of studied it as a strategist and at a research advisory firm and then had the opportunity to see kind of firsthand how important people are to the success of businesses at a few different scaling companies that I was at, where you could just point to individual people and see that person is one of the big reasons that we’re successful. And if they weren’t here, we would have a different outcome. And so it’s kind of a first hand reminder of that. And at the same time, in a few of those roles. I was wearing sort of an operational and a finance hat. Right? So people are also our single biggest investment. So they’re driving every outcome. They’re the number one reason for our success of failure, and it’s the number one investment we’re making. 


Ben Sesser
On the one hand and on the other hand, I felt like there was a big disconnect between the importance if your team is the most important grief for your success. And hiring is how you build your team. Then hiring is among the most important activities that you do as a business. But the way it’s done day to day doesn’t necessarily reflect that at all times, particularly relative to the way that we treat other really important processes in our business, like go to market and product development in terms of the rigor, the discipline, the data, the kind of the constant attention and focus. And so that was kind of the context for BrightHire, seeing that at the heart of the hiring process is a series of conversations and decisions that drive every outcome. And those conversations and decisions are our black box and kind of random. 


Ben Sesser
And it felt like in the future, if people are still really important to the success of every organization, which we firmly believe, there had to be a smarter, better way to do that. And so interviews was a great place of focus in hiring decisions because they’re at the heart of the process. Right? And so if you’re going to solve the most important, potentially one of the most important processes that’s going to set the stage for your success, go right to the heart of it. That’s kind of most broken and that’s kind of where we focus our attention. But it’s hard to get interviews right, and so there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that I can get into. But it just seemed like that was a tremendous opportunity to solve that problem and then create a more systematic way to hire better, make it more efficient, more effective, with less bias. 


Brett
And looking through your site as the logos grew by, it’s essentially every dream big unicorn tech company that someone would want to work with. So what’s the secret? How were you able to break through the noise and capture the attention and earn the trust of all these impressive logos? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, I’d love to tell you that there was a magic wand, but I think ultimately the first stop is do you have a product that is going to solve an important problem for folks? And I think all the companies on our site that you’re looking at and the rest of our clients, they share some common traits and principles. And primarily they are very talent, forward organizations that want to treat hiring as a discipline, as something that should be a competitive advantage and certainly a strength of their organization because they know the stakes are really high. And so finding early on the right sort of psychographic, the right folks, and bringing something to the table that has a clear connection back to the thing that they care about is really important. And ultimately a lot of the early great clients that we brought on board started pretty early in our company formation process. 


Ben Sesser
These were folks that we talked to early on to validate the concept, to get feedback as we built the business and built the product such that when it was the right time to put something in their hands that could work functionally, they were already bought in. And at the same time we had validation from the market before we invested a bunch of time. 


Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And talk to me about market categories. So is interview intelligence, is that a widely accepted category? Is that a line item that most organizations have carved out now or is that a new category that you’re pioneering and really pushing to create? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, that’s a great question. We are in the broad sense in an existing category, right? Video interviewing is something that folks have done for a long time, but the category itself has transformed quite a bit from the days when just having a software platform where you could talk to somebody on video remotely and do an interview was the thing to what we do. So the subcategory interview intelligence is new, we are the leader, we’ve educated the market and we can talk about that process. And so we are bringing something new to the table that folks haven’t done before. But what they have done before is interview. And increasingly, certainly post pandemic on doing so, on zoom and meet and teams. And so that affords an opportunity to do things and get a set of capabilities that were impossible before. By having this technology mediated conversation you can create value in ways that you weren’t able to before. 


Ben Sesser
So that was really the crease that we stepped into and once we did that were able to layer on so much value for all the stakeholders in the process. And so yeah, definitely we exist within a broader existing category but what we do is new and interview intelligence is a new thing and yeah, we’ve been at the forefront of that. 


Brett
And do you envision eventually it’s going to really be its own standalone market category or is it always going to be a subset of the video interviewing category? 


