Wellfound
Wellfound is a startup hiring marketplace and AI recruiting platform whose wellfound:ai suite auto-generates screening criteria from a job description, then scores and ranks inbound applicants (AI Resume Screening) and surfaces outbound candidates from a talent graph of 10M opt-in Wellfound profiles plus 500M+ enriched external profiles.
HireAIScore rates Wellfound 52 out of 100 (grade F, Substantial gaps) under rubric v1.0, last reviewed August 2, 2026. Wellfound ranks 31 of 92 vendors rated in Screening AI, against a category average of 47. That score is drawn from 27 evidence items across 7 rubric criteria for Wellfound — 22 with a cited source, 9 recording that nothing was located.
§ 01 - Company facts
- Founded
- 2012
- Headquarters
- United States · US
- Pricing tier
- Mid
- Market side
- Employer-side (AEDT)
- Categories
- ScreeningSourcingATS-integrated
- Website
- wellfound.com
These are company details, not findings. They are editable by a verified representative and carry no weight in the score, which is built only from the cited evidence below.
§ 02 - Score breakdown
§ Score breakdown
Category scoring
Weighted contribution shown to the right of each bar.
- 01
Article 11 Technical Documentation
Weight 20%40
+8.0 · category avg 50
- 02
Bias Audit Transparency
Weight 18%82
+14.8 · category avg 46
- 03
FRIA Support
Weight 15%28
+4.2 · category avg 32
- 04
Data Governance Disclosure
Weight 15%45
+6.8 · category avg 54
- 05
Human Oversight Design
Weight 12%52
+6.2 · category avg 56
- 06
Post-Market Monitoring
Weight 12%60
+7.2 · category avg 40
- 07
Customer Documentation
Weight 8%58
+4.6 · category avg 58
Category avg is the mean raw score on that criterion across the 92 Screening AI vendors in scope of this rubric, this one included.
§ 03 - Strongest · weakest
Strongest category
Bias Audit Transparency
Raw score 82 · contributes 14.8 to total.
82 against a 46 category average
Weakest category
FRIA Support
Raw score 28 · contributes 4.2 to total.
28 against a 32 category average
§ 04 - Cited evidence
Download diligence record→§ Evidence
Cited per category
Every score is backed by at least one cited piece of evidence.
Evidence ledger
- Items
- 27
- Documentation
- 11
- Audit report
- 4
- Public statement
- 2
- Product feature
- 1
- Absence
- 9
- With a source URL
- 22 of 27
- Source hostnames
- 7
- Fewest items
- 2
- FRIA Support
These figures measure how thoroughly Wellfound was reviewed, not how Wellfound performed — an absence row, recording that nothing was located, is counted like any other item.
Article 11 Technical Documentation
3 items40
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Wellfound's own top-level wellfound:ai product page describes Search, Applicants and Autopilot but contains no mention of bias mitigation, fairness assessment, AI audits, explainability, human review or any AI ethics framework.
https://wellfound.com/recruit/all-features/wellfound-ai-overview
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
The only published description of the AI system's intended purpose, data pool and evaluation logic ('each candidate is assessed individually and independently against the same job criteria') lives on Warden AI's third-party dashboard, not on any Wellfound-controlled page, and the dashboard has no EU AI Act or technical-documentation section.
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Searched wellfound.com product and blog pages, reach.wellfound.com, help.wellfound.com and the Warden dashboard for a model card, system card, AI policy, responsible-AI page, explainability statement or ISO 42001 certification; none exists -- wellfound.com/about, /privacy and /terms return HTTP 403 to automated fetches and could not be inspected.
Bias Audit Transparency
5 items82
- Audit reportCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Public, login-free Warden AI continuous assurance dashboard for Wellfound AI Resume Screening showing monthly audits, latest 1 July 2026, sample of 23,584 candidate profiles, with sex, race/ethnicity and intersectional (sex x race/ethnicity) bias all graded 'Clear' (28 Clear / 0 Consider / 0 Concern).
