Episode 404 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Ben Sesser, CEO & Co-Founder of BrightHire.
Well this is a first…
It’s common to time my podcast interview around a milestone for a company like a funding announcement. But, this is the first time that in the span between my interview with the founder to the publishing date that the company announced its acquisition.
Last week, BrightHire announced that the company has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Zoom. It certainly is a combination that makes a lot of sense.
BrightHire is an interview intelligence platform. We saw its influence firsthand this past summer when VentureFizz hosted a series of AI job searching events. Talent acquisition leaders consistently mentioned BrightHire as the most-adopted application—a signal that immediately led me to reach out to Ben for this interview.
As Ben shares, when they started, “interview intelligence” was a brand new category in hiring, and they faced plenty of doubters. But fast-forward to today, and much like the success of companies like Gong for sales teams, BrightHire’s value is now obvious. But isn’t that the case for all great companies in hindsight?
BrightHire’s investors include Flybridge, Index Ventures, 01 Advisors, Zoom Apps Fund, and others.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:48 State of Hiring in the AI Era
06:51 Ben’s Background Story
19:40 Getting Started in the Tech Industry
25:26 Origin Story of BrightHire
33:06 Creating a New Category
35:31 The Value of Video in the Hiring Process
41:17 BrightHire Screen – New AI Screening Platform
45:51 Experience of Raising Capital
48:36 Biggest Lessons Learned
50:22 Common Mistakes Companies Make When Hiring
51:57 Lightening Round Questions
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Transcript
Keith Cline (00:01)
Greetings, I’m Keith Cline the host of the VentureFizz podcast, where I interview the most fascinating people in the tech scene. This is episode 404, and today’s guest is Ben Sesser, CEO and co-founder of BrightHire. Well, this is a first. time my podcast interview around a milestone for a company, like a funding announcement. But this is the first time that in the span between my interview with the founder to its publishing date, that the company announced an acquisition. Last week,
BrightHire announced that the company has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Zoom. It certainly is a combination that makes a lot of sense. you’re not familiar with BrightHire, they are an interview intelligence platform.
this past summer when VenturePhys hosted a series of AI job searching events. Talent acquisition leaders consistently mentioned BrightHire as the most adopted application, a signal that immediately led me to reach out to Ben for this interview. As Ben shares, when they started, interview intelligence was a brand new category in hiring, and they faced plenty of doubters. But fast forward to today, and much like the success of companies like Gong for sales teams,
BrightHire’s value is now obvious. But isn’t that the case for all great companies in hindsight? BrightHire’s investors include Flybridge, Index Ventures, Zero One Advisors, Zoom Apps Fund, and others.
In this episode of our podcast, we cover lots of great topics, like the state of hiring in the AI era, Ben’s background story, and how he landed in the tech industry, including an interesting story of how he landed his position at Sail Through, the origin story of BrightHire, and the challenges of creating an entirely new software category, the details behind their platform and the value of using video in the hiring process, plus their new AI screening product called BrightHire Screen, the experience of raising venture capital,
and the biggest lessons learned while building BrightHire, common mistakes companies continue to make when hiring, and so much more. Okay, now a quick word from our podcast sponsor, Silicon Valley Bank.
All right, without further ado, here’s my interview with Ben.
Keith Cline (02:46)
Ben, thanks so much for joining us.
Ben Sesser (02:48)
Thanks for having me.
Keith Cline (02:49)
All right, so I have to kind of give a little bit of a story here of why I’m so excited to have you on our podcast. So over the summer, VentureFizz hosted this five part job search in the AI world type of webinar series. So it was aimed towards job seekers. And I was trying to help job seekers navigate the waters of what it’s like to apply to a job, get an interview hopefully, and maybe land a position with all the AI world that we’re
getting accustomed to. So it was a demystification type of ⁓ webinar series. So I had a lot of town acquisition leaders participating on these panel discussions to explain to them what their world looked like. What do they do to narrow down the candidate pool and everything. So in these conversations, the same tool kept coming up over and over again. BrightHire, BrightHire, BrightHire. And it was like a lot of affinity and love for your product. it may be what like, wait.
I need to interview the founder of BrightHire. So that’s what brought me to you. So kudos on what the platform you’ve built. And we’re to talk a lot about that. OK, but before we get into all that, I have somebody who thinks very deeply about hiring and hiring well. So I’m like, this is going to be a geek out conversation. The market is very weird right now. So there’s an overwhelming amount of applies. There’s fakes. There’s the AI effect on the hiring process. So what
Ben Sesser (03:53)
Thank you.
Keith Cline (04:15)
in your lens is the state of recruiting and hiring in this market.
Ben Sesser (04:20)
Yeah, so I’ll copy out by saying it has a lot to do with what segment of the market you work in or the type of company you’re in. So I don’t want to paint, you know, kind of all segments with a broad brush because I think we think a lot, you know, on the podcast and so forth around professional hiring tech in particular. So I can talk to that kind of first and foremost, but you know, it’ll vary. You know, the state of play varies considerably based on
What’s your industry? What part of the country you living in, you know, and all of that. So I don’t, want to make sure that I don’t portray, know, everything is one thing because it’s not, ⁓ you know, I’ll talk to tech first, cause you know, we have a lot of clients that are in the tech space. I just say, I think the word that comes to mind is noisy. It’s a very noisy market. you know, on the, you know, on the candidate side, or let’s say on the company side first, you know, there is an enormous.
increase in the amount of top of funnel ⁓ volume that companies seeing. So applicants, the number of applicants per open role has gone up pretty considerably for most roles. I think probably with the exception of very, very kind of niche roles or maybe if you’re a company where you’re not as big, so maybe you don’t get quite as many applicants. But I think in general, it’s just there’s a huge surge for a variety of reasons. One is like it’s easier to apply to jobs in mass and people are doing that.
They’re using the tools at their disposal to impart because of the labor market. So there’s more folks that are seeking work or seeking new work. And so there’s demand. ⁓ And so for companies, that’s challenging because most companies ⁓ generally are being asked to do more with less or apply AI or technology to work more efficiently. And that really, honestly, ends up landing within GNA functions first.
talent acquisition being among them. So they have less resources, but they have more applicants and they’re expected to kind of support the same volume. And then on the candidate side, you know, it’s the other side of the equation, right? So because that’s the situation from the company side, you know, they are applying to many, many roles, getting very few interviews per application or, know, have to submit maybe 15 to 20 applications to get one, one screen. ⁓ And, and often probably not hearing back again for the same reason. like,
That’s the state of play at the top of funnel and it filters down to the rest of the process, you know, kind of as.
