Built by people who ran the pipeline before they built the tool
Hirefathom was founded in Chicago in 2024. We're a three-person team building resume screening tools for TA teams — tools that are transparent about what they're doing and honest about what they're not.
Why we built this
Marcus Whitfield spent five years in talent operations at a Chicago-based technology company — running TA programs, managing req pipelines, and sitting through more ATS implementation meetings than he'd like to count. The reqs that frustrated him most weren't the ones with too few applicants. They were the ones with 300.
With a stack that size, the honest truth was that qualified candidates were being skipped — not because a recruiter made a bad call, but because there wasn't time to read every file. A recruiter who is excellent at her job cannot review 300 resumes carefully and still manage five other open roles. Something gets deprioritized, and it's usually the bottom half of the stack.
He started looking at the existing AI screening tools and found a different problem: they made decisions without explanation. Scores without criteria. Rankings with no rationale a hiring manager or a candidate could interrogate. He left in early 2024 to build Hirefathom with his co-founder Priya Anand — a screening tool that reads the whole stack and tells you exactly why each candidate ranked where they did. Not a decision-maker. A reading assistant with documented reasoning.
The team
Five years in talent operations before founding Hirefathom in 2024. Spent those years designing TA programs and watching high-volume reqs create avoidable blind spots in candidate review. Built the product to fix the reading problem, not the decision problem.
ML engineer with a background in NLP and structured information extraction. Built Fathom's resume parsing and criteria-matching pipeline. Focused on the constraint that the model must not infer what the job description didn't say — which turns out to be harder than it sounds.
Product background in HR software, with a focus on making AI outputs readable to the people who use them — not just the engineers who built them. Owns the shortlist UI and the recruiter override flow. If a recruiter can't understand why a candidate ranked where they did, that's a product problem, not a user problem.
What we build toward
Explainability over throughput
A faster shortlist that no one can defend is worse than a slower one with documented reasoning. We optimize for defensibility first.
Recruiter in control
AI surfaces. Humans decide. That's not a limitation — it's the design.
Fair by construction
We built the scoring system specifically to avoid demographic inference. Not as an afterthought — as the foundation.
Chicago, IL
Founded 2024. Angel-backed 2025. Building in Chicago's West Loop, serving in-house TA teams and staffing agencies across North America.