I Built a Hiring Tool After Watching Founders Lose Great Candidates to Google Forms

Last year I watched a founder friend spend six weeks trying to hire a backend engineer. She wasn't bad at hiring. She had a strong job post, she was getting applications, and she had good instincts about candidates. The problem was her process. Applications were landing in a Google Form. Status tracking lived in a color-coded spreadsheet that she and her co-founder were both editing, independently, with no shared source of truth. Resumes were Dropbox links embedded in spreadsheet cells. Communication with candidates happened through whatever Gmail tab she had open. Three weeks in, she got an email from a candidate she'd really liked. He'd accepted another offer. She dug through her inbox to find their last exchange — she'd never sent the follow-up she'd meant to send. That candidate would have been perfect. The process lost him, not her judgment. I'd seen this exact pattern enough times that I decided to do something about it. The result is HireFormly — a simple applicant tracking syst