Introduction

Almost a decade ago, I left my first job, a software engineer at Microsoft, to become a recruiter. It wasn't easy making that decision but I would rather be talking to people all day than computers.

Throughout my career as a recruiter, I have been extremely fortunate to work with category-defining companies. Be it the evangelizing of health-tech at Practo, helping scale the Freshworks team from 87 to 913, adding folks to the new way of transport at Uber, or headhunting leaders for Stripe - eternally thankful to each of those incredible organizations that I have been a part of.

During that time, the tech ecosystem re-invented itself many times over. Just to remind you, 10 years ago, the Martech landscape had under 500 tools and the 2020 landscape had more than 8000 Martech tools.

I have seen my friends in Sales or Marketing automate almost all of their inundating busy work. Tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Outreach have changed the way these functions fundamentally operate.

However, life for me, my tribe, the recruiters haven't changed much, apart from the addition of a few sourcing tools and platforms, and the ATS. We still depend on the same tools, processes, and systems - that we used a decade back or even older. We are using the tools of the 1990s to hire in the 2020s.

How did it all begin?

It occurred to me while my time at Stripe. Stripe has always been in a hypergrowth phase. I was a part of the leadership-recruitment team, bringing the top-tech leaders into Stripe. I wouldn't deny it, it was tasking. The sad part - I really enjoyed the hiring bit, it was the operational bit, the busy work that kicked my productivity to the curb, I hated that. So a search for automation tools for recruitment began.

Our requirement wasn't outlandish - we just wanted a tool that can send cold emails, automate follow-ups, and keep the passive talent engaged. Marketing and sales teams have had tools like these for decades. However, even after evaluating dozens of software, we couldn't find one that suited a recruiters' or the recruitment function's flow. That's when I knew, I had to build one for the recruiters like me.

Why 'Kula'?

Kula is a Sanskrit word that can be translated as ‘community’. It encapsulates the sense of belonging that we need to survive and thrive as people. Without this belonging, the world starts to make less sense. At Kula, we are building a platform to help more people find places where they belong. That's the kind of company we want to build. That's the kind of world we want to live in.

With Kula, the recruitment teams outperform expectations by opening up more conversations with future employees, automated nudges and follow-ups on professional and personal touchpoints, and a dedicated module for making referral hiring, effortless.

Who's on the team?

We are currently a founding team of 8. We have engineers, designers, marketers, and a recruiter (myself) in those 8.

We're three co-founders. There's me and Sathappan, engineer number 3 at Freshworks, and later an engineering leader at Grab, and Suman Kumar Dey, an early member of the Infra team at Freshworks and Grab, and Architect at Salesforce.

What are we building at Kula?

The past few months have been busy and we're proud of what we have built. If you had a quick peek at the product, you'll find a place to bring together all the top-of-funnel candidates - from LinkedIn, spreadsheets, Gmail, and even phone books. You have a quick path to ask for a referral from anyone in the network of your company staff. Essentially, your own talent CRM.

And then some more. You can automate the reach outs to all the candidates, build workflows for automated follow-ups, set up interviews with hiring managers, and build reports for measuring efforts or showcasing progress - all in minutes, and without ever leaving Kula. Thus, making Kula a comprehensive Recruitment Automation platform.

We would like to be part of recruiters' everyday life, to empower them, and to help them meet their goals of putting together the best team they can.

We are building the recruitment OS of today and the future.