Gyfted / Human Exponent

I co-founded Gyfted with Robert Kowalski (CEO) and Adam Szefer (CTO) to fix a real problem in hiring: most recruitment still runs on resumes and keyword matching, which lose most of the signal that actually matters in real work — cognitive ability, values, soft skills, behavioral tendencies, learning potential, and mutual fit. Gyfted (operated by Human Exponent, Inc., a venture-funded C-corp headquartered in Mountain View) replaces that with validated psychometric assessment combined with AI.

The platform spans both sides of the talent lifecycle: hiring, matching, and screening on one end; L&D, internal mobility, culture alignment, and organizational assessment on the other. It’s an assessment operating system, not just a hiring tool.

What I Do

I own the product architecture and psychometric design. That means designing assessment instruments grounded in Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory, building scoring and feedback logic, defining competency models for enterprise clients, and translating psychometric constructs into deployable product systems. The integration layer between psychometric models and machine learning algorithms — connecting validated trait and competency measurement with ranking, matching, recommendation, and profile similarity logic — is the core of my technical contribution.

Every assessment goes through proper validation — item analysis, reliability checks, factor structure review — before it touches a candidate. And the outputs are designed to be interpretable: actionable profile information that recruiters, managers, and talent teams can use for real decisions, not opaque model scores.

Beyond standardized frameworks, I design custom assessment instruments for enterprise clients — instruments aligned to client-specific competency models, culture definitions, and business needs. This is where Gyfted differs most from legacy assessment vendors: we combine psychometric rigor, modern product UX, AI-assisted matching, and the flexibility to build bespoke measurement for each organization.

The Platform

Gyfted’s assessments cover hiring, talent development, and culture alignment:

• Culture Canvas — Organizational culture assessment based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and Schwartz’s Personal Values frameworks. Measures six dimensions of organizational culture plus individual values alignment.
• Remote Work Assessments — Evaluates personality/culture fit, soft skills, cognitive ability, and growth mindset, producing a composite Remote Work Index score.
• Merit (MEI) — Our framework for bias-reduced hiring, measuring cognitive ability, personality, values, and learning agility. Fairness here is a design problem, not a slogan: it depends on what you measure, what you remove from the decision process, and how the model is structured. Blind screening — no age, gender, race, or photos — is one layer, but the deeper architecture prioritizes merit-relevant psychological and behavioral signal over cosmetic proxies.
• Job Fit & Candidate Screening — Two-sided matching between candidates and roles, considering both candidate profile and role environment rather than treating jobs as keyword containers. Built on vectorized competency databases with matching, recommendation, and similarity logic.

Assessments are designed to be usable and engaging, not clinical. Adaptive logic makes measurement more efficient and precise where possible. Results become more useful when compared against internal benchmarks — current employees, leaders, or high performers — so the platform supports benchmark-based interpretation alongside individual scoring.

Enterprise & Public-Sector Work

The platform serves growth startups through to large enterprises. We’ve worked with organizations including LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), where we screened 250+ candidates and cut manual review time by 60%.

For EPAM, we assessed 400+ individuals across four pilot talent development programs, building custom assessments aligned to their internal competency matrix and L&D use cases. This wasn’t a generic platform deployment — it was bespoke psychometric design connected to practical organizational decisions.

For gr8.tech, I designed a custom values assessment tied to the company’s operating philosophy and hiring logic. The instrument used forced-choice, ranking, and situational judgment formats with structured feedback, translating company-defined values into a psychometric architecture that could actually discriminate between candidates.

We’ve also built career assessment instruments for public-sector bodies like Ireland’s Health Service Executive. Organic growth was driven through programmatic SEO in partnership with Digital Savages.

The Team

We’re a distributed team of 19 across Mountain View, London, and Warsaw — psychologists, statisticians, engineers, ML specialists, and talent operations. Our academic advisory board includes Michal Kosinski (Stanford GSB, computational psychology pioneer) and partnerships with Columbia, Stanford, Cambridge, and SWPS.

Our core matching technology — an AI system built on a psychometrics-based competencies graph that combines validated psychological frameworks (Big Five, Schwartz Values, Emotional Intelligence) with O*NET occupational data and large language models — is patent pending with the USPTO, the result of 2.5 years of R&D. The system emerged from trying to connect validated human measurement with scalable computational matching in a way that preserved scientific defensibility. I’m one of five named co-inventors.

We price as a flat SaaS subscription — no per-test or per-candidate fees. Per-test pricing discourages broad internal usage, repeated assessment, development use cases, and experimentation. Flat pricing encourages organizations to actually use measurement as infrastructure.

Gyfted is where my academic work in psychometrics and self/trait measurement met product building, machine learning, and real organizational workflows. It’s the most complete expression of the idea that rigorous measurement and scalable product design aren’t in tension — they’re the same discipline applied at different layers.