After picking an industry, for me it was recruiting, the next step is to:

Study 100 Companies

1: Go to Y Combinator, and you’ll see all the companies they funded grouped by industry. I studied 60+ recruiting companies from this list.

2: Go to Product Hunt. I checked out the latest trending tools in recruiting.

3: Do a basic Google search for companies in the recruiting space and get like lists of companies.

4: Go to Crunchbase. There’s 40, 000 recruiting companies. If I want to be a bit more specific, maybe recruiting companies in US founded in the last three years, or recruiting companies that use AI.

For each of these companies, I would just click through their entire product, audit their UX, go through the onboarding flow.

I’ll try to think about: what is unique about this product and what aspects of this products offer the most value to users.

So what I learned from my product research in recruiting is:

Most people use LinkedIn recruiter for recruiting.

People would have a applicant tracking system to store candidates and track their progress like Lever or Greenhouse

There’s the contact data tools like ContactOut, Lusha, Apollo, Entelo.

There’s email campaign tools where recruiters can use to set up an email campaigns like Yesware.

There’s new tools like Fetcher, which is a YC startup and also Dover, where they will do a full service recruiting for you using AI.

There’s other tools such as like Reggie, uses AI to help you write more personalized emails and create like a higher response rate.

Engage AI lets you write comments automatically on LinkedIn to help you build your personal brand and connect better with candidates on social media.

There’s candidate screening with AI, instead of reading like thousands of resumes yourself, you can tell the AI like what criteria you have for a job and it will rank and, and score candidates for you.

Auto GPT is really cool. It allows you to fully automate your browser.

You can just tell your browser to go find me candidates on LinkedIn or book a restaurant or plan a trip to New York city. It’ll start a browser instance and browse and click for you.

This is kind of buggy and doesn’t fully work right now, but it’s really exciting that you could potentially automate all tasks.

As we’re studying these companies, we want to focus on:

what is the smallest thing that I can build that provides maximum value.

Ideally something that we can build in two to four weeks and is a 10 times better solution compared to what is current available.