Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. Okay. There's many benefits to try to create your own category, right? We're number one. That's one main category. Two is you can lead the charge on understanding or just defining what's important. I imagine there's other benefits maybe you could share, but there's also probably a lot of downsides. You mentioned oftentimes, it doesn't work and it just ends up being a lot of wasted money. Maybe just talk about what are the reasons to pursue trying to create your own category and then some of the reasons you maybe shouldn't. Greenhouse is a great example to talk about a failed approach at creating a category. So I mentioned before the ATS or the applicant tracking system category at the time was just, it carried so much disdain. People had such bad experiences with that whole category of products. No matter what, they weren't strategic. They didn't help people be good at recruiting. It was just a pretty terrible, very transactional experience. And I came in and it was like, "Okay, let's reposition ourselves. We're going to create a new category." We tried several things. One of the main things that we zeroed in on was recruiting optimization platform, and it was really like we are doing that. We're helping companies really structure the process, identify where they have gaps, where people are falling through the cracks, where they're flying through the process and really tweak and iterate it and improve it. And we spent time getting content out there, talking to press about it, positioning it in this way. And ultimately, at the end of the day, the budget that customers had and the way that customers talked about what we did, no matter what we called it, was applicant tracking. So it didn't really make sense to continue to go against the grain of, no, we're going to be this new thing or we're going to call it this if everybody, even seeing the value and seeing the differentiation of our platform to others, still called it an ATS. We abandoned that process. But I think the main thing that we understood then was instead of spending the time and money to build a new category, we were going to spend the time and money to elevate the value of this category. So rather than changing the category to something else which we could value at whatever it was, we were just going to spend all of our resources to make this whole category much more valuable to the users, to companies. And that really was, along with what CultureAmp was doing at the time in the same space, what set off this whole trajectory of really good, strong people practices and people organizations that were really doing cool stuff on the recruiting side as well as employee engagement.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.