- Audit reportCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Dedicated NYC Local Law 144 report page publishing scoring rates and impact ratios by sex (Female 36.35% / 1.00 reference, Male 35.85% / 0.99) and by race/ethnicity (Black 36.91% / 1.00, Asian 36.16% / 0.98, Hispanic-Latino 35.99% / 0.98, White 35.35% / 0.96), and disclosing that Warden's own independent dataset of real candidate profiles was used because historical data was unavailable.
https://trust.warden-ai.com/wellfound/ai-resume-screening/nyc
- Audit reportCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Bias detail page documenting the methodology as disparate-impact analysis plus counterfactual analysis, reporting counterfactual consistency of 100.00% (female) and 99.83% (male) alongside the impact ratios, across 23,584 records.
https://trust.warden-ai.com/wellfound/ai-resume-screening/bias
- Product featureCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Warden AI's public Assured directory independently lists Wellfound's 'AI Resume Screening' with a listing date of 16 March 2026 and the Warden Assured badge, confirming the dashboard covers Wellfound's own product rather than a third party's.
- Public statementCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Wellfound's own recruiting overview page links to the Warden dashboard from its 'Trust & support' footer as 'AI audit center', so the audit is publicly claimed by Wellfound rather than only hosted by the auditor.
FRIA Support
2 items28
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Wellfound's Warden assurance dashboard exposes only bias and NYC Local Law 144 sections; there is no EU AI Act, Article 27 FRIA, or deployer-obligation page anywhere on it.
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Searched wellfound.com (product, recruit, blog and pricing pages), reach.wellfound.com, help.wellfound.com and the Warden dashboard, plus targeted web searches pairing 'Wellfound' with 'EU AI Act', 'FRIA', 'fundamental rights impact assessment', 'Illinois HB 3773' and 'Colorado AI Act'; no FRIA template, deployer guidance, or EU AI Act statement of any kind was found.
Data Governance Disclosure
4 items45
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Wellfound's support article confirms SOC 2 compliance ('Yes!'), directs customers to a Trust and Safety Center at https://trust.wellfound.ai/, and gives security@wellfound.com as the compliance contact; no other certification (ISO 27001, ISO 42001) is claimed.
https://help.wellfound.com/article/1193-is-wellfound-soc-2-compliant
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Discloses the composition of the underlying data: 10M Wellfound candidates who joined the platform directly plus 500M+ externally enriched profiles, with enrichment described as inferring skills from teammate data and mapping company stage/category from 13+ years of startup hiring data -- but it does not say whether the 500M+ pool is scraped or licensed.
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
The trust centre URL resolves but renders only the heading 'Wellfound Trust Center' without JavaScript, so no certification scope, subprocessor list, data-retention terms or DPA could be independently verified from it.
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
No published exclusion list of attributes withheld from the screening model, no training-data provenance statement, and no 'we do not train on customer or candidate data' commitment was found across wellfound.com, reach.wellfound.com, help.wellfound.com or the Warden dashboard; wellfound.com/privacy and /terms return HTTP 403 to automated fetches and could not be inspected.
Human Oversight Design
4 items52
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Support documentation for wellfound:ai Applicants describes AI as sorting and enriching candidates while the recruiter accepts or rejects each one; no automatic rejection is documented, but the article also mentions no match-score explanation, override control or audit log.
https://help.wellfound.com/article/1136-what-is-wellfoundai-applicants
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Wellfound's candidate-facing AI Interviews (beta) documentation states plainly that 'Real people (not AI) review your interview' and that results stay private until the candidate chooses to share them, though it says nothing about bias testing, retention or consent terms.
https://help.wellfound.com/article/1195-how-do-i-take-an-ai-interview-and-how-do-they-work-beta
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
The Autopilot product page frames the workflow as human recruiters reviewing hundreds of profiles with the customer retaining the decision ('You reject or approve from the list'), reinforcing decision-support rather than automated decision-making.
