The following interview is a conversation we had with Daniel Birkholm, Founder & CEO of TalentHub, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $6M Raised to Transform How Organizations Measure and Improve Their Hiring Experience
Daniel Birkholm
Thanks for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building there at TalentHub, let’s start with the quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Daniel Birkholm
Yeah, sure. Yeah. So Daniel based in Copenhagen. In Denmark. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 18. Today I’m 33, started out building a company with one of my good friends when we are still high school kids. And that company is actually today marketed in Denmark with an attraction of young people. Just reached 100 employees. So a school project that actually went into a real company five years ago, we got a new idea, basically and would see that all the stuff that we knew about employee branding and attraction, et cetera, that we could convert that into a global, scalable business. And that was the reason we found a teletub.
Brett
Amazing. And two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as an entrepreneur, what CEO do you admire the most and what have you learned from them?
Daniel Birkholm
Yeah, I thought about this question because I think we have some quite cool Danish founders that I would like to shout out to. One of them is an old guy, Last. Last and is his name, founded one of the biggest Danish successes called jusk retail chain. And I think what he did to me, starting out on his own and 30 years later, they are all over the world, selling in most of Europe, also in Canada and so on. I think that’s amazing and amazingly executed. So I actually think he would be my favorite. But I also have a Founder who’s invested in us. Christian Brinkford Dixon, CEO and Founder of Leap Work. I admire him a lot. I think he’s a great CEO, great Founder. So, yeah, those are the names.
Brett
Nice. And what’s the biggest startup in Denmark who is like the big hot unicorn that everyone talks about?
Daniel Birkholm
Unity Technologies might be the thing. I mean, also I tend to say that Just Eat was founded by yesterday book. So here in a basement in Denmark, I guess that’s also a pretty amazing company. Skype was one of the first venues, tech startups that went all the way through. So that’s also one of the companies that we’re super proud of.
Brett
And how would you describe the state of the startup ecosystem there in Denmark.
Daniel Birkholm
Over the past years? It has really developed. I think we have seen Danies, especially tech scale ups with lots of traction, raising bigger rounds than ever before. And there are also definitely more money available for Danny startups, which is super good. The ecosystem really starts to work. We have founders of Peacon, founders of Unity, founders of Base Cam and so on that are investing back in the ecosystem and they can attract also money from the US. Et cetera. So better than ever before. Better than ever before.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing to hear. And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this could be a business book or just a personal book that’s really shaped how you view the world?
Daniel Birkholm
In my early years as an entrepreneur think what I really need to figure out was selling that was crucial for building the first company to understand how to sell yourself, how to sell the product, how to sell the concept, et cetera. And I read a book by Frank Betker called How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. And I was 20 years old and that just made a crazy difference for me, being a young guy new into sales. So that was really good for me. And then I would actually say within the past five years, the book that I’ve read that made the biggest difference is probably good to great. I think it has a lot of great stuff in it, great principles. I’m a huge fan of execution and I think that’s a book about how to do that the best possible way.
Brett
Nice. I love that book. It’s crazy how it’s really stood the test of time as well. When was that originally published? Wasn’t it like 20 or 30 years ago? Something crazy like that?
Daniel Birkholm
Something like that. And the studies, I think they started out in what was it? 60s or 70s or something.
Brett
Nice. Love that. Now let’s talk about the origin story of TalentHub. I know you touched on that at the start, but let’s go back day one. What really prompted the company to begin and at a high level, what’s the pitch that you make to customers?
Daniel Birkholm
Yeah, so I was active in our first company and was sitting with customers and one day I was sitting with a customer and he said to me, you know what, Daniel, we are really not in the business of recruiting. We are in the business of rejecting because we are rejecting a lot more people than we recruit. And that view on things were new to me. We had done a lot of attraction campaigns and were focusing on how to get applicants for companies, et cetera. But then I was curious and asked, so how many candidates do you have? And it was crazy. I mean, for that specific as a graduate program, they wanted to hire, I think it was 100 people and they had 10,000 applicants. And then I was like, what are you doing with the past all the remaining 9900 and what do they feel about your company after that?
Daniel Birkholm
You have rejected them and so on. And that was a black box and that was where went into a meeting room, me and a few from teams and were like, okay, this is a problem if companies have no control over their candidate experience, if they don’t know what candidates think of them. After that, they have been through a recuper process. And at the same time, we had just implemented an employee engagement tool and were fascinated a lot by the idea of data and how to be data driven. And then were like, why is this not a part of a talent acquisition tech stack? So that was actually the reason we started TalentHub. And we did that back in 2017, the first year and a half. It was basically a company running next to the old company and then I jumped over as full time CEO in 2019.
Daniel Birkholm
In short, TalentHub is a company helping companies all over the world to measure and improve their hiring experience. We are not an applicant tracking system, but we make it super easy for companies to understand their own hiring experience. And through data we help them to optimize it and basically transform as big a portion of the candidate pool to ambassadors as possible.
Brett
And when you’re selling to hiring teams, where are you seeing the most adoption? Is this big enterprise? Is it mid market SMBs? Where are you seeing the most traction and adoption so far?