Ben Sesser
Well, I think we’ve created a pretty big distinction in terms of what we do relative to the historical products in this space. And so we certainly believe that the opportunity space that we occupy is going to be a big standalone category over the long haul. Without a doubt, there is so much value for adopting what we do. It makes such a demonstrable and immediate difference to the quality and the efficiency and the equity of hiring. So yeah, we certainly believe that it’s a standalone big opportunity unto itself. And there’s quite a big distinction between sort of what we do and the existing players that lived in the space for a long time. 


Brett
And do you think that existing category eventually just goes extinct and is replaced by interview intelligence? Like, will video interviews even exist without the interview intelligence component? Like, is there a world where that makes sense or is it all going to be interview intelligence at some point? 


Ben Sesser
It’s a great question. Yeah. I mean, again, the capabilities that we’re layering onto the process, it’s hard to imagine that you’d want to do interviews not the way that we’re supporting folks doing them in the future. And just to give you a quick sense, we are helping every single interviewer run a better conversation in the moment. Right. We’re automatically recording transcribing the conversation. So that just like I’m focused on you now, not writing everything down. You’re telling me that’s what you could do in an interview, which is really important, you have such a finite amount of time with a candidate to evaluate them and understand if they’re going to be a fit in your organization. And we’re talking about decisions that are tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so to not spend every second of that limited time at full attention with full focus and also delivering the experience a candidate wants right in that regard is a big miss. 


Ben Sesser
And then after the conversation, we create shared context for decision making. Right. Brett, if you and I were going to go try to buy a company or start a company or make another big decision together, we would be sharing spreadsheets and memos and have all the shared context to align and make those decisions. But that’s not actually the case in hiring today. Right. It’s a lot of trading notes and games of telephone, which given the stake, is almost kind of incomprehensible. And then systematically we’re helping the process run better. Right? So we’re helping people ask us the right questions at the right time and we’re giving a bunch of insights back to organizations that help them understand the effectiveness of their hiring process and the equity around it. And so when you think about all those capabilities layered on to relative to what existed before, which is just a conversation that happens and disappears and becomes like a few bullet point notes, it’s such a gap, right? 


Ben Sesser
And so it’s hard to believe that’s not where the world moves. Which is why we started the business. We sat back and said AI and technology are going to really revolutionize the way that we do nearly everything, right? And particularly within work. And so in the context of all that sea change, which if you look at things like OpenAI GPT, I mean, it’s very palpable right now, did we believe that five years from now all of that would exist but hiring would still be pen and paper notes and people’s memories. That was not a feature that we felt reasonable, which is why we started business. 


Brett
Makes a lot of sense. 


Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B two B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast, I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. 


Brett
In looking through the site, it seems like it’s very intentional that you’re owning Interview intelligence. You literally do own Interviewintelligence.com looking at that site. Old way, new way. I’m guessing there’s a clearly defined category strategy here, or at least a clearly defined strategic narrative that you’re building on. Is that fair to say? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, totally. When you are creating a category, there’s a bunch of things that you have to do that are distinct from operating in an existing category and maybe just being a disruptor, but still fitting nicely within the lane of an existing category. And so we are definitely leading into a lot of those best practices and things that we’ve learned from looking at other great companies that have created categories historically, whether it be around branding or education or formalizing the category in the right places, there’s a whole bunch of things that go into it. 


Brett
Are there any inspirations that you have or any specific companies that you’ve looked at their approach to category building and just felt really inspired by them? 


Ben Sesser
That’s a great question. Gainsight is a company that comes to mind. We know some of the folks that were involved in the building of that business and before they existed, there was no purpose built software for customer success. Right? And so they did a whole bunch of things that I think others have tried to emulate following them that were really successful. They built a really strong community in customer success, which was kind of nascent at the time. They did a tremendous amount of education and content development around best practices to codify what great looks like in customer success and create thought leadership. And so they just did a bunch of things that I think others have tried to emulate later that proved to be really important to establish a whole new category in software and to build a brand that wasn’t just associated with a solution, but was associated with a movement. 


Ben Sesser
So that’s one, I think HubSpot is another one that folks look at. Their original founding was really around this idea of inbound demand versus outbound and content and so on and so forth. And so I think they had some of those principles in place as well. 


