Founded in 2020, Humanly aims to be leading conversational AI platform for high-volume talent acquisition, by facilitating two-way conversations for candidates and recruiters.

It counts The Key, Moss Adams, HCA Healthcare, and Worldwide Flight Services among its users.

In June last year, the Seattle-based startup raised $12 million, to take its total funding to date to $17.8 million from investors including Drive Capital, Spark Growth Ventures, Chaos Ventures, Zeal Capital Partners, and Y Combinator.

John Brazier: What is Humanly’s unique selling point? What makes your proposition special?

Prem Kumar: Our focus is to save time in the recruiting process, particularly with screening and scheduling, by creating the best candidate experience – including diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging – in a way that allows customers to really show off their brand to the candidates they’re engaged with.

Making the direct, two-way conversations with candidates more efficient and equitable differentiates us from standard chatbot companies – some ways we facilitate this are over SMS, chat, or with our co-pilot for interviewers. It shouldn’t feel like they’re talking to five different companies.

We believe if hiring teams had unlimited time, money and resources, every candidate process would start with a conversation. Obviously, humans don’t have time to talk to every candidate that might apply, so in this high-volume recruiting space, using technology can mean everyone gets at least a consistent elevated experience and a conversation.

JB: How is Humanly trying to change the world?

PK: We honestly believe in an outcome for every candidate and every candidate getting a two-way conversation with a company. Because of the high-volume problem and a lower barrier to entry through the number of platforms (LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.), there are hundreds of people wanting attention from your organization but you can’t give it to all of them.

This leads to shortcuts, like resumes, or other ways of quickly trying to figure out what someone is about, because we don’t have time to talk to them all for 30 minutes.

I believe in a future where we move away from those shortcuts, or even just looking at pieces of them, and change the way anyone applies for a job, whether it’s having a conversation via technology or a human.

We also find it’s better for companies; it’s like driving one million people to our website but because we have a really small sales team, we can only talk to five percent of the people that want to buy our product. That’s what’s happening in recruiting where candidates are saying they’re interested but not being engaged properly.

JB: What is your message to HR leaders and decision-makers?

Prem Kumar, co-founder and CEO, Humanly

PK: We’re going to save you a bunch of time. Generally, we’re automating about 90% of the tasks that happen from an interview including screening, scheduling, and note-taking. We’re also broadening the net, letting you talk to anyone that comes to you at a career fair, through the website, QR code or SMS; we’re going to expand the top of the funnel, so you’re talking to everyone, but saving you a bunch of time so that you’re only meeting with the most qualified candidates.

Right now, recruiting coordinators are doing a lot of the manual work. We want those recruiting coordinators to be recruiters – we want them to get promoted and to spend time on the actual human conversation while we automate everything else.

It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; we have to solve basic needs first. Once we get there, we’ll expand it through quality – quality of candidate flow, quality of candidate, quality of candidate experience.

JB: What is the next strategic objective for Humanly?

PK: Right now, the goal is about growing. We’re at about 300+ companies using Humanly either direct or through partners. Over the course of this year we want to get out and grab a bunch more market share. We’re sitting on a product and experience that has 4.7 NPS, even candidates that don’t get the job rate us about 4.5. So, we know we have a strong product.

Going forward we want to be the hub for any two-way conversation with candidates, we are constantly evaluating where candidates are and how they like to be engaged. We are also looking at building the right team; we’re growing and hiring right now to build a productive and diverse team.

Another strategic goal is just a focus on customers, getting this in the hands of more customers, with a heavy emphasis right now on hiring in the banking, financial and healthcare sectors.

JB: What one trend will be top of mind for HR leaders in the next 12 months?

PK: There’s certainly a lot of hype and excitement around AI, of course. A lot of organizations are looking at it but there isn’t a similar level of trust. I haven’t seen anything like this since cloud computing when I was at Microsoft, enterprise technology that so many people were adopting, or about to adopt, was untrusted.

It’s like hiring a salesperson that’s off the charts in their resume and making all these promises; if you don’t trust them, you’re not going to hire them.

So, for me, the trend is about meeting actual results and taking all the promise of AI – thinking about ethical and responsible AI as well – and taking the veil off, with buyers actually getting familiar with this and having real business results from it.

There is a trust barrier to be bridged. It’ll be a smaller subset, maybe machine learning, that’s going to be predominantly used as buyers gain more knowledge.

UNLEASH Startup | Spotlight is a monthly Editorial interview series where we speak to and profile the best and brightest technology startups the HR world has to offer. Want to feature in the series? Get in touch with john@unleash.ai to find out more.

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