Prem Kumar launched Humanly after experiencing the hiring process from the side most tech founders ignore: the candidate. “After I graduated from college, I sent application after application and was expecting to at least hear back on most of them,” he said. What he got was silence—an early glimpse into how overwhelmed hiring systems fail the people they’re supposed to serve.
In an interview with The Software Report, Kumar explained how his background shaped the company’s direction. At Microsoft, he worked on the HR Solution Delivery team, building tools and buying others to support a global workforce. “When we acquired LinkedIn, one of my roles was how do we bring this enormous set of data and use cases into the Microsoft ecosystem and products like Dynamics.” After moving to TinyPulse, focused on employee engagement, he saw the pattern repeating: disengagement often starts before day one.
Humanly is an AI-first recruiting platform that screens, interviews, and engages candidates across channels. “Everyone in an ideal world that meets basic qualifications would get interviewed. You just don’t have the human time to do that,” Kumar said. The platform starts with a chat-based screen, then moves to a skills or behavior-based voice or video interview with a customizable AI persona. “The goal with this is never to trick the candidate into making them think they’re talking to a human,” he explained. “But what we find is if you can make it just human enough, you get much more authentic interview input from a candidate.”
The system adapts in real time, responding to verbal cues and pauses. It’s also modular, so companies can deploy different pieces depending on role type or hiring volume. While Humanly serves both deskless and professional roles, its strength lies in high-volume, early-career hiring—where resumes say less, and speed matters more. “You have to talk to these folks to really get to know them,” Kumar said. “Some of the soft skills we’re getting really good at discerning, and what we can guarantee is that it’s going to be standardized.”
Today, Humanly supports hundreds of customers across industries like healthcare, finance, insurance, and hospitality. The company engages with about 250,000 candidates each month and consistently earns high satisfaction: “We have generally about a 4.8 out of 5 candidate rating.” The platform adapts in real time and can even respond to pauses in conversation with subtle signals—like an inhale—to avoid interrupting a candidate mid-thought.
Kumar is clear on where humans still matter. “AI is not going to be able to do a lot of things that recruiters can do in building those deep relationships,” Kumar said. What it can do is eliminate silence and close the gap at the start of the process. “There’s nothing less human than being ignored.”