Weekday Simplifies SWE Hiring with Upfront Referrals

The increasing emergence of startups has no doubt grown the need for employees, especially software engineers, with a candidate’s job references playing an integral part in the scouting and hiring process.

Recruiters often search for viable job candidates through referrals, which usually come from previous co-workers or employers, and are needed to ensure that the candidates they end up hiring can be a great fit for the job as well as the office’s culture.

Despite its significance, a rising amount of company recruiters have stopped seeking referrals from previous co-workers as the process can be time-consuming and has become too much of a hurdle.

A Y Combinator-backed startup named Weekday, founded by Amit Singh, Chetan Dalal, and Anubhav Malik, creates a recruiting platform with referrals as its focus to disentangle the hiring process and help recruiters find trustworthy software engineers.

Referrals and Recommendations

With plenty of startup software engineers now working remotely, gauging their culture fit with teammates as well as their behavioral inclinations and habits while working in an often isolated environment has become increasingly prominent.

This can be done by having recruiters search and go through any required information about potential candidates, including referrals, that can now be more easily found through networking tools and provided in job platforms, like LinkedIn, for example.

When it comes to searching for referrals specifically, however, it is still quite rare to find platforms that are able to provide reliable and guaranteed results. For instance, although LinkedIn is powered with one of the world’s largest databases of job candidates, the platform’s Recommendation feature isn’t always well grounded.

The feature provides commendations written by LinkedIn members to recognize a candidate’s work, usually done by requesting recommendations from connections one works with or has worked with. However, there are instances when the candidates themselves are the ones who provide their own commendations, making the data essentially moot for recruiters looking to make good hiring decisions.

Weekday’s founders, despite having access to plenty of job platforms and networking tools, were only able to hire an engineer for their previous startup after three months of searching. This unnecessary challenge inspired the trio to create Weekday, which automates the managing referrals step of the hiring process.

Automated Referrals and Hires

With scouring through networking platforms no longer entirely apt, the Weekday trio had to turn to their networks for references by conducting video calls with friends and colleagues and asking them to find promising candidates through their LinkedIn. The candidate searching process not only became complicated but required the involvement of others, which doesn’t sound very effective.

The trio essentially productized this approach to make the complicated process of sourcing a simpler and more automated one. Upon signing up, Weekday’s platform lets recruiters connect their social graphs to their LinkedIn or phone contacts. Weekday will review the contacts and send outreach messages that it has created to about 50 potential candidates.

Weekday can perform intro calls with interested candidates and share a shorter, more curated list for recruiters to sift through. Once recruiters want to know more, the platform can do reference checks of about 70% coverage on any candidate who has provided consent. Once this is done, the interview process can begin per recruiters’ availability, with Weekday able to schedule the interviews as well.

In this case, Weekday will look for personal/work emails of any LinkedIn profile recruiters require, set up mailboxes, and create personalized messages for the outreach process. Recruiters can then visit LinkedIn profiles and send outreach sequences to candidates’ LinkedIn InMail and personal/work emails with just 1 click.

Recruiters can also use Weekday to send personalized messages to candidates through WhatsApp and texts or have Weekday’s in-house team conduct outreach phone calls.

With recruiters having to take care of and pay attention to hundreds of things, Weekday provides a solution that can make the candidate outreach process less stressful. Over 120 companies have utilized Weekday, with the company aiming to hit more than 1000 in 2025.

Weekday recently secured $2.2M in seed funding led by Venture Highway. Companies can try the platform for free and will only need to pay commission-based fees when they successfully hire engineers through Weekday.

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