Keith Cline (06:51)
Yeah, it’s just a weird, crazy market and I hope it figures itself out and gets better because it just is unsustainable. Okay, let’s rewind the clock. So where’d you grow up? What were you like as a child?
Ben Sesser (07:06)
I grew up exactly where I am right now. So I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, which is where I live again. So, you know, I guess not that original moved away, came back. And yeah, it’s it’s it was a wonderful place to grow up.
Keith Cline (07:23)
So what did you, in terms of pursuing your studies at Cornell, you decided to study industrial and labor relations, what was behind that decision?
Ben Sesser (07:33)
You know, I grew up playing sports, in particular ice hockey, and I was kind of really passionate about it, but knew pretty early on that, you know, you’re from New Jersey, there’s not that many people from New Jersey that are going go to the NHL, particularly of my stature. So, you know, I thinking about, okay, well, when I leave college, I need to have a job and a career, you know, kind of what do I want to do?
And at a certain point in time, I convinced myself like sports, like the business of sports was pretty interesting. So I would like read the sports business journal, like literally a newspaper and sort of learn about that space. And I found out that the commissioners of a bunch of the major sports leagues were industrial and labor relations majors. ⁓ You know, they have a unionized workforce and actually a number of them went to the like the particular program at Cornell that I went to. And so I went.
to Cornell for that program thinking I was going to go into sports management and change directions for a few different reasons where I can get into but that was ⁓ the idea originally.
Keith Cline (08:38)
Okay, well good segue. So how did you get your career started?
Yes.
Ben Sesser (08:45)
Post-college? Yeah, so when I was in school, I was still interested in sports management, sports business for a little while. I actually remember I did one job interview, a big change, kind of caused a big change in my direction. One, kind of like, I figured out that you had to go to law school or most of the folks that went into that kind of role went to law school. And I was…
actually talked out of law school by a bunch of folks in my family ⁓ who just felt like it was not going to be a good fit for my personality and the way I kind of go through the world. You know, I was kind of an entrepreneurial kid growing up. I liked to, you know, get things done and, you know, sitting at home doing homework for seven hours and reading, you know, briefs didn’t feel like the best fit from their perspective. And then I had an interview with a major sports agency actually for an internship, a summer internship. And
they were representing the United States for an Olympic bid to host in New York. each city kind of puts bid forth to host the Olympics. Long story short, in the midst of this interview, they sort of asked me, what would you think about building a giant stadium on the west side of Manhattan? What do you think about that idea? And the right answer was, that’s a great idea. New York, let’s go, let’s win the Olympics. But I was like…
Keith Cline (10:06)
Right.
Ben Sesser (10:09)
Well, I read a paper in my economics or sports class and it turns out that, you know, taxpayer funded stadiums don’t really accrue benefits back to the local community. And it was like, answer. And then I kind of just like, it me a look like, you should be like copying things in the copy room. Like that was the wrong answer. Like you just stick to the script dude. So anyway, sort of those experiences I was like, all right, well, I’m gonna do something else. And then… ⁓
Keith Cline (10:20)
Errr.
Ben Sesser (10:35)
Honestly, I’d love to say it was more planned out, but I did an internship in Washington, D.C. in education because I had a class that I liked around education policy. Not that I thought I was going go into it, just I was like the internship I got. And I liked living there and I didn’t want to move to New York because I’m from here and I just figured I would never, if I moved to New York, I would never live anywhere else. And ⁓ I was lucky enough to get a job at this company called Corporate Executive Board. They were interviewing on campus. It was kind of like, you know.
subscription research and consulting firm and they would hire young kids to basically at a college you’d write white papers about best practices, business best practices and you do like this, be very kind of framework to research around particular areas and so you know they hired me. You know I’d done some research in a class and or a few classes that they thought felt like really relevant to the types of work that they did. They did a big HR practice area and so they hired me. So I was a researcher for about a year, actually not in the HR group, actually in the marketing group but and then
and did corporate development and corporate strategy there. So they were a big public company at the time and kind of worked on the corporate strategy team there trying to transition their business and do acquisitions and partnerships.
Keith Cline (11:43)
Now maybe like this was, was this during college? Like you were part of a startup investment fund prior to that, right?
Ben Sesser (11:50)
So that was actually concurrent. ⁓ I was kind of in this role. ⁓ I was on this corporate development team. We were actually doing a lot of stuff in the HR tech space, which is how I got both introduced to tech and HR tech. I got to partner with a bunch of startups in this space. But somebody came to me who was a friend and said, well, they work at Discovery Networks. And they said, well, you know,
this person who was like a very senior executive here is, you know, kind of starting this private equity fund. ⁓ And with this other person who was like this very well known publisher, ⁓ executive publisher in DC. And ⁓ it was an interesting idea that there, you know, this is when there’s a lot of movement in this sort of like green energy climate tech space. And their idea was, you know, all the publications in this space are sort of like mom and pop publications from the 70s, like this is like legacy hippie.
journals saying, win power monthly. And they said, well, this is gonna be a huge market and nobody owns it from a media business, media perspective. We’re gonna like roll up all these media companies into a single media company that like kind of owns the space. And yeah, that’s just kind of my personality. were like, we need somebody to work nights and weekends and do like all the research and basically build the whole plan, essentially the pitch, like who are the targets we’re gonna go after? How much money do we need to raise?
you know, like what’s the pro forma financials of this thing. And ⁓ so I was, you know, I’m like, I’m an entrepreneurial person. So I said, yeah, like, okay, let’s do it. And then I met the two guys who were the kind of the principals and I was, my feedback was, you know, this is, this is way more, way more work than I can do myself. Like, can I bring a friend? Can I phone a friend? And they said, yeah. So actually my current co-founder, Teddy, I pulled him in. And so for like a year, maybe more every day after work, we would go to another office and work from.
Keith Cline (13:37)
Right.
Ben Sesser (13:46)
you know, six to 10 o’clock at night and every weekend for like a year doing this whole other, doing this whole other project. And we ended up kind of getting a little bit of initial seed funding committed to this fund. But then the financial crisis happened and all the money went away. So we worked for a year and a half and nothing, nothing came out of it. I learned a lot though, made good connections, but that’s just one of the things in life. You know, you can work a year and a half nights and weekends and just things just fall apart.
Keith Cline (14:16)
Well, you decided to go back to B-schools at Stern. So what was the thought there?
