Hayden Sherwood · Founder, Built Well
I didn't plan to become a recruiter.
I learned how to be good at it.
In my past agency life, I supported hiring across all kinds of industries and organizations. Early-stage startups, mostly. The kind of companies where you're building the interview process at the same time you're running it, where the hiring manager is also the CEO, and where a bad hire genuinely changes the trajectory of the company. I also started to see a pattern: companies weren't failing at recruiting because they didn't care. They were failing because no one had ever built them anything real.
The problems were predictable.
So was the fix.
After nine years of seeing the same issues: job descriptions that described a fantasy candidate, careers pages that said nothing, interview processes that exhausted everyone and revealed little. I wanted to do something about it at scale. Not just for one company at a time, but as a practitioner who could move between organizations and actually transfer what works.
At the same time, I kept getting messages from people in my network. Friends of friends. Former candidates. People who had been laid off, or were quietly looking, or had applied to forty jobs and heard nothing back. They weren't looking for someone to find them a job. They needed someone to tell them the truth about why it wasn't working — and how to fix it.
Built Well is both of those things at once. The name means exactly what it sounds like: talent infrastructure that's actually built well, and careers that are positioned well. Two sides, one throughline.
Direct. Specific.
No filler.
I don't do vague audits that end in a slide deck no one reads. I don't do resume rewrites that sand off everything that makes you interesting. I work in the specifics: the actual words in your job description, the actual question you fumbled in your last interview, the actual reason your careers page isn't converting.
I'm also a new mother, which has made me even less patient with things that waste time. I work efficiently, I communicate clearly, and I don't disappear mid-engagement. If something isn't working, I'll tell you.