You Can't Improve What You Can't See: The Origin Story of BrightHire: Teddy ChestnutL (LIVE @ Transform 2026)

WATCH: https://youtu.be/LqqkvpJM1wA Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features Teddy Chestnut, co-founder of BrightHire — the leading interview intelligence platform — which has recently been acquired by Zoom. Teddy is one of the rare founders who was genuinely born into the recruiting industry: both of his parents spent 30 years in HR, his dad met his mom as a recruiter, and he grew up with dinner table conversations about comp plans and campus recruiting. That origin story is the foundation for a company built on a deceptively simple insight: hiring is the most important thing we do in business, but the least rigorous — and you can't improve what you can't see. The conversation covers BrightHire's full arc, from the 2019 founding conviction that interview conversations should be captured and analyzed, through the early beta customer who asked if they were charging enough, to the current state of a platform that has processed over 930,000 interviews and is building agentic AI workflows on top of a Zoom acquisition. Teddy shares data from that 930,000-interview analysis that genuinely surprises — compensation comes up in fewer than 2% of candidate conversations. What candidates are actually asking about: remote and flexible work, company growth trajectory, and product innovation. The episode covers BrightHire's emerging role in interview fraud detection (they've helped customers identify cases where the person who showed up for onboarding was not the person who interviewed), the rise of AI interviewers and what recruiter reaction has actually looked like, and Teddy's sharp framework for what makes a vendor defensible in an era when companies are building their own AI tools in-house. He closes with one of the most quotable observations of the conference: in a market flooded with AI products, the most important commodity any vendor has right now is trust. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tchestnut/ Learn More: http://brighthire.com