Ben Sesser (14:22)
Yeah, I I was in this corporate development role. A lot of the job was, you know, the company I was working for was a subscription research and kind of consultancy. So it was really like convening these really, really incredible networks of C-level executives from say Fortune 1000 global companies for in-person meetings and best practice sharing and kind of benchmarking and creating these assets out of their collective knowledge. But they had to transition the business into being more a data business, technology like tech enabled.
services business, a technology business. And so, you as I mentioned, I was looking at a lot of HR tech companies for partnerships and acquisitions. And then, you know, through the process of that, realized that that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in those companies, you know, ⁓ you know, I had this kind of entrepreneurial background, but didn’t grow up around sort of tech companies. ⁓ And so that was kind of my exposure and realized that was a good fit. And for whatever reason, I felt like business school, you know, business school sometimes can be a route to sort of just like switch gears.
And so that was the thought was like, I’m to go back to grad school, I’m going go to visit school, I’m going to use that as a way to kind of like change tracks. And I was really, it was kind of kind of a little bit of a silly idea and I’ll get into why it worked out for me, but also really incredibly lucky because I moved back to New York, this was like 2010, the New York technology scene had been around in the nineties and like the odds.
for like ad tech and then media, but it wasn’t what it is today, not even close. So was much, much smaller. And so I got to get, I got really enmeshed in the technology scene in New York as it was sort of like actually building itself up to be a proper ecosystem. And so I got exposure and access to a whole bunch of people that, you know, I think today would be much, much harder to, pretty quickly. it was good. It ended up working out pretty well.
Keith Cline (16:14)
Yeah, it’s been amazing to see how the tech scene in New York is just blowing up and it continues to continue to blow up. So how did you get started down that path?
Ben Sesser (16:23)
Yeah, I had a couple, I had a couple routes that I, you I think, you know, part of me, when I first went back to grad school, I thought I wanted to maybe do venture because I had this sort of corporate development background, but I thought tech was interesting. And then I, I kind of realized pretty quickly that that actually wasn’t what I wanted to do because I got to know the job more and realized that it was kind of a sales job, which I love sales by the way, but.
It’s like you’re just meeting lots of people for coffee all the time. You know, it’s not the same. don’t, you don’t get wins the way you get when you’re an operator. Like I did something, I shipped something, I got a win. We saw the revenue, we booked the deal. I like the lead times are really long. You don’t, there’s really no feedback loop. So I realized it kind of wasn’t for me. And so I actually spent the entire time in grad school trying to start a startup. You know, I wasn’t trying to join a tech company. I was trying to build a tech company and, you know, went through, cycled through different ideas, didn’t go on, you know, a lot of your
you know, for those familiar with business school, a lot of people like go to grad school and they like fly to Iceland and they do all these sort of cool trips and I did none of those. No money. I didn’t go on any trips, for better or worse. All I did was try to start a startup the whole time. And the one that we ended up spending the most time on was actually, it’s called MODIS education, but basically it was actually for career seekers, for job seekers, ⁓ or really for students to kind of connect and understand.
Keith Cline (17:28)
Right.
Ben Sesser (17:49)
what career would be a good fit for them to really educate themselves. ⁓ And so I don’t, can get more into it if interested, but that was the one that we spent the most time on. And yeah, that kind of me on the path.
Keith Cline (18:02)
Very cool. All right, so after B-School, what’d you do next?
Ben Sesser (18:07)
Yeah, so I still trying to get a startup off the ground. And then I kind of, at a certain point, I pivoted and started another company in the media space and was kind of working on it, but needed to pay the rent. so my, actually my former boss from before grad school was kind enough to let me do some consulting.
So I was actually, I went back to this company, CEB. I was doing some consulting work with them around corporate strategy stuff and corporate development. So I was taking the Amtrak to DC every week, staying there Monday through Friday or Monday through Thursday or whatever it was, and then taking the train home at the end of the week and trying to start the startup at the same time. And what I learned in the startup was, it was a media thing.
Concept not a bad idea actually but but was focused on kind like the health fitness wellness space Which you know I have interest in but I’m not deeply passionate about and I realized pretty after a few months ⁓ I realized that my my readers my users were more passionate about the problem than I was and that was a problem like I was you have you can’t have your users and your readers be more passionate about the problem than you are and so I actually end up kind of like handing the business off to somebody else and
eventually just sort of said, I have to get a job. Like I have to get a job in tech and learn how tech companies run before I go off and try to start my own thing the next time.
Keith Cline (19:40)
And so you did that. So you worked at a couple of tech companies, Sail Through and Enigma. So what were the different roles that you held?
Ben Sesser (19:47)
Yeah, Sail Through, I don’t even know what my title was. It was a really interesting story, but it was kind of like a hybrid of a Chief of Staff and kind of a Biz Ops role. So I was doing like special projects, fundraising, some finance, some FP &A, board, you know, kind of board, board facing work, really a mix of, yeah, it was like a mix of Chiefs, Chief of Staff and Biz Ops.
And the reason it was sort of a hodgepodge is it was like a very, very random story about how I got that job, which I’m happy to tell you if you’re interested. And then I joined that company. was about, I think it was like 40, 50, 60 people. And I did that for a couple of years. It was great. It was great to like actually work in a tech company and understand, you know, kind of the ins and outs of sort of just a B2B software company. And, but I still felt like I hadn’t started something or done something like really with my hands from an earlier stage. And so I had this interesting opportunity.
to join a company called Enigma, which I actually been vaguely aware of from when I’d seen like a fundraising kind of announcement from them. I remember I actually sent it to my old boss and said, this is kind of a cool company. And they were hiring for somebody to kind of be like the business person more or less. You know, there were about 15 people and the founder or the founder CEO was kind of really product oriented and they needed like a business person. So I came in and I think my title was like VP of operations, but it was finance ops.
know, legal, talent, HR, I did sales, I did product strategy, like it was sort of whatever is needed. think I moved office, that was my first project, was like moving their office, which was terrible, terrible project, doing an office build out in New York City, but it was really like anything.
Keith Cline (21:35)
So what was the story of how you landed at Sail Through?
Ben Sesser (21:38)
I’ll try to the short version. Basically, I said I didn’t, I figured out that I didn’t want to go into venture capital, but when you’re looking for a job, you don’t get that picky. And so I really needed a job. So I actually landed an interview at a, at a venture capital firm and their focus was B2B, B2B software. And so to prep for that interview, I did a huge, like this ton of research about B2B software companies that went public. This is pretty common now, but at the time it wasn’t, it was less common.
