In recent times, sourcing talent has become challenging but hiring the correct talent has been painful for longer. A key feature when hiring is the reference check process, which has become a redundant tick box exercise for recruiters, and over 95% are not seeking references from their previous colleagues to gain insights into their past work performance and behaviours, and assess their suitability for the role.
In an attempt to address this concern, California-based Weekday has launched from stealth with a $2.2 million seed funding round. The investment was led by Venture Highway with participation from several influential angel investors.
The Y Combinator-backed startup aims to use the funds to supercharge the hiring landscape through the power of trusted references.
Amit Singh, CEO and Co-founder of Weekday commented: “We did a survey of more than 200 companies’ hiring process, and while a majority did a basic background check on candidates, less than 5% of companies use reference checks from previous colleagues to make their hiring decisions. This often leads to wrong hires. Eventually leading to firing; which ends up being detrimental to both employer as well as the employee. We want to change that. We want to solve the problem of lack of trust in the hiring process. We believe that a recruiting platform with “references” as the cornerstone is the solution that solves all these problems. We are what LinkedIn should have been.”
“While most other company functions like design, product, dev tools, and sales have seen breakthrough products in the last 5-6 years, recruitment still hasn’t. LinkedIn is a 20-year-old company that continues to be the de-facto platform for recruitment. We are partnering with Weekday as they try to change that” said Aviral Bhatnagar from Venture Highway.
Crowdsourced reference network for recruitment
Founded in 2021 by Amit Singh, Anubav Malik, and Chetan Dalal in California, Weekday helps startups hire engineers who are vouched by other software engineers. It is a sourcing engine on auto-pilot for these companies, that finds candidates, facilitates outreach to them, and sends interested parties to interview with ready references.
Weekday invites software engineers to connect their social profiles such as LinkedIn and Contacts and offers them a readymade shortlist to refer talent to various companies. The company gamifies the experience and makes this unique data of references available for recruiters.
The company hosts multiple people’s references and companies can utilise the “Backchannel” feature to get background references (from former colleagues) on every candidate they interact with. This makes hiring less about resumes and interviews and more about real-life experiences and capabilities.