https://wellfound.com/recruit/products/wellfound-ai-autopilot
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
The main wellfound:ai page markets '10x faster' application processing and AI ranking without describing any human-oversight control, override path, in-product explanation of why a candidate ranked where they did, or jurisdiction-specific configuration.
https://wellfound.com/recruit/all-features/wellfound-ai-overview
Post-Market Monitoring
4 items60
- Audit reportCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Warden AI re-audits the resume screening system monthly and publishes the running result publicly ('Our platform continuously audits for bias and other risks, giving ongoing visibility into fairness, compliance, and system behavior'), with the most recent audit dated 1 July 2026.
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Public Atlassian Statuspage with a dedicated 'AI' component alongside Application and Background jobs, 90-day uptime history, chronological past-incident log, and email, Slack, Atom and RSS subscription options.
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Documented bug and security-vulnerability reporting route, pointing researchers to a dedicated vulnerability report page and maintaining a public acknowledgements list of reporters; security@wellfound.com is separately published as the compliance and security contact.
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
No AI model-update changelog, release notes for the screening model, or dedicated channel for reporting AI-specific incidents or contesting a screening outcome was found on wellfound.com, reach.wellfound.com, help.wellfound.com, the status page or the Warden dashboard.
Customer Documentation
5 items58
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Public product hub covering all three wellfound:ai products (Search, Applicants, Autopilot) with feature-level detail and links to the trust centre, help centre, privacy policy and terms.
https://wellfound.com/recruit/all-features/wellfound-ai-overview
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Fully public pricing page listing the free unlimited-jobs ATS tier, job ads from $200, Reach at $0 / $135 / $199 per seat per month with a custom 'Scale' tier, and Autopilot at $500 per month per open role plus a 10% placement fee.
- DocumentationCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Maintained help centre with product-specific articles for recruiters (AI Applicants setup, ATS sync) and for candidates (AI Interviews beta), plus a SOC 2 article and a vulnerability-reporting article.
https://help.wellfound.com/article/1136-what-is-wellfoundai-applicants
- Public statementCaptured Aug 2, 2026
Wellfound's AI recruiting FAQ blog post (published 25 May 2024, updated 24 July 2026) discusses algorithmic bias, transparency in algorithmic decision-making and the limits of AI in general industry terms, but does not describe Wellfound's own safeguards, audits or regulatory posture.
- AbsenceCaptured Aug 2, 2026
No employer/deployer compliance guidance of any kind was found -- no NYC Local Law 144 pack or AEDT candidate-notice template, no Illinois or Colorado guidance, no EU AI Act deployer note, and no publicly downloadable DPA -- across wellfound.com, reach.wellfound.com, help.wellfound.com and the Warden dashboard.
§ 05 - Editorial notes
Company overview
Wellfound is the startup-focused hiring marketplace formerly known as AngelList Talent. The talent business launched inside AngelList around 2012 and spun out as an independent company under the Wellfound brand in November 2022, having connected roughly 150k startups and 8M+ candidates at the time of the split. In April 2024 Wellfound acquired AI recruiting vendor Celential.ai and folded its talent graph into what is now the wellfound:ai product line: wellfound:ai Search / Reach (AI sourcing agents and outreach), wellfound:ai Applicants (AI resume screening that auto-generates 'must-have' and 'nice-to-have' criteria from a job description, ranks applicants and syncs decisions back to the customer's ATS), and Autopilot (human recruiters working on top of the same AI stack at $500/month per open role plus a 10% placement fee). A free built-in ATS anchors the bottom of the funnel; Reach seats run $135-$199/seat/month with a custom-priced 'Scale' tier, placing Wellfound firmly in the mid price band rather than enterprise. A video-based AI Interviews product is in beta on the candidate side. HQ is San Francisco, US.
