Case study · AI / Recruiting
Guest interviews with recruitment leaders, turned into inbound.
The startup was a 16-person team building an early AI screening product that interviewed candidates — this was before AI was what it is now. The company had come out of NYU Tandon Future Labs and was running pipeline almost entirely on outbound: cold email and direct outreach, plus the occasional founder-network referral.
What was missing was an inbound channel. A way for the right people to find the company first, without depending on having an existing audience to draw from.
We launched a weekly podcast on the future of AI in recruitment. The head of sales hosted, and every guest was a leader at a recruitment company — meaning every guest was also a perfect fit for the product. The conversations were not promotional; they were thoughtful exchanges about how AI was actually showing up in recruitment work.
To get it in front of the right ears, we ran targeted outreach inside online communities like recruitment-focused Slack channels, sharing episodes as resources, not ads.
Hosting an industry-relevant guest is a much warmer reason to start a relationship than “do you have 30 minutes to look at our product?” The show became a sales motion that didn't feel like one.