Basically I pulled all their S1 filings, which is like the filing that, know, software company makes or a company makes when they are going to public. And I did all this analysis of like all the financials, all the ratios, like what’s the, what are the physics of a software company that is required to go public? Like how many people work in each department? What are the ratios gross? All this stuff, gross margins, everything. And then, ⁓ and I did that just to be smart in this interview, but I didn’t get the job. So I did like, you know, three days of sort of data analysis. didn’t get the job.
and figured like, I’ve done this analysis. Like maybe I’ll, you know, write a blog post or something. I wasn’t really much of a blogger, but I, you know, let me capture my learning so I can maybe use it to get another job. So I wrote a blog post and I’m sending to this person who was the editor of a kind of a tech crunch competitor at the time called Pando Daily, which I don’t think exists anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And this guy, Adam Pendenberg, who was at NYU and I had like cross paths with him because was at NYU. So I said, Hey Adam,
Keith Cline (22:53)
Yeah, I remember Pando. Yeah. Sarah, Sarah. What was the part? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Ben Sesser (23:03)
I wrote this blog post, like thought you might think it’s interesting or what have you. And he wrote back, was like, this is actually really good. Would you be okay if we posted it in Pando Daily? And I was like, yeah, sure. So they were like, okay, so they did their editing thing. And then I remember they rewrote the subject line and it was, had something very bland, but they had to come up something much more clickbaity. And so was something like I felt really embarrassed by, like memo to YC founders, like, know.
It was some, some, some, like something I would never write basically. And I was like, you know, okay, you know, I guess, you know, it’s your, it’s your publication. Anyway, long story short, I actually flew to San Francisco to interview for a job at a tech company. And the, I guess they were like, yeah, the post is going to go live today. Uh, I didn’t think much of it. And I landed and there was no wifi on the plan. That’s a long time ago. Uh, I landed in San Francisco and I, I had like hundreds of new Twitter followers and like dozens of emails in my inbox. guess this post kind of went viral.
Keith Cline (23:32)
Right.
Ben Sesser (24:00)
like as
Keith Cline (24:00)
Right.
Ben Sesser (24:01)
I was in the air and I had emails from like the CEO of Box, you know, the CTO of Amazon, like a bunch of venture capitalists. And one of the people that I ended up like going back and forth with on it was Bill Gurley from Benchmark Capital, who I guess saw it. And I was like, hey, I really appreciate the kind words. By the way, I’m looking for a job. So everybody, just wrote back and I was like, by the way, I’m looking for a job. Like, do you have any jobs?
Keith Cline (24:10)
Wow.
Sure, yep.
Ben Sesser (24:29)
And Bill Gurley was like, what are you looking for? And I was like, well, I live in New York. Do you have a portfolio company in New York? And Sail Through was one of his portfolio companies in New York. So he basically wrote them an email and was like, you should hire this guy. That was basically it. So I showed up and they were like, what can you do? And I was like, well, I’ve done finance and basically I described all this hodgepodge of things that I can do. And they were like, all right, guess so. Basically Bill said we should hire you. So I guess we’re hiring you. That’s how I got.
Keith Cline (24:42)
You
That is
a great, great story. See, I’m like, there’s gotta be a good story behind there, because the way you teed it up. And I just love, like, you just never know. You never know. Like a blog post, all this analysis you did, hours and hours of your time, you didn’t get the job, but you’re like, what can I do with this? So anyways, kudos to you. Okay, bright hire.
Ben Sesser (25:05)
You never know.
Yeah. And don’t be afraid
to shamelessly reverse pitch people, ask them for jobs. I guess that’s the other lesson.
Keith Cline (25:18)
That’s good advice
too, yeah. If you’re looking for work, doesn’t, know, the more people that know, the more doors that could be open for you. So, all right, bright hire. So, you you always had this entrepreneurial spirit. So how did you get to the point where you’re like, okay, I think I have an idea?
Ben Sesser (25:36)
Yeah, was kind of a slow burn and then sort of a realization. basically, I was at this company, Enigma. We grew from a couple dozen people.
You know, in that role, I wore many hats, as I mentioned. so I interviewed virtually every candidate. I certainly approved every head count, ⁓ just like integrally involved in seeing the organization grow and realized a few things during that time. One was, there’s nothing more important for your future success than who you hire full stop. Like, I don’t even care. I don’t care if it’s an AI native company in the age of AI. Like you are as successful as the team that you built, period.
And when you go from a couple dozen people to a few hundred, you see that really firsthand. You’re like, that part of the business is going well because that person joined and then they built this team. And you just see how direct the line is. And ⁓ the other thing that kind of struck me over time was, I was wearing the finance hat. And so every time we made an offer, we brought somebody in, I thought about it as like, this is a six figure annual recurring investment.
Uh, and if I compare the level of rigor, like if a member of our team, marketing team wanted to buy, you know, a $9,000 piece of marketing software, we’d be like, well, why $9,000? Yeah. Why let’s, let’s make a big spreadsheet. Let’s bake off seven different providers. You know, it’s a nine and it’s like, that’s like one, two weeks. That’s like a two week paycheck for one of these hires are making. And we were doing spreadsheets and a bake off. when we’re hiring full-time people, we’re like, did anyone submit their notes? No.
Keith Cline (26:56)
What’s the ROI? Like data, data. Right?
Ben Sesser (27:15)
seems like a nice guy, you know? like, this would be less scientific and rigorous. And so yeah, kind of this realization that this is the most important process potentially for our future success, certainly up there. And we would never tolerate such a lack of rigor and data and scrutiny sort of in any other part of the business of any importance. And then the question was sort of why. Well, it’s like, well, because the heart of the hiring process is basically a bunch of people talking to each other and making decisions.
Keith Cline (27:17)
You
Ben Sesser (27:44)
It’s run by an army of volunteers who only do it sometimes. It’s hard. It’s actually hard. And so for all those reasons, it’s like, okay. It kind of struck me that, you know, this is really important. The heart of the process runs in an incredibly antiquated fashion. And that while there’s lots of technology in the recruiting space, I was a, not just a, I was a consumer of, know, we bought, we had a recruiting tech stack at Enigma. ⁓ None of those tools actually helped people be more successful at hiring where it kind of matters.
