The task should resemble the job
A work sample is useful when it tests the decisions and skills the role will actually require—not someone's ability to guess a puzzle format.
About ShowWork Labs
Hiring should learn more from the work—and ask less from everyone around it.
We are building the operating system for job-relevant technical assessment: less manual coordination for hiring teams, clearer expectations for candidates, and a decision grounded in what someone actually did.
Why we are building ShowWork
Technical hiring has accumulated a lot of motion that produces very little understanding. Recruiters move information between tools. Engineers grade similar exercises repeatedly. Candidates rewrite the same story for every company and often learn nothing from the work they submitted.
We think the useful part is simpler: define what matters for the job, give people a reasonable way to demonstrate it, and make the evidence easy to inspect. ShowWork automates the administration and the repeatable first pass so hiring teams can spend their time on the judgment only people should make.
What we believe
Consistency is a product feature
Criteria should be agreed before candidates begin and applied to every submission. Exceptions should become visible, not disappear into a reviewer's notes.
Candidate time has a cost
The format, deadline, expected effort, and deliverable should be clear before work begins. A longer exercise is not automatically a better one.
Automation needs a boundary
Software can organize evidence and run a consistent first pass. It cannot take responsibility for a hiring decision. That stays with the team making it.
The system we are building
- A hiring team starts with the role and turns it into a deliberate sequence of coding, take-home, or system-design assessments.
- Each stage carries its own candidate brief, timing, rubric, and delivery rules instead of relying on a separate checklist.
- Candidates receive one private pipeline, complete the work in the right format, and submit the context the team requested.
- ShowWork evaluates the submission against the approved rubric and brings the evidence, exceptions, and stage result into review.
- The hiring team inspects the work, asks follow-up questions, and owns the decision.
What stays human
ShowWork does not make autonomous hiring decisions. An automated evaluation is a structured input to review, not a verdict. Teams are responsible for checking the work, considering relevant context, offering accommodations, and following the employment rules that apply to them.
We also will not call a process “bias-free.” Better structure can reduce arbitrary variation, but fairness requires ongoing human attention, clear policy, and a willingness to examine outcomes.
Product direction
Today, ShowWork is focused on the assessment pipeline. We want the work to become more useful to candidates too: clearer feedback they can learn from, better-matched job suggestions, and a demonstrated- skills record built from verified performance rather than time spent online. Those candidate-network features are product direction, not part of the current invitation experience.