The Story of Humanly: Building the Future of Conversational Recruiting

Great startup stories often begin with a moment of clarity that reveals a systemic problem. For Humanly founder Prem Kumar, that moment came in 2007 at the University of Washington, where he witnessed the stark differences in how tech companies interviewed him versus his female classmate.

“We’d be interviewing with the exact same companies for the exact same job, with the exact same interview panel,” Prem shared in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. “It would just perplex me how different the interviews were… she was being grilled as a woman on a lot of questions that I wasn’t on the technical side.”

This observation stayed with Prem through his ten-year tenure at Microsoft, where he served as PM for their global HR portal. The experience gave him deeper insights into enterprise HR challenges, but the leap from corporate security to startup uncertainty wasn’t easy. “I had just had my first kid who’s now seven, and I’m leaving kind of a lot of familiarity,” Prem recalls. Healthcare benefits, in particular, proved a significant mental barrier: “That one thing probably held me back for two or three years.”

The transition began with a move to TinyPulse, focusing on employee engagement. This intermediate step proved valuable, as it was where Prem met his future co-founder and gained crucial insights into the HR tech landscape. “I felt a lot of that started with hiring,” he explains. “We found there’s a lot of tools to help track candidates, applicant tracking systems, a lot of sourcing tools, but there weren’t tools to help you have a better conversation.”

Founding Humanly in 2020, the team went through Y Combinator with a clear mission: make hiring conversations more efficient and equitable. Rather than trying to boil the ocean, they focused intensely on high-volume recruiting scenarios. This focus led to surprising discoveries about candidate experience: “Even the candidates that didn’t get the job rated it very strongly, which was a surprise… treating them with respect and kind of following through, even with a simple, not like auto generated follow up email, can go a really long way.”

The emergence of advanced AI tools like GPT-3 has accelerated their vision rather than derailing it. “We’re using our own generative AI built on top of GPT-3 to automatically generate follow up emails for recruiters,” Prem shares. But he emphasizes that technology should enhance rather than replace human interaction: “Using the generative AI as well as other technology in ways that isn’t just throwing technology to human problem, but kind of helping things happen faster or more efficiently.”

Looking ahead, Humanly’s ambitions extend far beyond their current success. “We definitely want to win this conversational AI for recruiting space,” Prem declares. His vision involves scaling from their current volume to “a million [conversations] a month,” ensuring these interactions happen in a “more structured, less biased and more efficient way.”

This isn’t just about growth metrics – it’s about fundamental market transformation. “The impact we’re making to candidates is going to be a huge way that I measure our success,” Prem emphasizes. “These are numbers we share with our investors, the impact metrics as well, not just the financial ones.”

At its core, Humanly’s story is about recognizing that hiring isn’t just a process problem – it’s a human interaction problem that technology can help solve, not by replacing human judgment but by making it more consistent, efficient, and fair. As they continue to scale, their mission remains clear: ensure every candidate conversation contributes to a more equitable hiring landscape.