AI’s Impact on Outbound Recruiting Just Made it Easier

Shannon Pritchett & Steven Jiang of hireEZ

If you’re in the mode of hiring, which almost everyone is with all the staffing shortages, outbound recruiting should be on your mind. On a recent HR Happy Hour episode I had the pleasure of doing a deep-dive discussion about this with HireEZ‘s CEO, Steven Jiang, and their Head of Marketing and Community, Shannon Pritchett. From the first moment of the conversation, you could feel the excitement and passion for solving problems for business leaders. Formerly known as Hiretual, a rebrand to HireEZ was done to more accurately reflect the mission and capabilities of the organization.

In 2020, Hiretual announced a $13 million Series B round of investment. Now, amidst the re-brand to HireEZ, they announced an additional $26 million in venture capital led by Conductive Ventures. Their vision is to hold Outbound Recruiting as it’s own, new category. While there are many skeptics out there who wonder how this risk will pay off, or if it will, I am optimistic. Why?

Is there a need for Outbound Recruiting as a Category?

I spent the first five years of my career in active recruiting roles as a primary function of my job and the next 15 years leading and coordinating with our recruiters. I’ve been thinking about the way magnetism and attraction work in recruiting my whole career. This experience gives me the perspective of what recruiters are still dealing with decades later: not enough candidates from inbound recruiting efforts, not enough time to recruit the number of candidates needed, and how to find better skill matches for positions. And while there are some creative recruiters and sources out there who literally work magic, for many organizations it remains a daily struggle. Add to that the “Great Resignation” and it’s a perfect time for a vendor to make a bold move to make the whole approach radically different.

Outbound recruiting is not “new”, but applying modern technology approaches to it is. I like to think of outbound recruitment as the art of the search and artificial intelligence augments the approach beautifully. Instating of replacing recruiters with AI enabled bots or solutions, HireEZ claims they make the recruiters more productive. According to Shannon Pritchett, CMO, HireEZ pulls over 750 million candidate profiles from 45 open web platforms.

The solution is designed to help organizations have visibility into any underrepresented talent and reduce hiring bias.

Creating a New Environment for Hires

In our HR Happy Hour discussion, Shannon summarized the mission and direction for HireEZ and for outbound recruiting. “It is our mission to make outbound recruiting easy. We want to create the environment where jobs find people. That’s the way it should be, especially in a candidate driven market, let the jobs start finding the people. We’re not trying to make recruiters lazy, we’re trying to take more off their plate, focus on the things that we all got into this industry for. I don’t think any recruiter or sourcer got in this industry to mine job boards and mine LinkedIn. We want to say out with the in and in with the out.”

Time will tell if this category takes off in a new way. From the sound of it, there are millions more dollars in investment waiting to help drive the recruiting market forward. Stay tuned…