Brett
Yeah, I love both those companies, but I especially love Gamesight. And they’re one of the companies that I reference a lot when it comes to category creation and category design. Because like you said, they just really nailed it with identifying that customer success managers were an underserved demographic and there was a market for that. Yeah, they’ve done such a good job. One thing in the things you listed out there you failed to mention is his wrap, nick Meadows Customer Success Wrap. Have you ever seen that video? 


Ben Sesser
Yes. Nick is someone I’ve been fortunate to know a little bit and spend a little bit of time with. And I think that rap is amazing. I think in general, his leadership style is one that I really appreciate. 


Brett
Yeah, he comes across it’s cool. So a big question there. When is your hip hop tape going to drop? When are we going to see the Rap come out? 


Ben Sesser
That’s a great question. I think those moments are, at this point, strictly for BrightHire off sites thus far. And so I think TBD on when I’m going to bring the cameras behind the scene of a BrightHire karaoke night and release it to the world, but noted. And I’ll talk to our marketing team about when that makes sense. 


Brett
Sounds good. I’ll be anxiously waiting for an update here. Now to dive in here. Just a few more questions on the category side, since so many of the founders listening in are either thinking about creating a category or actively trying to create a category. So when you set out to build the company from day one, was that clear in your mind that this was going to be a new category? It was going to be called interview intelligence or was there a real discovery process that led to you eventually making that decision and coming up with that term? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, that’s a great question. I know there’s lots of checklists and things that have been put out into the world in regards to sort of making the decision as to whether or not you want to create a category or join an existing one. I think a lot of folks that have created categories generally say if you can fit into an existing category, you should probably do that from like, hard Lessons Learned and those sorts of things, which makes a lot of sense. Category creation is definitely always a challenge, even if the rewards are great. You’re educating the market on a new, better way to work. So it takes a lot of time and it’s always a work in progress, I think, for a long time until things get really established. And so I think early on were bright eyed and bushy tailed and we’re excited about this prospect of bringing something new into the world. 


Ben Sesser
That’s one of the, I think, traits of founders, is you’re excited about bringing innovation. And so we quickly said, hey, this is a new category because we felt it was so different from what existed before. And we felt that the value was transformational and we didn’t want to get bucketed with solutions that were truly pretty fundamentally different in terms of the way that they’re used and the value that they create. So we didn’t really have a drawn out conversation. We kind of went headlong into, hey, we’re creating a new category. What’s the best way to do that? Early on and looking back, I’m not sure we would have done anything different. Part of category creation is really hard, but it’s also really fun. You feel like a little bit swashbuckling, like you’re imposing a change on the world and things are not going to be the way they were before. 


Ben Sesser
And I think that’s something that our team draws fun and inspiration from on a regular basis because we see the impact. 


Brett
And early on, did you have any pushback from either investors or what a lot of founders tell me is the sales team where they have the sales team saying that it’s very hard to sell a new category, it’s much easier to sell into an existing category. Did you have any pushback like that from either sales investors or anyone else early on, or was everyone bought into this idea of a new category from the early days? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, I think were all bought in. When you’re at the juncture when we’re having a conversation about whether we should create a category or join an existing one, the sellers are myself and my co founder. There wasn’t a big sales team to sort of push back on the notion we would be the pushback. Evidently we didn’t. So that wasn’t really part of the equation. And I think among our investors, yeah, it wasn’t really a big point of contention. I think everyone felt like this is a different new and different enough way to do things that it really didn’t make sense for us to kind of talk about it in the context of the historical category. In particular, because the companies that were selling to out of the gate weren’t using existing video interviewing technology which had been really the purview of large enterprises. The companies that were talking to use the phone and Zoom and Google meet. 


Ben Sesser
So yeah, it wasn’t really a big debate among the team. 


Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Now let’s talk about go to market challenges. So I’m sure at some point you’ve experienced a couple of challenges along this journey. So if we had to pick one major go to market challenge that you experienced and overcame, what’s that challenge and how’d you overcome it? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the category creation is honestly probably what I would point to. Again, there’s a lot of education involved and that just adds a new factor in your marketing. It adds a new factor in how you manage a sales process and what the conversations look like, how advisory you need to be versus sort of more transactional. Right. If we are bringing a slightly different, newer version of something that people are already using today with existing budget, we would be having much more of a features, functionality, and pricing conversation. It would be about, do you want to continue to use the product that you’re using, or do you want to use our product which has these differentiated benefits relative to that product? But for us, there’s a lot more discovery and then there’s a lot more conversation that we have where we’re connecting the value our product delivers back to pain. 

 

Ben Sesser
And to some extent, it can only be it’s best learned through experience. And so early on, you have just true believers are your customers that get it right away, and then there’s honestly a bunch of folks that don’t get it. And that’s okay. Not everyone’s going to get it right away. I think the important thing in terms of how we tackled it is you have to have raving customers because there’s no validation for a new category, that no amount of marketing is going to create a category. What’s going to create a category is extremely happy customers telling their peers how great something is, and more people adopting it such that it hits a tipping point and goes to that sort of classic adoption curve. And so category creation, again, is not for the faint of heart. For those reasons, and I would say the only way to be successful, but a critical attribute to be successful, creating a category, is just. 


Ben Sesser
You actually have to deliver a tremendous amount of value to the market, to your early customers, and magnify their successes to validate why other folks should spend their time and attention investing in what you do. 


Brett
And did you have to train your brain to really buy into this idea of making long term investments? That’s one of the other things that I’ve heard from a lot of category defining founders is it’s a total change in mindset. You have to really stop thinking about short term ROI and immediate metrics that are seeing the needle move. But how did you train yourself to do that? Was that hard for you to do? Or what was that experience like? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah. Are you thinking about in particular from a go to market investment perspective? 


Brett
Yeah, exactly. So what I’ve seen is there’s marketing metrics that you want to be able to measure, and obviously everyone wants to focus on ROI and leads and deals. But what I’ve seen with category creation is a lot of time you’re just investing in the education to create the demand for the category term. And that’s a long way from there until that’s going to generate an ROI and drive revenue for the company. So I guess the question there is, did you have to convince yourself and train your brain to be okay with playing this long term game? Or were you. Able to do that just right from the start? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think we are kind of doing two things at once. I think were all pretty bought into some of the investments that we would have to make to ultimately find success in category creation and trying to lean into those early on, I think really early on, some of those are really challenging to invest in because you simply don’t have the resources to do so. When we got a little bit of scale and you could have more dedicated personnel and resources to things like content and that sort of thing, I think were all really bought into how important that would be. My co founder spent a fair bit of time at LinkedIn and one of the roles that he played there was kind of harnessing all of LinkedIn’s data to tell stories that explain the value of what they did or told. 


Ben Sesser
It very interesting stories. And so we kind of walked into this business with that being something that were really excited about, which is we’re going to capture all this incredibly valuable data and we’ll be able to educate the market with that data and tell really interesting stories with it. And it will create this sort of long game benefit to us. And so I don’t think there was a big training the brain exercise that we had to go through necessarily because were excited about that from the get go. But the reality is that you have limited resources and capital and those sorts of things early on and so you’re not necessarily able to do all of those things when you’re really small because you simply don’t have the resources. 


Brett
Yeah, makes sense. And I see on the site that you have a community called Shine. Can you talk to us about that community and just the overall role that community led growth is playing in your go to market? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, so Shine has been a community that we’ve had in place for maybe 18 months or maybe a little bit longer. We tried to facilitate a community of folks in the talent acquisition space, even going back to when it was just myself and my co founder sort of trying to build a bit of momentum around what were doing and part of our research process. And we knew that community was important for category creation from conversations with like the folks from Gainsight. But just because it’s important doesn’t mean there’s an opportunity to build a community. A community requires people that need community that are seeking it. And it kind of became evident almost in a surprising way over the first year, maybe a year and a half of our business, that talent folks didn’t have great communities to the level we would expect to just simply share best practices. 