We had a bunch of tools to help source candidates, which is very important. But then what happens? Then a bunch of people talk to each other and make decisions and that’s it. That’s your team. And in that part of the process, we had a tool that like helped keep track of, know, I have seven candidates in this stage and three in that stage, but it didn’t help people gather better signal from candidates, calibrate, make good decisions, none of that. And so that was kind of the takeaway. And my co-founder, Teddy, who I’ve known since we were six, seven years old.
but he happens to spend seven and a half years at LinkedIn, I just reached out to him, not with a product idea or a startup idea, just an observation. Just like, hey, doesn’t this seem like a really weird disconnect? And he’d seen the application of conversation intelligence, which is kind of like the seed of what we do in other parts of business. So essentially in every other part of business where conversations are really important, people were starting to record them.
because they’re important and we don’t want to forget them. And so that we can share context and we can gather data and we can learn and we can have a perfect memory. ⁓ And saw how that was being really, really impactful in sales and other places. And we just sort of said, would be incredible for hiring. It would make it efficient. It would make it more objective. It would make it higher quality. Like there were so many clear value propositions for the technology and hiring. And it just felt like there was a 0 % probability that this technology would be.
incredibly valuable everywhere else that, you know, conversations matter in business, but never get applied to hiring. That felt like zero percent chance. So that’s how we can jump into it.
Keith Cline (29:44)
And you created a category, because we’ve seen it in sales, right? But not for hiring. And when I think of some of the companies that I’ve worked with in the past, the hiring process of actual interviews, kind of a mess, because not every company, some companies. ⁓ Okay, if you’re gonna, well it’s like, okay, let’s say round one, you interview with the recruiter. Tell me about your background, what do you wanna do?
Ben Sesser (29:50)
Yeah.
No, no, it’s every comment.
Keith Cline (30:11)
Okay, then you go in maybe face to face or Zoom interviews. ⁓ The role of the interviewer, right? ⁓ They’re asking the same questions over and over again. Like, tell me your background, tell me what do you wanna do? Why are you looking to leave? Like, there’s no like stage set of, okay, like the best companies I saw that were really good at hiring. They’d be like, you’re gonna focus on figuring out the person’s overall background. Are they a fit fit? Your role is going to be maybe,
pitch this person on the company, like, us. You’re going to be, hey, is this person going to be able to thrive in the way we work and our culture? so the companies that figured that out of let’s be efficient with everybody’s time versus the same conversation five, 10 times for the candidate was like, just exhausting.
Ben Sesser (30:41)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and you just have like tremendous blind spots in historically, right? You’re just, we actually did a piece of research that was in Harvard Business Review like a month or two ago. And the premise was, you know, essentially a job description is a kind of representation to the candidate market of what you care about. Like what are the skills, qualifications, experiences that are important for a role. And we were curious to know, well, like how well does that line up against the actual interview process? And, you know.
At a very high level, one of the conclusions was like, actually a lot of these topics do get covered. Like, ⁓ you know, it’s not like people are just going completely off script, but what we learned in further analysis is like, they’re all covered at like very little depth and then a bunch, a couple of areas are just repeatedly covered. And so if you actually look at the percentage of the skills or competencies or experiences that are covered at like a moderate or a deep level within an interview loop of even four or five interviews, it’s like a…
borderline half. So like half the things that we said were important upfront, we’re just like not covering at a level of depth. And that comes down to some of the coordination and challenges. You can’t share context. That’s one of the incredible unlocks of, you know, product like BriHire is, you know, you have to ask me about my background and story because you can’t hear it from the other interview. Like, and you want to hear it yourself. You need the context. But when you can start to share the context across a team, it eliminates that need altogether.
we can actually all cover our own areas and still feel like we have a full picture that we can rely on ⁓ to make good decisions.
Keith Cline (33:06)
When you were getting started, what type of pushback did you get? Because I could imagine new category, very uncomfortable, like you can’t record interviews. ⁓ I’m sure you got lots of that feedback.
Ben Sesser (33:11)
Yeah.
Yeah. Uh, yes. The, mean, look, the, you know, when you’re starting a company in, it’s hard to start a company and establish category where there, where there’s winners, there’s some benefits to doing that. Um, but, but the challenge is people are like, well, you know, I’ll just buy from, you know, pub spot or, you know, pick your category winner. Um, this was a new category. And so the key there is like, you’re going to talk to 10 people.
And nine out of 10 are going to look at you like you have five heads. And then one out of 10 would be like, this is genius. Uh, of course. Uh, and we actually take my co-founder got advice early on to that effect. Um, it was actually like an early hire at LinkedIn and they were basically like, yeah, when I was trying to sell LinkedIn, you know, early on, know, nine out 10 people would be like, are you nuts? Like, I don’t want my employees on this thing looking for jobs. Like, why would, you know, like, you know, this is, this is like ridiculous. Um, and so.
Keith Cline (34:09)
Bye.
Ben Sesser (34:14)
Thankfully we got that advice early on because yeah, like nine out 10 people were like, this is so, I would never do this or my company would never do this or this is stupid. You know, like that’s the feedback you get. But then you like, you find those one out of 10 people that are like genius and you just kind of glom onto them and you have to have a little bit of conviction that, you know, the world will, will catch up. But yeah, to your, to your point, like ⁓ this will make candidates uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable, you know.
I don’t know, why, like, like, well, we actually use, you know, there was just so many, so many things, ⁓ yeah, that we would hear early on in terms of pushback, but we just tried to like glom onto the, to the one out of 10. and some of them, some of those folks are still our customers today, which is kind of remarkable. Like they’ve gone to like two or three other companies since, but they’re still our customers. The, the psychographic that was for us, the right one early on were like people that came out of agencies, like staffing agencies, because they were like, well, when I was at a staffing agency, we would record.
staffing calls all the time. That’s how we coached. were able to get a bullpen. Everyone listened to everyone. so those are those were like finding those people in companies was like a huge focus because we knew that they would have the mentality, ⁓ you know, around this that would, that would make them excited.
Keith Cline (35:18)
Totally.
It’s how you got better. So I grew up in the staffing world and it’s how you like, you had your manager and they were helping you and it would just be like, let’s, how can we do better next time? Anything you do, it’s through practice and it’s assessing how you did by reviewing, why do football teams watch film? So it’s like same idea, right?
Ben Sesser (35:33)
⁓
100%.
You could have been one of our first sales rep yet. I mean, a hundred percent. And
for whatever reason, you know, people viewed interviewing as like some dark art or some, you know, artisanal thing that, you know, ⁓ like some private thing. It’s like, no, you’re doing a job on behalf of the company. You’re evaluating talent that the company is going to invest in. There’s actually a science to this. There are, there are best practices. There’s ways to do it well. ⁓ and I think, look, now that, you know, I’m preaching to the choir, as I like to say,
When we first started, was like one out of 10 people looked at us and said, is genius. And the other nine 10 looked at us and we get five heads. And I’d say like a few years later, was like five out of 50, 50, know, five out of 10 would say, this is genius post COVID. Five out of 10 would be like, this is genius. And the other five would still be like, this is crazy. And now it’s, it’s funny how the world changes. Now people are like, of course, of course you should do this. Yeah, it’s so obvious. Like, of course you started the company. Duh. It’s like, yeah.
