Entrepreneurship 101 · Business
Entrepreneurship 101 in its first season, features Steven Lu talking about being the Co-Founder & CEO @ Pin.com.
· 28 min 50 sec · Hosted by Daniel Lucas
Episode description and notes
Steven Lu Exited startup founder now running one of the hottest AI Recruiting startups: Co-Found & CEO @ Pin.com - AI Recruiting & Sourcing Steven Lu has spent nearly a decade inside recruiting technology, on both the build side and the sell side. He's watched the same pattern repeat at every company he's touched: great recruiters get buried in low-value work, and the tools they pay for keep them there. He's now on his second act trying to fix it. He shows up to podcasts with specific patterns, hard numbers, and operator stories from inside the hiring funnel, not theory and not the usual AI hype cycle commentary. Background: CEO and Co-Founder of Pin (pin.com), the highest-rated AI recruiting platform on G2 (4.8/5) Previously Co-Founder and CEO of Interseller, the sourcing and outreach platform acquired by Greenhouse Spent his post-exit years inside Greenhouse, watching how recruiting software actually gets adopted (and abandoned) at scale before leaving to start Pin Raised a $3M seed led by Expa Ventures in December 2024 Advisory bench includes Benjamin Mena (Elite Recruiter Podcast, 170K+ downloads), Brianna Rooney (Techees, acquired by Affirm), Rich Rosen (Forbes Top-50 Recruiters, 1,200+ placements), and Evan White (Purple Acorn Network) Press: VentureBeat, Pulse2, and most of the major recruiting trade publications The numbers he can speak to (Pin's real customer data, not a deck): 850M+ candidate profiles across professional networks, GitHub, Stack Overflow, patents, and academic publications 14 days average time-to-fill 12 hours a week saved per recruiter on sourcing and outreach combined 5x better outreach response rates vs. industry averages 83% candidate acceptance rate into customers' hiring pipelines 90% reduction in manual sourcing time 91% of users reduce or eliminate LinkedIn Recruiter spend after switching 6x more diverse candidate pipelines Topics Steven can go deep on: Recruiting and talent acquisition The post-LinkedIn-Recruiter stack: what TA teams are buying instead, and why 91% of Pin users walked away Outbound vs inbound hiring, and why sourced candidates are 5x more likely to be hired than applicants Why multi-source candidate data (GitHub, Stack Overflow, patents, publications) beats single-network sourcing for technical and niche roles The agency vs in-house TA economics shift happening right now What "good" looks like for time-to-fill, response rates, and recruiter capacity in 2026 The future of the recruiter role: strategist vs operator, and which parts of the job AI is actually changing See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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