This week we welcome Prem Kumar to the podcast. Before co-founding Humanly, an Y Combinator-accelerated startup focused on improving the efficiency of candidate screening, scheduling, and engagement at scale, Prem spent ten tears at Microsoft, where he was responsible for delivery and operations of all software initiatives for the organization’s HR portal. He also served as Director of Product at TINYpulse, an employee survey and engagement platform.

Topics include: the meaning of “accessible for all” with regard to HR tools and tech, the prevalence of male-gendered words in job descriptions, why years of experience often isn’t predictive of an employee’s success, how technology can reduce our reliance on resumes as screening shortcuts, how an organization’s chosen mode of interviewing candidates (e.g., video, phone, chat) can introduce biases against candidates with certain personality types or communication styles, the importance of using candidate feedback to improve hiring team outreach and communication, and differing approaches to measuring employee impact or “employee lifetime value.”