Keith Cline (36:41)
So obvious.
Well, it’s
a perfect use case for AI, right? Like if I’m in an interview, and this isn’t a sales pitch, by the way, of us doing this podcast, but it’s just like when I heard what you were doing and I learned more about it, I’m like, man, this makes a lot of sense. And it became very obvious. It’s like, you could sit there with a notepad and like write notes as the person’s talking around. I was always a fast typer, so I’d be listening. I’d be trying to like transcribe while I was typing, but you could be like, have your notepad.
Ben Sesser (36:50)
Yeah.
Keith Cline (37:13)
writing down notes while the candidate’s talking, or you could sit there and actually listen, right? And actually pay attention and ask good follow-up questions and have your platform review it all and be able to review things and have that data and summarize and next steps or whatever the case may be. It’s just as ⁓ the core of your AI-powered interview piece of what you do is just, it’s so powerful.
Ben Sesser (37:18)
Yeah.
I’m interviewing someone right after this. It’s kind like the CEO final round interview. And right before this, I mean, I was, I had a question like why they leave this, this one role. I didn’t really understand the transition. I went into a product and said, why did they can’t admit that they left this role for the next role? Here’s the answer. Oh, okay. I don’t need to ask that question. And I was like, just give me the rundown of like their entire career journey so that I can go in with the context. I don’t need to ask them. I got like their whole chronology pulled from four different interviews they’ve run with other people on the team.
There’s a other questions I was going to ask. I just quickly made sure that we hadn’t already touched on those. I’m like, okay, got it. So now I’m going to walk in. I have an incredibly clear understanding of this person’s career trajectory, things we’ve covered, a few open questions that I don’t need to bother anybody else on. And we’re going to go in, I’m going to cover net new ground. And I’m actually going to use honestly more of the time for them to ask me questions and to sell because I feel pretty satisfied with a lot of the stuff I learned already and don’t want to be redundant.
Keith Cline (38:32)
But it also shows consistency of answers, I hope, when that AI is pulled, because it probably raises a flag. You know why they left? They didn’t really say the same thing. So it could trigger some flags that would be helpful ⁓ that you could use that time to diagnose and see what the reality is. ⁓ OK, I’m jumping around a little bit. So your platform also creates AI-generated job descriptions. The traditional way of creating a job description, go to Google, ask for job, get
Ben Sesser (38:35)
Yeah.
Morning.
Keith Cline (39:01)
Description tweak it a little bit publish it. How does your AI like do a better job of creating an actual real job description?
Ben Sesser (39:09)
Yeah, so we have just like take a step back. So ⁓ Bright Hire is an AI platform that spans the entirety of the interview process today. So think of everything from, as you mentioned, like planning, like what are we even looking for? How do we articulate that to the market? Let’s build an interview plan so we can actually run a coordinated interview process around this, then capturing interviews, making decisions, then we gather a bunch of data and analytics on the backend. So that’s the part that we span today. ⁓
And on the planning side, to your point, yeah, the old way was like, let me pull some comps, some other job descriptions for similar roles from Google. Today, it’s like, go to ChatGVT, and you’re just like, give me a job description. The way that we’ve approached it is use AI to give folks the menu and then have them make really thoughtful choices around what matters. There’s lots of different flavors of even roles that have the same title or even the same title, and it’s the same stage company, but they operate in different environments. And so.
You come into our platform and you share a little bit about the role or you do a recorded intake meeting. That’s really common. Our customers will actually record an intake meeting with the hiring manager and gather their input on, you know, what they think is really important. Then we use those materials to sort of say, okay, based on that, here’s a set of, here’s a set of, you know, ⁓ responsibilities that could be part of this role. Like which of these are relevant? Okay. And you, and you kind of make thoughtful changes. Here’s some skills that feel relevant. And then as you kind of.
make your selections, it goes to click deeper. Okay, you said, you know, analytical analysis skills are important. Well, let’s go click deeper. What type of analysis are we talking about? And so it basically presents a series of choices so that, you know, hiring manager, recruiter, often together can make thoughtful choice about what matters. And that becomes like the frame of the house, I like to say. And that’s what turns into a job description. That’s what directly informs the interview loop. Okay, so let’s divide these.
areas up and then have different interviews that should cover each of these particular areas, whether it’s responsibilities and experiences, skills that the person has, let’s suggest questions that might be good for, you know, kind of pulling signal on these. So we try to pull that thread all the way through the whole process.
Keith Cline (41:15)
Yeah, that’s very, very powerful. So I think this is a newer product or new. So you have AI powered ⁓ or it’s called Bright Higher Screen. So it’s an AI screening platform. So what is that?
Ben Sesser (41:26)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So going back to your question at the beginning of this podcast, you know, one of the biggest challenges our customers face is open a role and get a thousand applicants in 24 hours. Um, and so the, neither have the like time on the, on the, like the human time on their team to review like the vast majority of those applicants. Um, and so, and they also feel like they’re missing a lot of people. So they might be able to get through 200 out of a thousand applicants.
which is both ⁓ not great in terms of they don’t have time to view more, but also they feel like there’s great folks that are in the stack that they’re missing. And a lot of the applications look all the same. So to help kind of solve that problem, we’ve built Screen, which is like an extension of the recruiting team. And it actually has like two-way voice conversations with candidates. I think about it as like an extended application, right? An 8×10 resume only tells you so much. ⁓ What if you could get more useful context from a candidate?
so that you can actually make a more informed choice about whether they might be a good fit for the given role and then spend your time with the best fit candidates while also giving a candidate more information upfront about the role. ⁓ so candidates get invited and they have basically like a two-way voice conversation. It’s like using a chat GPT and voice mode if you’ve ever done that, where it runs through a of questions. gathers more information with the candidate in a much more efficiently than it be if a candidate had to like.
write four paragraph answers to bunch of questions. A candidate can ask questions themselves, tell me more about the details of role, tell me about the company, et cetera. We take all the context from their other interviews that they upload to be able to answer those questions. And on the back end, a recruiter is basically able to see much more context on every applicant. They can actually give more applicants an interview, like the ability to share more of their story, and then ultimately pass through folks who are going to be the best fit and the most interested going forward.
Keith Cline (43:23)
So I think this is also going to be a mindset shift for job applicants because all of sudden you’re talking to an AI bot or whatever it’s called. During this webinar series I ran over the summer, it was very obvious, cover letters are dead. Who reads a cover letter? Do I even write one? Why is the company even asking for one? I see this as the evolution because me as a recruiter in the past, I saw value in a cover letter if someone actually took the time to write it geared towards that job.
