When a company hires a VP, they run a proper search: a real rubric, careful screening, structured interviews, finalists with evidence behind each one. On every other role most of it gets skipped, because the cost of running it outruns the cost of the hire. Workshop Hiring uses AI for the parts that take time and a senior recruiter for the parts that don't, so the good process becomes affordable everywhere.
Great hiring isn't a mystery. The playbook is well-known: rubrics, structured interviews, work samples, deep reference calls. The hard part is running it without burning out the senior people who know how.
A resume is a starting point, not evidence. It tells you where someone has been, not how they'll do the job you're hiring them for. A good process digs that up.
Candidates deserve a real answer, fast. They have other options and their own timelines. A clear yes or no inside a week shows respect. Six weeks of silence signals a broken process.
Tools compress the expensive parts; humans keep the judgment. AI can read two hundred resumes against the same rubric without getting bored. It can't tell you who to bet on.
We run the same process a top retained-search firm would run on a $400k VP search — on every role we take.
Week one is design: a working session with the hiring manager that turns the job into a rubric and a sourcing plan. Weeks two through four are execution. AI handles the expensive parts — sourcing, resume review, the screener interview, the test task — on a stack of our own tools and the best recruiting point solutions on the market. Faz does the judgment work.
Faz is one of the leading recruiters in early-stage edtech. Based in Oakland, she and Mike first worked together at Entangled Solutions and again at Guild, where she spent years placing senior, mission-driven talent into companies that needed it. At Workshop Hiring she runs searches end to end: writing the rubric, talking to candidates, and handing hiring managers a small set of finalists with the evidence to pick.
Mike drove hiring at Entangled Solutions and has spent the last few years helping Workshop Ventures' portfolio companies hire. He's a partner at Workshop with seventeen years in education technology, most of it spent figuring out who to bet on.
If you're a candidate who got an email or saw a posting from us and want to confirm it's real, we'll come back inside a business day with the role, the company, and someone to talk to.
If you're hiring for a role that matters, tell us about it. We'll get back to you on whether we're the right team for it and what a first conversation looks like.