Five years on, PitchMe’s founder revisits the problem that started the company and what AI has changed about it.
Every company reaches a point where it has to ask whether the problem it set out to solve is still the problem. PitchMe is five years into building candidate data enrichment for the staffing industry, and the category has been rewritten several times over in that stretch. So the company’s founder and CEO, Dina, sat down with Ed Pederson, VP of Commercial Operations, to answer the question directly.
The mission, it turns out, hasn’t moved. The purpose has come into sharper focus.
The problem was never the software. It was the trust.
What Dina noticed five years ago was a behavior recruiters repeated everywhere. A recruiter would open the ATS, look at a database holding hundreds or thousands of records, then open a sidebar with LinkedIn and start sourcing from scratch.
It made no sense. Why would someone sitting on an asset that valuable go somewhere else to begin the search?
The conclusion was that this wasn’t a usability problem with the ATS or CRM. It was a trust problem. And when the team traced it to its root (research that began before PitchMe existed) they landed on something more fundamental: the static profile of an individual, otherwise known as the CV.
A CV gets amended for every open role, stuffed with whatever keywords are most likely to earn a shortlist. It doesn’t help the candidate tell a story, and it doesn’t help the recruiter read between the lines and put the right person in front of the right opportunity. Every system built downstream of that document inherits its weakness.
The mission didn’t change. The purpose sharpened.
The distinction Dina draws is the clearest frame PitchMe has found for where AI actually belongs in recruiting.
No recruiter wants to give away the interview. As she puts it, you don’t take a job as a recruiter if you hate talking to people. What recruiters will happily hand over is the manual load: updating records, keeping them current, hunting down candidates already sitting in the database and pulling them back into the ATS.
That is the work AI takes off the desk. But it does more than subtract, it surfaces the bigger picture of a person rather than a flattened one.
“The purpose of PitchMe is to bring AI in and humanize the manual routine of screening, matching, and shortlisting.”
The payoff isn’t efficiency. It’s that recruiters walk into a conversation already knowing far more than a single sheet of paper could ever tell them, and candidates are seen and heard rather than processed. Dina calls it a privilege to watch the change land on both sides of the desk.
Anyone who has sat in on interviews recognizes the version of this PitchMe is trying to end: a recruiter staring at a screen and typing while a real person talks to the side of their head. Getting the human element back into that room is worth a great deal.
Beyond the standard fields and into social listening
PitchMe’s core enrichment has always covered the structured layer: contact information, email, phone, skills, licenses, certifications, location, title, employer. Asked what the next frontier looks like, Dina pointed past it.
This year the platform moved into what the team calls social listening: personal signals such as anniversaries, birthdays, a new child, a new puppy, a new hobby, a new adventure. Those flow back into the CRM as live data triggers. The example she offers is a simple one. Most people would appreciate a birthday message from someone other than their bank, and this is an incredible opportunity for the recruiter to make a lasting impact on the mind of the talent.
The push for this came from recruiters themselves. Even when the standard fields are updated accurately, they want to see past them, because building a meaningful connection requires it.
“In the end of the day they are not placing functions. They’re placing people.”
The obvious objection: isn’t this a privacy problem?
If recruiters are handed that depth of knowledge, someone has to ask about the dark side. Dina has been fielding the question for five years, and her answer is that the pre-AI status quo was considerably scarier.
Before anyone had a name for social listening, recruiters were simply opening Instagram and Facebook and judging what they found. There were widely reported cases of candidates screened out over a vacation photo. It was subjective, unauditable, and biased by design.
She illustrates how badly unstructured signals get read with a software developer who blogs about bird watching. Is that introversion? Curiosity? Nothing at all? A human eyeballing it will invent an answer.
Structured behavioral signal and predictive analytics do the opposite. They connect professional skills to personal ones in a way that leaves less room for improvisation. PitchMe has drawn hard lines around where the product will not go:
- No background checks (never built, never planned).
- No AI-written candidate summaries or recommendations made on the recruiter’s behalf.
- Facts only. No subjective judgment layered on top.
What the data does enable is forward-looking rather than gatekeeping: tracing career trajectories, connecting a person’s past to what’s possible next, and helping employers build bespoke motivation and learning-and-development paths around what someone actually cares about. Customers have seen stronger offer acceptance and retention when candidates are given a clear, personalized path because the employer understood something real about them beyond the day job.
Verification for real people
Taken together, these pieces amount to something PitchMe doesn’t often say out loud: the platform provides protection and verification for real people, mostly without their ever noticing.
The data is verified and secured. Nobody is embellishing to match a job description. Nobody is running a lazy AI apply and firing a synthetic profile into the pipeline. What remains is real humans connecting with real humans on real data with enough room left in the process for personality to come through.
That is the part that matters most.
Dina Bay is the CEO and Founder at PitchMe, the AI-powered candidate data enrichment platform built for staffing and recruiting firms. To see what real-time, accurate candidate data can do for your AI stack, visit pitchme.co.