Ben Sesser (43:28)
Yeah.
Keith Cline (43:52)
hey, I’m a fit for this job because of X, Y, and Z, and you’d be foolish not to talk to me for those reasons alone. So this is like the evolution of that. This is your opportunity to pitch yourself. If there’s a thousand applies and 200 of them, get this invite to talk to your product. It’s the opportunity to sell yourself and like, this is why I’m such a great fit for this role. And then the recruiter will hopefully get that. And then, you you’ll be on your journey through the interview process from there.
Ben Sesser (43:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, totally. I mean, I had this conversation with somebody the other day, but, you know, let’s take my resume and take BrightHire off my resume. know, Ben never starts BrightHire and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, I worked for some really good companies. were backed by public, they were publicly traded or backed by great venture capital firms, but probably not very widely known. You know, probably many people have not heard of Sellthrough or Enigma or corporate executive board, even though was on the New York Stock Exchange. And, you know, the reality is,
I probably wouldn’t get selected for that many interviews if that was just my resume, because people are looking for names they know, they’re using heuristics. And so to have the opportunity to say, no, no, at corporate executive board, I did a bunch of these acquisitions and they were in HR tech space. And I played this, it was a really small team. So I played this huge role and at Enigma, we are actually this incredible company. I got to do all these, like to be able to tell that story, I would have such a better opportunity to actually progress and get a shot into an interview loop. And we’ve seen that we were using the product ourselves.
Keith Cline (44:55)
like fang companies and…
Ben Sesser (45:17)
you it’s kind of amazing. You give more people an opportunity to tell their story and then you’re like, wow, okay. Like I’d never heard of that company, but that experience is incredible. And you know, I definitely want to talk to this person. And so you see people actually end up getting through the funnel that, you know, otherwise may not have had a chance, you know, not because they’re not great, but because there’s really like finite time that recruiters have, that hiring managers have to be able to, you know, do interviews, frankly. And so there’s a little bit of a risk historically of kind of going outside.
people that feel like they’re an obvious fit just from a time perspective. And so can we change that equation?
Keith Cline (45:51)
So as we’ve talked about, there’s pros and cons of being someone creating a new category. Same can be said if you’re creating a new category and trying to raise venture capital. There’s some VC firms that are like, yes, we are risk takers. We want to define category, creating companies that hopefully have a great success. But then there’s others that are probably just looking for the herd of where’s the puck going, not to where the puck is versus where it’s going. So what was your experience like raising capital?
Ben Sesser (46:01)
Yeah.
Yeah.
⁓ Lucky, I would say. You know, like it’s hard to raise venture capital. lot of things have to click together. ⁓ I feel very fortunate that we were able to get people to fund us, frankly. ⁓ But I think it helped that we were, it helped that we were applying a category that folks were aware of to a new vertical. That kind of bridges the gap. One, good venture firms do want non-consensus bets. Good venture capital firms.
because that’s where alpha is, right? Like they will make much more money if they are finding opportunities that nobody else is seeing or getting into opportunities no one else is seeing early from evaluation perspective, it’s helpful, et cetera. It was helpful that we were saying, we’re going to do X for Y, which is actually now you see every Y Combinator company is like, you know, we’re the Brecks of, you know, pet care or whatever. Like they connect adopters to some really, really well known company and some completely other tangential things, but it was helped that we were.
Keith Cline (47:11)
Yeah, yeah.
Ben Sesser (47:17)
We were like, look, this type of solution already exists in other spaces and we’re applying it to a new vertical. And here’s all the reasons why we think it should be built in a very domain specific way for this use case and this workflow. And we were lucky, know, Flagbridge Capital was our first lead investor and they’ve been fantastic. you know, they bet early and then after that it becomes more of a traction thing. Like your series A, your series B, it’s a lot more to do with, you know, what kind of traction do you have?
Keith Cline (47:44)
Who is the partner of Flybridge?
Ben Sesser (47:46)
Jeff Busking.
Keith Cline (47:47)
Jeff, yes, he was on the podcast not too long ago, but within the past year, yeah. Okay, what’s the size of the team? What’s the future ahead looking like for BrightHire?
Ben Sesser (47:50)
cool. Nice. Yeah.
Yeah, team today is about 40, 40, 40 people. You know, we, yeah, it is pretty lean. Yeah, we, I think we tripled our revenue with like not more or less the same head count over like an 18, 24 month period or over an 18 month period. And so we, we’re hiring a bunch now. ⁓ We were like a little too lean, but ⁓ we like five X’d our revenue per employee. And so we were really focused on.
Keith Cline (48:02)
That’s pretty lean.
Ben Sesser (48:26)
you know, how can we scale up and can we do it in a way that’s capital efficient because that’s kind of like a good muscle to build. And so now we’re hiring up in a bunch of different roles, but yeah, it’s been fun.
Keith Cline (48:36)
All right, so what are the biggest mistakes in these years of running bright hire that you’ve seen as your own operator? And then I’m gonna ask a follow up question after that.
Ben Sesser (48:45)
Mistakes in general or in a particular area.
Keith Cline (48:48)
In general, because it could be anything.
Ben Sesser (48:49)
Yeah,
that’s a great question. think.
I think one is that you need to be really clear on what are you doing that is really valuable and adding to your momentum and kind of core your ability to be successful and what are you doing that is like a bunch of empty calories, like eating cauliflower, like fills you up, it’s not adding, it’s not very nutrient rich. ⁓ And sometimes it’s hard to delineate, but it’s really important to you because the most
Keith Cline (49:22)
That’s a good one.
Ben Sesser (49:25)
kind of scarce thing that you have is time. ⁓ And so if you’re spending your time and you’re burning a bunch of calories in the wrong things or your team is, and you’re not kind of providing clarity for them, like that’s at the expense of, you know, the opportunity cost is really high. So same with that. So that’s definitely one. I the other one is like, ⁓ you know, early on getting, letting the highs get you too high and particularly the lows getting too low. think our personality, me and my co-founder is a little bit more like,
we kind of blow past the winds, but early on, when things went wrong, was like, oh, was like the world is ending. And I think over time you have to build a thick skin and realize, and weather the storm and not let the tides get too high. And you have to build that resiliency pretty early, because the worst thing in the world is going to happen every day, and the best thing in the world is going to happen the next day. And it’s going to feel that way the entirety of the journey.
Keith Cline (50:22)
Okay, so the flip side of what I was thinking of is like, so what are the common mistakes that you see companies continue to make when hiring?
