The Search: Season 3, Episode 71 - Manan Shah, Co-Founder at Recruiterflow

Awesome.

We'll get into a lot more of that through the episode.

But I guess, you know, Manan, CEO of Recruiter Flow for nine years.

I mean, I do want to talk about the US, but that's just caught me off guard in the sense of like, what's changed over the last... two to three years that's really brought you guys to light in the market? Because everyone talks about recruiter flow now.

Everyone is looking for new CRM platforms or technology with AI and ultimately other areas of product.

What's changed over the last two, three years for you to, I suppose, take a huge stance in the industry now?

Yeah, that's a very interesting question.

Almost a decade in this industry, I don't think I have ever heard board-level conversations about technology at a recruiting or a search firm, but they are happening today.

Recruiting firms, because of the AI hype and a bunch of different reasons, they're much more technology-focused.

today and from top down.

There was always a lot of your rank and file recruiters were always not happy with the legacy tooling that they were getting, but the top was quite indifferent to it traditionally.

But because of the hype and the fundamental shift that we are seeing because of AI, now they are getting into conversations.

We have seen One of the customers that we have onboarding, they've been using an on-prem software for about 20 years now.

And they didn't see the need to change the software for 20 years.

And now their co-founders of the firm, they For them, it started, right? Like, hey, let's look at what's out there in the market now.

So that's what's happening externally in the market.

Now, internally for us, I think in the flow, we have always been a very, very product driven.

crowd-driven company.

Ever since all three of us co-founders, we are engineering software, engineering background, not really recruiting background.

So we learned recruiting along the way.

We learned the way industry works along the way.

But um as a culture as as founders we have always been very very technology driven um and as luck would have it uh me and my co-founders before recruiter flow we started an ai company back in 2014 right like when ai was just it was just a toy that nerds played right like that that basically summarizes the the status of ai uh back then So we were always very deep in technology when it comes to AI.

And we're pretty good at it as well.

Again, then we did the traditional thing, right? Like we started the company, raised money, executed the company, we've done, we did our thing.

And then we came into this industry, which is not very technology forward.