2019: The Year To Un-Break Your Hiring Process

Growing up, I was a bad student.

For me, sitting in a quiet room and listening to someone for 45 to 90 minutes was tantamount to torture. Every year, I vowed to myself that I'd make a change, power through, and improve, and every year I was wrong. I just wasn't built for it. My strengths lay elsewhere, I supposed.

It wasn't until I got my first internship, working for a tech startup out of DeveloperTown, that I found some of those professional strengths. As it turned out, there were a lot of assets that I, even as a 20 year old, could bring to a business, and none of them required sitting quietly for an hour at a time. I excelled, which opened the door to my next internship, which opened the door to my first job, and my career was off to the races.

In short, I got lucky.

If it wasn't for that one internship, which I got primarily through the kindness of a family friend, I would have never gotten the opportunity to show my value to employers. My resume would have been lackluster—there aren't a lot of people listing "improv comedy" in the Required Skills portion of their job posting—and I don't know where my career would be today.

This experience led me to understand a fundamental truth about how we hire.

The Resume Is Broken

Imagine that I came to you and pitched you a tool that will help you hire for your team. Some results we've seen with this solution include: massive amounts of racial discrimination, women being offered 13% less compensation, and academic studies that show that we're only measuring the weakest indicators of future job success. This tool is completely self-reported, and any relevant information that might help you make a decision is completely unverifiable.

You'd laugh me out of your office, and I'd absolutely deserve it.

So, why is that exact tool the first lens through which we judge job applicants?

Furthermore, why aren't we listening to experts who continue to tell us how toxic resumes are as a vehicle for hiring? While resumes and credentials serve a place in telling a candidate's story, why do we continually hold them up as a source of truth instead of one isolated, highly unreliable data point?

I believe there are a couple of answers.

First and foremost, change is hard, and the ask here is pretty big. Making the pivot to an evidence-based hiring model requires upending your current hiring processes, and that can be scary, but fundamental human equality is on the line, and we all know that we can do better.

Second, we have a natural tendency towards survivorship bias. Things worked out for me in the system, therefore the system is working just fine. We need to resist that urge as we look to hire in 2019 and beyond, because the evidence doesn't support that worldview.

The truth is, for every one person with a story like mine, there are a dozen that have a similar story without a similar opportunity. They have the skill, they have the potential, but they don't have the grades, credentials, or experience to prove themselves. They can hustle, they can network, they can build their portfolio with volunteer projects, and yet the hiring managers who interview them will consider themselves to be "taking a flier" on an unproven quantity.

I believe that we can end this toxic cycle with technology, and I just joined a team who agrees.

I've spent the past couple months helping an incredible group of technical founders build a company called Woven. We just formally launched with funding from High Alpha Capital, and I want you to join us on our journey to reduce bias and help high-growth SaaS companies scale their engineering teams more effectively.

What We’re Building…

At Woven, we give every job applicant the opportunity to prove their worth by providing them with an hour-long work simulation. This provides us with the data necessary to give a detailed recommendation to hiring managers based on a candidate's technical, problem-solving, and collaboration abilities—all benchmarked against their existing team. Meanwhile, candidates receive detailed feedback on their performance to help them advance in their career, regardless of the outcome of the interview.

We're thrilled about this solution, because we believe it will help us build the high-growth SaaS industry that we wish to see.

We want to build a rational industry, where the work that you do to get the job is the same as the work you’d do in the job.

We want to build an inclusive industry, where you’re not judged based on your name, background, and education, but rather on the quality of your work.

We want to build an empirical industry, where hiring decisions are backed by data instead of gut feel and intuition.

We want to build a human industry, where you have enough time with each candidate to treat them like a real person.

We want to build a nurturing industry, where instead of receiving an email that reads “Thank you for your interest,” you receive detailed feedback that allows you to grow and improve.

We want to build a better industry, filled with better engineering teams, doing better work.

What You Can Do To Help

If this mission speaks to you, I have four requests:

1. Tell me your story in the comments of this post. If you have experienced bias in hiring, your story will help fuel me this year. I want to hear it.
2. Tag an engineering team leader who does a great job of running their hiring process. We're launching a cool new project in a couple weeks, and we'd love to talk to forward-thinking engineering managers about it.
3. Schedule a meeting with our team if you are in charge of hiring for an engineering team, particularly in a high-growth SaaS company. We'd love to learn how we can help you scale your team in 2019.
4. Share this press release with your network. We're working to get the word out and every share counts.

Let's work together in 2019 to create a better, more fair tech ecosystem.