001. The “What Recruiting software should we be using?” Question, and why technology won't save you
A treatise on HR Tech and their startup customers
One of the most common questions I get asked from startup founders is: “What Recruiting software should I be using?”
Below, I will actually answer the question – I promise! But first, we should recognize that this is often the wrong question. In the tech industry, we’re biased towards using tech to solve all problems, but in reality, tech is not always the answer. So, before we get to specifics recommendations for a Recruiting Tech Stack, we need a broader, more important discussion about building a People function at a startup, and interrogate the narrative that we should throw money and technology at problems – because for many companies, this is a distraction from what’s actually important.
The Problem of HR Tech
FIrst, some context on HR tech, a notoriously difficult category that’s heavily favored by entrepreneur-types. Since most of us have been an employee at one point, it’s easy to connect to one of its many challenges and find a startup idea.
This means HR tech, much like the “Uber for X” trope of a bygone era, attracts founders in search of a problem (as opposed to founders in search of a solution). The combination of a lack of focus on the customer and first-time entrepreneurs’ misread of the market results in an abysmally low success rate HR Tech startups.
And so, HR tech has become extremely noisy. Competitive advantage in this space is rarely about Product, but Distribution (cue groans from Product-oriented founders).
Take the example of Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or Talent Marketplace startups – the trendy companies for each category are constantly in flux. What's shiny now will soon lose its luster, only to get overtaken by the next hot new thing. It’s relatively easy to acquire a set of early customers desperate for real help in hiring. All you have to do is promise them an easy solution that will solve all of their hiring problems, and the customer doesn’t even have to lift a finger.
But never trust what rises fast.1 Customers should be healthily skeptical of Recruiting tech that promises fast, great hires without internal changes and improvements. It’s like spending thousands of dollars on fancy guitars and a sweet sound system setup, but never actually putting in a day of practice.
From all my years as a Recruiter and People leader, I’ve seen what differentiates the companies that hire the best people – and it’s the *team* that’s using the software, not the software itself.
HR Tech… so what IS it good for?
Underneath the question “What Recruiting software should I use?” – the asker is usually trying to solve either Efficiency Problems, Judgment Problems, or both.
Efficiency Problems consist of: How do we collect resumes and respond to hundreds of people? How many clicks does it take to schedule an on-site interview? Who sends out the calendar invite to the candidate? Can all interviewers find the resume quickly? How do we measure baseline metrics of our pipeline activity and conversions? etc.
HR Tech is the appropriate solution for these Efficiency problems – at a certain scale. When it comes to managing volume-based tasks, technology is better suited than humans.
While Efficiency Problems are certainly painful and abundant at most companies – and making improvements will be impactful, not to mention damn satisfying – it’s Judgment Problems that are the heart of what’s hard, and this remains under-discussed and poorly understood.
Judgment Problems include: Who is the Hiring Manager and how do we know this person is equipped to identify and close a great candidate? What should the Job Description emphasize and de-emphasize? Salary position? Seniority level? Reporting structure? Timeline? Outreach strategy? Who will be on the interviewing panel and why? Are they trained on evaluation and selling, and how will we know when things are going well or not well? Who is in charge of candidate communications and what standards are we striving for? Who is ultimately making the hiring decision and how?2
There’s no one “correct” answer to these questions, and building a strong organization means going through the process of figuring it out, for Every. Single. Role. That’s what building a world-class team means – developing an organizational muscle for this work.
Building a People function is just as important as building Product or Sales. But while no reasonable person will challenge the need for improving Product and Sales – or assume you can solve everything by buying software – People work is still often perceived as something we can minimize or avoid.
And that’s the attitude that collapses all of the above Judgment Problems into the desire for a silver bullet, one that doesn’t make *me* do all of the work: “What Recruiting software should I use?”
Money can’t buy taste, and it also can’t buy judgment
There are plenty of HR tech players who will happily exploit startup founders’ insecurity and misguided search for The Easy Button. But Judgment is the foundation of Efficiency, not the other way around.
As mentioned, software tools *can* help with efficiency – once you’re operating at a scale where inefficiency is the main obstacle. Your ATS can’t help you decide who to hire (Judgment), but it can help you organize resumes in one place (Efficiency). This frees up your team from administrative work, and allow more space and time to work through a proper decision-making process. But if your interviews were never set up for success in the first place (a classic Judgment Problem), the data you gather is useless, and it doesn’t matter that all interviews happened to be all scheduled at the correct times.