Regulatory exposure
Wellfound's AI Resume Screening is squarely an automated employment decision tool: it produces an overall match score used to rank and filter applicants for employers, which brings it inside NYC Local Law 144 and, as an employment-decision AI, into Annex III high-risk territory under the EU AI Act, plus Illinois HB 3773 and Colorado's AI Act as those bite. Wellfound handles this unusually well on the audit axis and poorly on the documentation axis. On the plus side, it is a genuine Warden AI customer -- the continuous assurance dashboard at trust.warden-ai.com/wellfound/ai-resume-screening is linked directly from Wellfound's own site footer as 'AI audit center' on both reach.wellfound.com and wellfound.com/recruit/overview, it appears in Warden's Assured directory (listed 16 March 2026), it is audited monthly (latest 1 July 2026) across 23,584 candidate profiles for sex, race/ethnicity and intersectional bias using both disparate-impact and counterfactual-consistency methods, and a dedicated NYC LL 144 report page publishes impact ratios (0.96-1.00 across all groups). The material caveat is that Warden used its own independent candidate dataset rather than Wellfound's historical data 'due to a lack of access to historical data', and the audit covers only AI Resume Screening -- not the sourcing/ranking side, and not the AI Interviews beta, which is a video product and therefore also implicates the Illinois AI Video Interview Act and BIPA-adjacent consent questions. Against that, Wellfound publishes no AI policy, model card, explainability statement or responsible-AI page of its own; wellfound.com/recruit/all-features/wellfound-ai-overview contains no mention of bias, fairness, audits or human review at all. There is no EU AI Act statement, no Article 27 FRIA material, no deployer/employer compliance guidance, and no published AEDT notice tooling for the NYC customers who must post their own audit summaries and give candidates 10 business days' notice.
Path to a higher score
The audit work is already done and is a real asset -- what Wellfound is missing is first-party documentation to sit alongside it. Three moves would move the score materially. First, publish an Article 11-style system card on wellfound.com covering AI Resume Screening: intended purpose, inputs the model does and does not use, whether protected or proxy attributes are excluded, how match scores are computed, known limitations, and an explicit provider/deployer role split under the EU AI Act -- then link it from the wellfound:ai product pages rather than leaving those pages silent on fairness. Second, publish deployer guidance for employers: an NYC LL 144 pack (how to use Wellfound's Warden report, an AEDT candidate-notice template, the 10-business-day timeline), an EU AI Act Article 26/27 note with a FRIA starter template, and a public DPA -- this is the single largest gap and the cheapest to close. Third, extend the Warden scope beyond resume screening to the sourcing/ranking surface and to AI Interviews before that beta ships broadly, and move the audit onto Wellfound's own historical outcome data rather than Warden's synthetic-population proxy, which would remove the main methodological objection to the current LL 144 report. Smaller wins: surface per-criterion match reasoning and an audit log in-product, un-gate the trust.wellfound.ai contents (today the page renders nothing without JavaScript, so a prospective buyer cannot see the SOC 2 scope, subprocessors or retention terms), add an AI model-update changelog alongside the existing Atlassian status page, and state a data-exclusion and no-customer-data-for-training position publicly.
§ Regulatory frame
What applies to screening ai.
Treated as high-risk under Annex III §4 when the screening output is decisive. EU AI Act Article 13 transparency obligations apply; deployers must give candidates a way to contest.
§ Compare
Build any comparison→Wellfound against its nearest-scoring peers.
In Screening AI.
§ Others rated in Screening AI
All screening vendors→Ranked 31 of 92 by weighted total under rubric v1.0. The ordering is arithmetic on the rubric and carries no view on which tool suits a given hiring process.
- 28SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting53F
- 29HiringBranch52F
- 30Phenom52F
- 31WellfoundThis profile52F
- 32BrightHire51F
- 33Textkernel51F
Conflicts of interest
No vendor pays for placement, scoring, or removal. Casework - the consulting firm that operates this directory - provides paid services to some vendors. Any active or recent (within 24 months) commercial relationship is disclosed on the affected vendor profile and the review is reassigned to an independent reviewer. See the full policy on About.
Casework has no commercial relationship with this vendor.