Early this month, at an event for analysts, news media, customers and others, the artificial intelligence-powered global talent platform formerly known as Hiretual announced that it had renamed itself hireEZ. I enjoyed attending virtually and learning the rationale for the name change. We also heard details around the $26 million in venture capital that hireEZ noted it had just raised to help drive the objective of the rebrand: becoming the first vendor to define outbound recruiting as a market segment. Following the event, it seemed natural to invite hireEZ CEO Steven Jiang and Head of Marketing Shannon Pritchett to the #HRTechChat video podcast. “We chose to rebrand to align with our company’s mission to create a new category,” Jiang said, during the podcast. “Our mission is to make outbound recruiting easy. We want to make it easy for recruiters to bring jobs to people. Our vision, three words, is ‘jobs find people.'” Outbound recruiting itself is a collection of practices that have surfaced over the past several years. This market alert we published on the development delves into things. Suffice it to say, outbound recruiting is the yin to inbound recruiting’s yang…. Once a novel idea made possible by the then-novelty of the Internet, inbound recruiting is the idea that you can use the web as a fast way to attract large numbers of candidates to apply to your open jobs. This has its benefits. In contrast, think of outbound recruiting as a return to classic headhunting, but now aided by marked evolution in technologies such as AI and the cloud — and the Internet, of course. Within the external online environment, recruiters are better able to find and choose their targets. It is now possible for organizations to identify and approach right-fit candidates online for open requisitions and, thus, spare themselves the tedious task of sifting through a slew of information on candidates that found their way into the applicant tracking system. A thorough search may be impossible in the ATS. And it’s hit-or-miss on who, among these candidates in the database, may or may not be good matches anyway. Outbound recruiting is far more efficient, and recruiters with the means to do so have increasingly been deploying it, in bits and pieces, as essential arrows for their quiver. “We’ve evolved into a more candidate-centric, candidate experience model,” Shannon said. This is where the pinpointed, 1:1 nature of outbound recruiting comes into play, and that means to do so is where hireEZ enters the equation. The vendor’s technology already supports all five pillars of outbound recruiting: AI sourcing; robust, searchable data; email automation; diversity, equity and inclusion; and system integration. During the podcast, Steven, Shannon and I dove deeply into the details of these five pillars, which the aforementioned market alert also describes. Against the backdrop of The Great Resignation and a job market that looks like it’s going to be topsy-turvy for the long term, what hireEZ is doing in the recruiting space is remarkable, really. What struck me most, possibly, is around something Steven said. He noted that, for recruiters to embrace outbound recruiting, they must internalize a fundamental shift in mentality. Inbound recruiting remains a piece of the puzzle, yes. But the passivity associated with waiting for candidates to pour in is incompatible with outbound recruiting, whose ethos is proactive, can-do, recruiting with intentionality. The talent acquisition departments that deploy outbound recruiting the most successfully will commence all their recruiting activities with an outbound mindset first, with inbound activities playing a supporting role in their pursuit of the objective.