In other words: if your process is efficient, but your interviews suck, you make a bunch of mis-hires, but very efficiently. Yikes.
And so, many startup founders’ challenge is to resist the allure of having their hiring problems solved via the dozens of Recruiting tech cold pitch emails that flood their inboxes on a weekly basis.
Do not get tempted. But if you do – at the very least, put some thought into whether it’s Efficiency or Judgment problems you’re currently facing, and what the pitch claims to solve for.
The truth is, for most early-stage teams, it’s not software they need. When you’re hiring just a handful of people – often the first 1-3 years at a startup – you can get by with a no-code system and a spreadsheet, until hiring volume ramps up. But the low-volume time is the perfect opportunity to examine the Judgment Problems and start laying down a strong foundation.
The need for these teams isn’t that they have an established ATS, but that they have a process and visibility. They need to start building the muscle of following a good process and establishing good collaboration behaviors around hiring.
“Fine. Spreadsheets. Got it. But what if we ARE hiring at volume? What software should I use?? Tell me!!”
Ok ok, I did promise.
Today, I’ll primarily focus on the ATS, the cornerstone of the Recruiting tech stack. I will forever be biased towards Lever, given I’d joined as the first Product hire. I remain incredibly proud of the work that my team and I did, with many of our ideas that were unique at the time, having gone on to become standard in the industry.
But newer players have been coming up in recent years, and the truth is that many of these ATS products have near feature parity. Running an effective procurement process entails 1) being knowledgeable and prepared about your current challenges (both Efficiency and Judgment), 2) grilling your sales rep about them, then 3) playing the competitors against each other to get a deal. Don’t skip Step 1.
And if the process ends up being sub-optimal, you can still relax – it doesn’t really matter, since too many companies end up switching out the ATS every ~1-2 years anyway, a bonkers standard that I’ll write another post about soon.
Given everything above, I know I’m painting myself as an HR Tech hater. But far from it! I remain optimistic about the future of this space, and some of the up-and-coming players and new sub-categories – as long as we don’t forget that it’s ultimately the hiring *team* and their Judgement that is at the center of great hiring. This is what is too often broken at startups, not which software they use.
I feel privileged to be able to work with so many founders and leaders wanting to take People work seriously – but from here on out, anyone who asks me “Which software?” is getting a link to this post, so we can skip to the real discussion 😉
If you learned something new from this post, please consider 1) subscribing and 2) sending it to a friend to continue the discussion.
Jennifer Kim is the CEO/Founder of Workflow, an education and consulting company that trains the next generation of startup leaders on all things Recruiting, People Ops, and DEI. Through its flagship program, the HireEd Accelerator, Jen and her team have taught hundreds of startup leaders to make hiring a competitive advantage. Previously, Jen was Head of People at Lever and was an Advisor to dozens of top startups. She is also a Venture Partner at Symphonic Capital, and is known for her hot takes on tech industry and culture as @jenistyping.
Appendix / Relevant past discussions
“Labyrinth” by Taylor Swift
These questions can go on infinitely, but I’ll spare you the word count – this is what keeps me and the Workflow team busy!
The framing of efficiency vs judgment is super compelling - and I agree with the sentiment that if you have bad judgment, there's only so much gain you can pick up by increasing efficiency (and if your judgement is really bad, being inefficient may be good).
But I hypothesize that the grind of recruiting/HR and the seemingly endless set of stupid tasks that plague the function serve to drive away people who have, or could grow into, good judgment. If I'm interested in work that allows me live and die on judgment, I can't be spending 80% of my time on the knowledge-work equivalent of shoveling snow.
Look at what spreadsheets did for accounting and finance functions: automating away so much of the mathematical snow shoveling, clearing the way for more sophisticated work where judgment and decision making are core skills. If I want to hire smarter recruiters, I need a credible pitch for how the work will let them *be smart.* Bad tooling doesn't facilitate that pitch.
Maybe a hot take, but I think HR/TA function leaders perpetuate the problem. We ask for ways to speed up existing workflows rather than seeking opportunities to blow up bad workflows entirely; instead of asking for jet planes or railroads, we're asking for a faster horse. And so smarter tooling with product theses centering on better judgment don't get built.
Long way of saying: if you want to lean on better judgment, you need efficiency to create the space. If you want efficiency to create the space, you have to know what judgment you need to unlock.
Love the article, Jen. So thought provoking.
Love what you said about “what recruiting software should we use” is a distraction, and the analogy about spending money on fancy guitars but not practicing! Sending this post to a few colleagues and looking forward to reading more 🙌