Daniel Birkholm
Definitely bigger companies. So bigger companies with several recruiters hiring manager driven approach to recruitment, where you have a centralized talent acquisition team that are responsible for the recruitment process, but where the execution can be in several departments, several countries, et cetera. So when you’re sitting as the, for instance, global head of Ta, you need data to understand if the process that you have designed is also what is happening. And that’s where our product really can make a difference.
Brett
And when it comes to market categories, how do you think about market categories? Is this the candidate experience category or what is your actual market category?
Daniel Birkholm
Well, I’m a huge believer of that. Recruitment is on the change under transformation these years. I truly believe that recruitment is becoming candidate centric and it’s going from being company centric. The job ad is created by the companies. It’s the companies today owning the applicant tracking systems. It’s the companies sending out links to the candidates so they can do a personality test, et cetera. I believe that because of the power dynamics are changing in recruitment, that recruitment is getting more on candidate terms and the category that we would like to pioneer, we would like to call candidate centric recruitment. But of course we are a part of recruitment. We just think that something new is on its way.
Brett
Got it. And what are you going about try to create that category and get the market to understand the need for a new tool like you?
Daniel Birkholm
Well, I think that the product we brought to market and have brought to market now is an example of a good starting point creating data and awareness around candidate experience. Use that to make before. Talent companies didn’t have any insights into this, meaning that they did not understand that they potentially had a problem and that data can bring awareness and that awareness very often also create innovation. Because then the next step for companies would of course be okay. There are things we can do better when we are hiring that maybe are not prepared good enough for interviews or are happy with what we are writing, with our mail communication or whatever. And then the next step would of course be to innovate that and improve it. And that’s where we have also brought products to the market where we are more an active part of delivering a candidate experience.
Daniel Birkholm
For instance, we have created a telehub candidate learning center making it possible for companies to prepare candidates better, set them better up for success during a hiring process.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And are you seeing adoption in the US market or is most of this in Europe?
Daniel Birkholm
Yeah, we are. I mean, of course we have had most traction in Europe because that’s where we are based and where we have had our focus. But we have definite attraction from the US. I think we are onboarding is it a handful of US customers on a monthly basis right now. So super good to see. And yeah, we actually love working together with those customers because they really get it. So they’re actually quite mature when it comes to data driven recruitment and candidate experience.
Brett
And do you see there’s a difference between the US market and Europe or is it pretty similar?
Daniel Birkholm
I think the US market might be a bit quicker at actually deciding, to be honest, to implement our product. We have a bit shorter sales cycles in the US than we have in Europe. But when implementing the product, the business cases, et cetera, that’s more or less the same also because we are mostly dealing with global companies. So even though we have European customers, they also have foot on the ground in the US. And they’re also using the product in the US.
Brett
Nice. Makes a lot of sense. And are there any numbers or metrics you can share that demonstrate the growth and progress that you’ve seen so far?
Daniel Birkholm
We more or less tripled our growth the first year. The past year here we have doubled it. We are getting ready to raise our Series A round next year, meaning that we are close to $2 million on our annual recurring revenue right now. And yeah, for us it’s all about keeping the traction but also at the same time actually expand our product offering. So we are working on keeping the metrics as good as possible but also bringing new stuff to the market because there’s room for a lot of innovation and improvement when it comes to recruitment to be honest.
Brett
And what would you say has been your greatest challenge in your go to market so far and how did you overcome that challenge from the very beginning?
Daniel Birkholm
Maybe also because of the book that I mentioned in the beginning, we have focused a lot of on outbound and have been really aggressive on pitching to customers and I think that because that have been the focus, we haven’t really put that much focus and succeeded that much with inbound in our go to market. So that’s definitely some of the things that we are focusing on now and also partnerships actually, so that our go to market are not only one track but have several strategies and then that has been a bit of a struggle to be honest. But it’s also hard with enterprises. They are easier to get on outbound than they are on inbound. That’s at least my experience.
Brett
Yeah, that’s what I’ve seen as well. And last couple of questions here for you. What would you say excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
Daniel Birkholm
I would say three things. I think it’s amazing to see that our product are used in today more than 160 countries. As an entrepreneur and Founder, that’s just amazing. And seeing big brands like Red Bull, Volvo, Pandora, Snowflake, et cetera, using TalentHub to innovate their hiring process, that’s amazing. And then of course it’s also amazing building a company and doing it with great people and that amazed me a lot. I feel very fortunate to be the CEO for a lot of passionated people from I think we have more than 15 or 20 backgrounds in the team who have chosen us, chosen TalentHub either to join us or to stay with us because of the journey we are on. That’s amazing.
Brett
And last question here, if we zoom out into the future, what’s the three year vision for TalentHub?
Daniel Birkholm
We have first of all, of course launched more products for the companies but we have actually also launched services for the candidates. Then most likely or hopefully we would have raised both series A and B. That means that we would be much bigger than we are today. And as a part of this, I expect us to have foot on the ground in the US. Maybe I’m even there myself, maybe all on the ground for a continent. So we both have Hero, us and then one other. So that’s what I imagine.
Brett
Amazing. Well, unfortunately that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Daniel Birkholm
LinkedIn talenthub.io awesome.
Brett
Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to chat, talk about what you’re building and share your vision. This all sounds super exciting, and we look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Daniel Birkholm
Thank you, Fred. It was a pleasure talking to you.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. Our.
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