Lucas Price, Yardstick CEO and founder.

Anyone who has interviewed job applicants by winging it knows the routine: questions in a free-form document, notes on the back of a resume, and an overabundance of gut instinct and selective memory in the process.

Seattle tech entrepreneur Lucas Price, a former Zipwhip senior vice president, wanted a better solution, too. But he couldn’t find one that had the kinds of specialized features that met his needs. So he decided to launch a startup to develop one.

The company, Yardstick, is making its debut today with a browser-based app that leads companies and hiring managers through the process of structured job interviews. Price describes the company’s focus as intelligent talent selection.

The goal is to make better hiring decisions using consistent questions and processes, while incorporating culture and competencies in a way that can persist as a company grows.

“Making sure each candidate gets interviewed and assessed in the same way is a big part of the product,” Price said.

Makers of major applicant tracking systems offer tools for structured interviews in their checklists of features, but Price said he ultimately came to the conclusion that the problem required technology dedicated to the purpose.

Price was senior vice president of sales at Zipwhip from 2014 to 2019, prior to its acquisition by Twilio for $850 million in 2021. He was previously a founder and executive at Seattle-based Gravity Payments.

Price is Yardstick’s founder and CEO, working with CTO Austin Amoruso, a former Zipwhip senior engineer, and a small engineering team. Kathy Dellplain, a former senior human resources executive at companies including Amazon and Expedia, is working closely with Yardstick as an advisor, leveraging her experience in the HR field.

Yardstick leads hiring managers through the process of structured interviews. (Yardstick Image)

The company is self-funded by Price so far. He said he hasn’t decided whether he’ll seek outside investment.

Companies using Yardstick select from a library of competencies and cultural values that reflect their priorities and the requirements of an open position. They then choose interview questions that reflect those characteristics.

Yardstick shows questions to ask during interviews, ensuring that candidates aren’t asked the same ones repeatedly across multiple interviews. It includes an area for taking notes on the candidate’s responses.

One twist: Yardstick doesn’t let interviewers go back and edit their notes after they’ve taken them. Price cited social science showing that interviewers listen more attentively if they know they only have one chance to take and edit notes. In addition, he said, notes become less objective when an interviewer edits them after the fact.

The product has been in beta prior to launch with a handful of companies.

Yardstick will follow a standard enterprise software-as-a-service pricing model, with a free version and paid versions running $4,000 and $10,000 per year. A custom version will be priced based on the number of roles to be filled.

Long-term, Yardstick is looking at incorporating predictive technology, using data and past outcomes as signals to indicate whether a particular candidate will be a successful employee. For now, it uses a simple scoring system.

But even as Yardstick adds features, Price said, it will remain tightly focused on its niche.

“There’s a lot of areas for us to expand further into how to make the right hiring decision,” he said. “That’s what we’ll be focused on, the hiring decision, and not trying to replace everything else in the HR stack.”

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.