A role of a lifetime

There’s a unique satisfaction that comes from pairing the right candidate with the right job. Just ask any recruiter and they’ll tell you that helping people find jobs is rewarding work.

It’s also a role that generates happiness: the new employee is pleased to have a job and the client is happy they’ve found top talent to fill their vacancy. It’s very much a win–win scenario, which is why recruitment businesses strive as hard as they do to improve operations.

Award-winning talent acquisition platform hireEZ harnesses agentic AI to help recruiters seamlessly connect the right people with the right opportunities. It’s been a 10-year journey for Co-Founder and CEO Steven Jiang, who believes he’s found his most suitable role in the process.

“I think I’ve been very lucky,” he tells The CEO Magazine. “I’ve aligned great technology, a great product and great people – including my partners and our customers – to build a great business.”

That business is hireEZ, the AI-first, people-centric recruiting platform, which empowers recruiters with intelligent, efficient and accurate candidate screening and matching.

“We wanted to unify and simplify sourcing and recruiting-related activities into a single platform,” Jiang explains.

A smooth operation

With the help of AI, the hireEZ process is largely automated from the time a candidate’s application is submitted to the moment the hiring manager’s calendar is booked. Humans are involved in certain critical processes along the way, but Jiang says it’s a smooth journey.

“AI has helped us realize the sourcing and engagement functions we needed to convert passive job seekers,” he says. “I believe AI is the future of HR tech and it was obvious to me we had to use it well to become the big player behind this revolution. It’s an exciting time to be in this industry.”

A former Samsung engineer, Jiang saw the opportunity for a platform like hireEZ a decade ago and was quick to act. Now, it’s about survival.

“We’re growing and we want to keep growing, but the very grounded reality of the next three-to-five years is survival,” he reveals. “This is a revolution of technology – this industry is undergoing a seismic shift and like any earthquake, you need to survive it. We’ve had to move quickly.”

With AI under the hood, agility hasn’t been a problem for hireEZ.

“We’re humble and grounded enough to make big changes to our infrastructure to accommodate the best and latest AI technologies to support our customers and our product stack,” he says.

“We have a huge customer base and a great reputation, which is an advantage over newer startups, but if we’re going to keep up we have to be ready to act quickly and rebuild whatever the cost. The biggest cost is to do nothing.”

Perfect partners and customers

That customer base has grown to include leading talent acquisition partner Cielo, which has found hireEZ to be exactly the kind of one-stop shop Jiang intended to create.

“In the early years we were blessed by small and mid-size businesses [SMBs], and our customer base has only grown with us,” he says. “We still support SMBs, but our sweet spot is corporates with employee counts between 1,000 and 100,000.

“We’re so lucky to have partners and customers like Cielo. They serve the largest enterprise companies in the world, which have indirectly become our customers. We’ve grown so much because of their trust and endorsement.”

Jiang says keeping hireEZ’s cost down for clients has been another crucial win amid the industry revolution.

“If your technology and product are the best, then your go-to-market cost will be the lowest,” he says. “If you don’t have the right product, your cost will be very expensive. A lot of our competitors raised five, seven or even 12 times the money we did, but they couldn’t beat us.”

Instead, Jiang used his comparatively modest resources to make a simple appeal to would-be clients: let us make your recruiters more productive.

“They see the value of hireEZ’s proposition and we’re profitable as a result.”

Jiang landed his first job at Samsung after graduating from North Carolina State University, where he met his first – and only – boss to date, hireEZ Co-Founder Xinwen Zhang.

“I convinced him to quit his high-profile job and co-found hireEZ with me,” he explains.

Today, Zhang is hireEZ’s CTO, leading innovation to keep pace with the evolving global workforce.

“He was my boss and I disliked that. So I became his boss,” Jiang says, laughing. “I liked that much more.”