When we formed Woven in 2017, we set out to eliminate the gap between talent and opportunity, so everyone can find a team where they flourish.
In today's imperfect world a resume can be a flaw just as much of a door opener. Interviewing is a broken process littered by our own biases. Technical assessments rarely involve on the job skills, yet determine critical hires.
Wes Winham spent 10 years as the head of engineering for a technology company, and hiring was unexpectedly his biggest challenge. Hiring for technical work takes time. A lot of it. Even after all that time, he sometimes got it wrong. With all the existing tools, it didn’t help him separate mediocre from exceptional. To preserve his time and sanity, he sometimes screened on imprecise signals like a college degree or experience at a hot tech company. He desperately needed a way to differentiate between candidates who looked good on paper and candidates who had the grit and aptitude to make a big impact now and as we scaled.
When we formed Woven in 2017, we set out to eliminate the gap between talent and opportunity, so everyone can find a team where they flourish.
Our mission is simple. We unlock human ingenuity and purpose. We create effective software teams by allowing outsiders to join teams with the ease of insiders.
Team quality is the most important part of an organization, whether for dodgeball or the Fortune 500. That makes hiring probably the most important organizational process.
Despite that importance, a 1970’s hiring manager unfrozen today would still instantly recognize our hiring process. Online job boards, digital resumes, online multiple-choice assessments, and video chat have only made existing paper-inspired processes more efficient, with very little minor improvements.
Woven is here to push it forward, to reorient our hiring process to reap the 10x improvement that technology + AI-assistance can provide. We believe that firms that fail to meaningfully incorporate AI-assisted hiring will systematically underperform.
Woven exists to give hiring superpowers to technology leaders and talent acquisition teams. To do that, we’ll need to change behavior in a very risk-averse and fundamentally human process. We have chosen to undertake this challenge in a way that facilitates inclusive hiring and all the while acknowledging that teams built of similar members under-perform diverse teams.
We find strengths. Successful humans are “jagged” in their strengths and weaknesses, and we design systems with this principle in mind.