Ben Sesser
And so given that we knew that community could be really beneficial for category creation and just given that part of what we want to do is build goodwill and give back to the Ta space because we again believe in the long term benefit of that. We kind of dipped a toe in the water and started inviting folks into a community and facilitating connections around it and found that people were immediately very drawn to it and it was a space that people needed. And so it’s grown quite a bit and been fantastic. We don’t use it for commercial purposes. We don’t advertise and talk about BrightHire in there. It’s really a separate space for the Ta professional. We do some facilitation and some best practice sharing and that sort of thing. But we know that over the long arc of our business, this is a space that we all care about and are passionate about. 


Ben Sesser
And part of the reason that we love it so much is that there’s a lot of best practice sharing. It’s not like a highly competitive space in terms of company A won’t tell Company B what they’re doing. Well, people are really open to sharing. And so we know that by facilitating that, ultimately it’ll pay dividends in terms of the associations that folks have with our brand and our ability to tap into that community for feedback and product development and a variety of other things. 


Brett
Makes a lot of sense. You have to say, my takeaway from this interview really is play the long game. If you’re going to go down the category creation path, you have to be prepared to play the long game. And doing these types of things like building a community but not trying to commercialize it or monetize it, that’s definitely a long term strategy. And it’s really fascinating and interesting to hear your perspective and fun to hear about someone who’s really doing this, not just talking about it. In theory. 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, again, it’s a long game. So we’ll do the V two of this interview in five years and we can talk about how successful Shine was and whether or not some of the things that we’re talking about ultimately paid all the dividends that we hope they would pay. But again, part of it is particularly around things like education community. We also started this business and so many of our employees, they work at BrightHire because they’re passionate about making hiring better, because we believe it’s incredibly important for every individual, for every organization. And so to be able to give back to the community is something that we just find to be really important and don’t need to quantify the value on a week to week basis to kind of know that’s the case. 


Brett
And last question here for you. Let’s zoom out now into that three year, five year vision. What’s the future of the company? What do you want it to look like? What do you want the impact to be on the talent acquisition community as a whole and just the industry as a whole? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, it’s a great question. So our mission is to give everyone the hiring experience they deserve. And so when we say everyone, we mean everyone. We mean the company, the individuals on the other side of the table who are candidates. And we truly believe that there’s an opportunity for us to transform the way hiring works forever. And if you think about what that means, it’s quite an inspiring mission for us. Because, again, people’s experience day in, day out is so driven by the careers that they have, the doors that are open to them, the colleagues they work with, the success of their organizations. And so if you can make a dent in that’s a pretty transformational outcome today. We’ve done that for thousands and thousands of individuals. Those are folks that have been interviewed and hired after being interviewed on BrightHire and so forth. 


Ben Sesser
And over five years, we’d love to get that to the million mark. And if we’ve done that says a lot about other things that we’ve accomplished. Right? It says that we’ve gotten a tremendous amount of adoption, which means that we’ve had a huge impact from a mission perspective. And if we’ve had that level of adoption, I believe that we’ve also had quite a bit of business success as well. I’m very lucky in that this opportunity sits in the middle of a Venn diagram. That’s like a big opportunity that has a real mission to it that I’m inspired by personally. Right? There’s lots of big opportunities that I’m not inspired by. There’s a lot of missions that aren’t big opportunities, but I truly believe that we sit in the middle of that Venn diagram. And for me personally, it’s quite a place to be able to operate. 


Brett
Amazing. Ben, this interview has been so much fun. Really enjoyed learning from you, hearing your story, hearing this vision, and just really hearing about your category creation efforts. So before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build both this company and category, where’s the best place for them to go? 


Ben Sesser
Yeah, bryhire Aibrehire.com. We own both, so you can check us out there. Follow us on LinkedIn. You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well. And, yeah, I’d be excited to continue the conversation with other folks listening along who are thinking about jumping in and starting a business. 


Brett
Awesome. Ben, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. Really appreciate it and look forward to having you back on in a couple of years to reflect on all of these efforts and this epic vision that you’re working on. 


Ben Sesser
No, thank you, Brett. This is really fun. 


Brett
All right, keep in touch. 


Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a PDB founder looking for. Help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode. 


Brett
Search for Category Visioners on your podcast platform of choice. 


Brett
Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Write a comment...