In this episode of the Tesoro AI Podcast, Darius Gant sits down with Prem Kumar, co-founder of Humanly, to explore how true two-way AI conversations are reshaping the candidate experience. Prem shares how a personal brush with being "ghosted" as an applicant inspired him to build a platform that engages every candidate—applicants and sourced prospects alike—across chat, email, SMS, and voice, all while embedding compliance guardrails like real-time pay-transparency for each locale. You'll learn how Humanly's skill-based matching engine infers hidden competencies from past hires, plugs invisibly into your ATS and HRIS workflows, and even offers candidates a voice-activated agent for interview prep and career guidance—long before they ever speak with a human recruiter. Plus, discover the auditing processes Humanly employs to surface and mitigate bias in real time, ensuring a fair and transparent process for all.

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Founder Bio:

Prem Kumar is currently CEO and co-founder of Humanly.io, a venture backed generative AI platform that empowers hiring teams to be more effective and equitable in the job candidate conversations that should remain Human-driven, while automating the ones that shouldn't. Previously, Prem led the product management and design teams at TINYpulse, an employee engagement company that empowers organizations to build world-class cultures with real-time people data. Prior to TINYpulse, Prem spent 10 years at Microsoft working in a variety of product capacities, in areas such as HR Technology, New Ventures, Dynamics 365, and Office 365. Prem has been recognized as Geekwire's "Startup CEO of the year - 2023", a PSBJ 40 under 40 honoree, Forbes NEXT 1000 honoree (Forbes) TAtech Top 100 leader (TAtech.org), Top 100 HR Influencer (HR Weekly) and to "The Most Inclusive HR Influencer List 2021" (social micole).

Time Stamps:

00:32 Prem's Early Career & Pain Point

02:40 Humanly's Approach to Candidate Engagement

06:21 Multi-Channel AI Chat

09:04 Humanly's Candidate Pool and Outreach

12:04 Automating the Screening Process

15:52 AI's Role in Modern Recruitment

20:03 Challenges of Bias in AI Recruitment

24:02 Integrating AI with HR Systems

25:44 AI in Candidate Interviews

27:24 Analyzing Interview Data

31:03 Data Collection for AI Models