Ben Sesser (50:30)
Yeah, I think first and foremost is just not knowing what they’re looking for. It sounds very simple, but very often a company companies don’t actually, they don’t really know exactly what they’re looking for. Like what, who are we, who do we need? Why, what’s going to make them successful? And then is everyone aligned on, that? Um, that’s kind of like, that’s the starting place. And then from there, it’s do we actually have a good way to evaluate for this in a, in in a hiring process? You know, these are the things that are most important. Um, like
how are we actually gonna get conviction around them? And then I’d say like, again, these are all a little bit related, trying to find someone that checks like every box to some level versus finding people that are gonna be great at the few most critical things. And it feels risky, because then they’re like, maybe not be great. I saw a few other things that may be important, but at end of the day, you get much more impact and alpha from like people who are.
incredible at a few things that actually really matter for their success than you do from someone who’s like okay or good in a bunch of different areas but not exceptional in any.
Keith Cline (51:37)
So true. So both comments, I was shaking my head like this, ⁓ like as a search guy, I would love it when I came in after they’ve already been through a cycle of candidates because you’re going to have to go through those bumps and bruises of figuring out what do they actually want because they won’t know until they start talking to people. ⁓ So that is so, so important. So all right. Three apps you can’t live without. can’t be, well, can’t be your own product. Can’t be Slack, email or calendar.
Ben Sesser (51:49)
Yeah.
⁓ you got to,
I feel like you ruined like two of my three. Probably higher was definitely one of those as you heard. ⁓ when you say it can’t be email, it can’t just be like generic email client or can I, can I shout out like, yeah, yeah. So yeah, super, I do use superhuman. ⁓ I do rely on superhuman. This one’s kind of be out of left field cause it’s not business oriented, but you know, business and life are very intertwined. Skylight is an app I can’t live without. Skylight, ⁓ is a, it’s like an app.
Keith Cline (52:12)
Well, I mean, if you have a layer of something that is, like, you know, people say superhuman sometimes, but…
Ben Sesser (52:31)
and hardware actually, and you use it to like, I have a couple kids, they have lots of activities, there’s lots of stuff going on, it’s like the organizational layer for like the family, which is actually a huge impact on the business, because actually understanding what’s going on in the family, what’s on our calendar, yeah, it’s like the calendar, who’s doing what, every way, like all combined, and it’s like visual, it’s pretty great.
Keith Cline (52:49)
So like the calendars, like activities and sports and…
Ben Sesser (52:59)
I feel like we would be very discombobulated without that one. then trying to say something, I don’t know, I was like, I have a lot that are sort of like, I mean, I use a lot of apps to run the company, but I’m going to say this one’s not super inspiring, but Spotify. like, I listen to music all day. I listen to music when I work. Like it’d be real tough to operate through the world, you know, through work without Spotify, but yeah.
Keith Cline (53:24)
Spotify keeps getting better and better too. So is there an artist that you’ve discovered recently that you’re like, wow, loving this person?
Ben Sesser (53:31)
that’s a good question. I’ve rediscovered an artist. So I’ll tell you like quick story. So, when we first started BrightHire, I was working in the most depressing coworking space on the planet. Hopefully they don’t hear this. It’s called the Hoboken Business Center. It’s about as cool as it sounds. and we’re basically a windowless, I was basically working like a windowless cubby. This was not like we work basically. ⁓ and the person coming next to me was, ⁓ he was a ticket day trader. So he was like literally, he was like day trading. He was the people that like scalp on Ticketmaster and,
Keith Cline (53:46)
Hahaha!
Right, totally.
Ben Sesser (54:01)
I told him where I was from originally and he was like, oh, you should really listen to this band Pine Grove, which is a rock band and they’re from Montclair, New Jersey. And so I had a couple of Pine Grove songs on my Spotify and I hadn’t listened to them in really in four or five years. And I listened to them last, I rediscovered them last week and was like kind of jamming out to them. And the funny story is I was listening to a live concert of theirs on YouTube and I kind of forgot that they were from here. And at one point it was like the intro to a live concert and the lead singer was like,
Keith Cline (54:18)
Nice.
Ben Sesser (54:30)
I guess he was touring around where he grew up and he was like, and this is where I grew up, 30, I won’t say the name of the street, Montclair, New Jersey, and it’s two doors down. It’s two doors down from where I live today. Yeah, really bizarre. told my neighbor, I was like, your house is the cover of their album. So that was pretty funny.
Keith Cline (54:40)
Wow! That is crazy!
Another random story, so whoever the young starring pitchers for the Yankees that crushed the series and he’s from Massachusetts, turns out that kid grew up in one of my best buddies from college is his home where he grew up. And he’s a Red Sox fan. He’s like, oh, and this kid was a Red Sox fan too growing up. Now he’s a Yankee, but it was just like, oh my God, that kid grew up in my house. Anyways, weird, weird story. All right, quick book or podcast recommendation.
Ben Sesser (54:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
that’s so cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That’s cool. That’s really cool.
I always, yeah, ⁓ Endurance by Alfred Lansing. This is for like you said, for entrepreneurs. So it’s the story of like Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to ⁓ South Pole. And I’ve read it like five times. It’s like the most incredible survival story ever. And if you want to start a company, it’s pretty good. It’s like good to keep that one in mind. It’s inspiring, it’s incredible. And yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith Cline (55:26)
yeah.
Yeah, it is. It’s sane.
You think what we’re doing is hard, try what Shackleton did.
Ben Sesser (55:43)
Yeah, live on, ⁓ you know, have your boat get crushed and live on ice for a year with no supply, you know, with very few supplies and then find your way, you know, 800 miles away to, you know, some whaling island. That seems much harder.
Keith Cline (55:48)
great.
Alright. Alright,
outside of work, what do you like to do?
Ben Sesser (56:01)
Um, a lot of it revolves around kids, family stuff, you know, cause like life is busy, I like, I coach, I’ve coached hockey, so my seven year old, he’s like a hockey player now. So I just say coaching, coaching the kids sports is good. It’s like one of the few times where work is not in my brain at all. Cause I’m, you know, corralling six or seven year olds doing sports and it’s just, it’s few, it’s cute. It’s fun. Kind of takes my brain out of things. I like going on dates with my wife.
Keith Cline (56:23)
It’s so fun, yeah.
Ben Sesser (56:26)
And I like photography, although I don’t get to do it as much as I used to.
Keith Cline (56:31)
Very cool. Well Ben, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through your background. Obviously all the great work you and your team are up to at BrightHire and obviously wishing you continued success.
Ben Sesser (56:39)
Thank you, thank you for having me, this was really fun.
