We founded BrightHire because we saw a massive gap between how critical hiring is and how poorly it’s often done.
Over a decade of building technology companies, Ben came to believe that being entrusted with a hiring decision is the most important professional responsibility – the future of the organization is at stake. As our advisor Adam Grant, put it, “hiring the wrong people might be the most costly decision managers make.”
And while influencing how over a quarter million LinkedIn members found a new opportunity, Teddy came to deeply appreciate that hiring is more than a process, it’s a gateway to economic opportunity, a bridge to professional transformation and fulfillment.
And yet hiring is stuck in the stone age. Pen and paper. Gut and recollections. A total black box.
Candidates show up prepared, rehearsed, and focused, and interviewers often wing it. Recruiters and hiring teams play frustrating games of telephone. And while the cost of hiring the wrong people is massive, decisions are made based on fuzzy memories, not facts.
It’s no wonder that despite commitments to diversity and inclusion, companies struggle to translate them into hiring outcomes. Teams often apply – consciously or unconsciously – different standards to candidates from underrepresented and non-traditional backgrounds.
And remarkably, while the most important parts of the hiring process are human, nearly all recruiting technology has been built to automate people out of the process, not actually support the people in it.
This all seemed crazy.
So we set out to build a hiring platform for the future: intelligent, collaborative, built on top of the modern tools we all use, like Zoom, and focused on empowering people to hire better, faster and more inclusively – based on facts, not fuzzy memories.
Today we’re thrilled to finally share a few milestones on that journey.
First, after a year of building in close partnership with early pilot partners, we’re exiting stealth and publicly launching a completely new kind of platform to transform the future of hiring.
Second, to help us pursue this ambitious goal, we raised $3M led by Flybridge Capital and an incredible group of supportive investors that have backed the likes of MongoDB, DataDog, Figma, Ro and Instacart.
Third, Dr. Adam Grant, Wharton Professor of organizational psychology, NYT best-selling author, and host of the acclaimed WorkLife podcast, has joined our advisory board along with David Cohen and Felice Ekelman.
Most importantly, we’ve powered thousands of interviews and hiring decisions for some great companies, and built an amazing and passionate team (we’re hiring!).
These are big milestones, but we’re just getting started.
We won’t be done until we’ve brought rigor, excellence, and inclusivity into the heart of every company’s hiring process.
If you’re excited about this mission, or want to transform how your company hires forever, we’d love to hear from you.
Ben & Teddy
