About
Our story
2,000
applications in one week, for one role
In 2024 we were hiring for a warehouse network across three countries. One role drew 2,000 applications in a week, and the three of us had about forty hours to read them.
So we did what every stretched team does. We skimmed. We sorted by the last job title, then by the first line of the cover letter, then by whether a name felt familiar. By Friday we had a shortlist and no way to explain it.
The people we turned down never heard why. Some of them, we learned later, were stronger than the people we hired. Nobody had been unfair on purpose. The process simply had no room for reading.
Every applicant deserved to be read by someone with the time to do it properly
Yardstick is the tool we wanted that week. It reads every application against the brief your team wrote, gives each score a reason in plain words, and hands the decision back to a person. It never turns anyone down on its own.
We are still small, and we hire the way we build: one written brief, the same questions for everyone, and a reply to every applicant. If that sounds like how you want to hire, we would like to hear from you.
The founding team
Yardstick, 2026
Why we started
Most applicants are never read by a person
We ran high-volume hiring ourselves. The hours ran out long before the applications did, and nobody could say why one person got a call. Yardstick is the tool we wanted then.
Finding them
Four hundred applications, read in the order they arrived until the calendar ran out. We wanted every one of them read against the role.
Defending the shortlist
Different readers, different bars, nothing written down. We wanted every name to arrive with its reason, so the call could still be explained months later.
01
A person decides
Software can read a thousand applications. It shouldn’t be the one that says no, so Yardstick never is.
02
The same bar for everyone
Every applicant is read against the same brief, in the same order, with the same questions. Nobody gets an easier run.
03
Show the working
Every score carries its reason, written down, so the hiring team, an auditor or the candidate can check it later.
Sofia Lindqvist
Co-founder, CEO
Tomás Ferreira
Co-founder, engineering
Amara Okafor
Research lead
Jonas Weber
Product design
Elif Kaya
Organisational psychologist
Marek Nowak
Infrastructure
Chloé Martin
Customer engineering
Aaro Virtanen
Data and fairness
Where we’re going
Hiring shapes people’s lives, so it should be as easy to check as a set of accounts. We are building toward a hiring process that can explain itself to the people it turns down.
Next on the roadmap
Briefs you can share with candidates before they apply, so everyone knows what they will be read against.
Who we build with
A small group of hiring teams in logistics, care and retail who try every release before it ships.
How we check ourselves
We track how often teams overrule a score and why, and we change the product when the answer surprises us.
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