About
Every applicant deserves a fair first read.
Slate is a first-round hiring screener built to give every candidate the same careful, evidence-based read, with the reasons in plain view and a person on your team making the call.
The first round was already unfair before the bias started
Most hiring teams never read past the first ten applications. Not because they want to be unfair, but because volume makes careful reading impossible before the calendar moves on. The people who apply first get a considered look. The people who apply two days later, when the inbox is full, get a skim at best.
On top of that, the things that leak into a first impression have nothing to do with the job: the name at the top of the resume, a school name, a previous employer, a phrasing that matches what a reviewer expects or does not. None of it is the work. All of it shapes the impression before the evidence is ever read.
Slate was built to fix the first round, not skip it. It reads every application against the role, in full, with one consistent rubric. It keeps name, age, gender, school and employer prestige out of the frame. Every judgment is tied to a verbatim line from the application, so a reviewer can check the read rather than trust it. Then a human on your team decides.
Fair first-round screening is not a feature. It is the reason the company exists.
Founded
March 2023
Stage
Pre-Seed
Team
9 people
HQ
New York, NY
Structure
C corporation
Focus
AI full time
Founders and makers
Elena Marsh (Co-founder and CEO) and Daniel Okafor (Co-founder and CTO) started Slate in New York in March 2023 and are building full time. The team of nine is US-based.
Elena Marsh
Co-founder and CEO
Elena led hiring operations at two growth-stage companies and kept hitting the same wall: more applicants than any small team can read fairly. Slate started as the fix for that first round, not a way to skip it.
New York, NY
Daniel Okafor
Co-founder and CTO
Daniel spent a decade building evaluation and ranking systems where being wrong was expensive. The model-agnostic screening layer, with its commitment to structured, auditable reads and honesty about uncertainty, is the product of that decade.
New York, NY
Grace Lindqvist
Founding Engineer
Grace builds the product surfaces where a role and a pile of applications become a fair, comparable set of reads. The quiet reliability that makes the interesting parts trustworthy is the whole goal.
Remote, US
Aaron Wells
Design and Product
Aaron shapes how a screen reads at a glance and holds up under scrutiny. The goal is software that feels calm and precise, and that never hides how it reached a conclusion.
Brooklyn, NY
Team profiles are illustrative and representative of the people building Slate. Slate, Inc. is an equal-opportunity employer.
Four things that do not move
These are not aspirational. They are the design constraints. Every decision about the product and the company passes through them.
Judge the work, not the person
The screen is built to read job-relevant evidence and to keep name, age, gender, school and employer prestige out of it. We reduce bias by design, not by disclaimer.
Always show the evidence
Every reason points to the exact line it came from. A read you cannot check is an opinion, not a screen.
A human decides
Slate never auto-rejects and never makes the call. It makes the first read fair and fast, and leaves the judgment with your team.
Honest about the limits
Models are not oracles. We would rather say plainly where a read is thin than oversell a certainty we do not have.
Give every applicant a fair first read.
Start free with one open role. See what a structured, evidence-based screen looks like before you commit.