Hello from the Siftboard Team —
why we built this, and what's next

Siftboard is live now — but the team behind it has been living this hiring problem for years. This post is the origin story of what we shipped, why we built it for teams under 500 specifically, and what's coming next.

Why we built it

We came up doing in-house talent acquisition at companies between 50 and 400 employees. That's the size where you hire constantly, the founder is on every interview loop, and "we don't have a TA team" is still a true statement. It's also the size where every off-the-shelf recruiting tool we'd been pitched was built for someone else.

For junior hiring, the call was always the same: try Handshake or RippleMatch first. Both work, and we used both — but they were built around employer-university partnerships and structured campus programs. When we needed to hire a non-campus junior (a bootcamp grad, a career changer, someone from a school without a Handshake partnership), the signal dropped off fast.

For senior hiring, we ended up on LinkedIn Recruiter. Six seats a year, thousands of dollars per seat, a firehose of profiles that needed four hours of screening to turn into a shortlist worth reaching out to. The math never quite worked, but there wasn't a cheaper alternative that produced credible senior candidates.

We kept running into the same shape of problem. Not a shortage of recruiters, or a shortage of platforms, or a shortage of résumés — a shortage of candidates worth calling back this week. The tooling either skipped us (Handshake without a partnership, RippleMatch outside the campus funnel) or soaked our budget before delivering anything (LinkedIn Recruiter).

The tool we kept wanting didn't exist: paste a job description, get eight ranked candidates with personalized outreach emails already drafted. Under 30 seconds. Self-serve. Flat price, not enterprise contract. We ended up building it ourselves — that's Siftboard.

What we shipped to get here

The product today is closer to what we wanted a year ago than what we thought was possible. The headline numbers:

The first shortlist is free with no account required. You can paste a job description on the Siftboard app, get eight ranked candidates with personalized outreach copy, and decide whether the output is worth a $99/month subscription. If it's not, you leave with the shortlist in hand — no strings.

We're intentionally scoped to teams under 500. That window — 50 to 400 employees, depending on the industry — is where the tooling gap is sharpest, and where the founders actually know the workflow. We're not trying to displace Greenhouse at a 2,000-person company. We're building what Handshake-Reach-LinkedIn Recruiter would look like if it were actually one product, priced for the size of company that needs all three.

What's shipping next

The roadmap for the rest of 2026 is built around the same gap that made us build Siftboard in the first place: getting candidates in front of a hiring manager faster than the existing tools allow. Here's what's queued up, in order:

• 1
  Reply-rate signal Aug–Sep 2026

  When you send outreach from a Siftboard shortlist, the system will start tracking reply rates by candidate profile. That's the feedback loop that turns "eight ranked profiles" into "eight ranked profiles from the kind of person who actually responds to outreach." We won't surface it as a separate dashboard — it'll be visible on each candidate row.

• 2
  Calibration by industry Sep 2026

  Shortlists today are calibrated to role-level signals (seniority, function, must-have skills). The next layer is industry calibration — picking candidate pool, tone of outreach, and seniority heuristics that match how the same role works in fintech vs. healthcare vs. consumer. Same flat price, sharper output.

• 3
  Re-rank on hiring manager feedback Q4 2026

  When you mark a candidate "not a fit" mid-shortlist, the next shortlist on a similar role will re-rank using that signal. This is the simplest version of the "your shortlist gets smarter over time" promise, and we'll ship it before any bigger personalization work.

• 4
  ATS import for already-hired candidates Q4 2026

  A small but high-friction feature: upload your existing "people we've already decided on" list (your last 20–50 hires) and use it as a calibration anchor for future shortlists. Many of you told us your main objection to AI sourcing was "it doesn't know what good looks like for us yet." This solves that.

That's the launch and the first stretch of the roadmap. If you've used Siftboard and want to shape what we ship next, the easiest path is the leave a review page — reviews go directly into what we prioritize.

— The Siftboard team