I built tapMERiT after years of seeing hiring fail from both sides of the table.

As an employee, I experienced what most candidates experience. You apply. You interview. You do the work. Then you get passed over without a clear explanation. You rarely know how decisions are made. You only see the outcome.

Later, as a founder, I finally saw what candidates cannot see.

I watched hiring decisions get shaped by familiarity and bias long before anyone reviewed the work. I heard founder colleagues say they would not hire attractive women because it felt “risky.” I saw people avoid candidates their parents’ age. I watched strong applicants get passed over because they reminded someone of a sibling or did not feel like a cultural fit.

Overlooked

I also felt the pressure founders face when they need to hire roles they have never done. Hiring happens under time pressure, uncertainty, and high stakes. The advice I received was common in startup culture and deeply flawed.

Advisors and mentors routinely recommended unpaid trial projects. This practice is widespread. It is often illegal, unfair to candidates, and a poor signal of the top talent in the applicant pool. It filters out experienced professionals who cannot afford unpaid work and rewards those with financial security or those conditioned to accept unpaid labor as a normal part of hiring.

This is where hiring breaks for everyone:

• Founders want to move fast and make good decisions.
• Candidates want to be evaluated fairly.

Most hiring systems fail both at the same time.

I built tapMERiT to replace this with a system.

Before tapMERiT, I built and operated a blind hiring platform in the cannabis industry, a high-compliance environment where consistency, documentation, and fairness are not optional.

That system removed identity from early hiring decisions and focused evaluation on previous outcomes and proven, transferable skills.

The result was authentically diverse, high-performing teams and a 12 percent reduction in onboarding costs.

I have also led small teams with outsized output. Outside observers assumed we were a team of sixty. We were fourteen. The difference was talent, systems, and teamwork.

In parallel, I built a salary negotiation platform designed to help underrepresented professionals increase their compensation and total rewards.

Through that work, I saw how deeply flawed and biased salary negotiation systems are.

Compensation often rewards confidence, leverage, and negotiation skill rather than outcomes or experience. Two people can do the same job, deliver the same results, and earn vastly different pay simply because one negotiates better.

That experience shaped how tapMERiT was built. tapMERiT includes clear compensation formulas for every role so hiring decisions and pay decisions are grounded in outcomes and proven experience, not negotiation tactics or bias.

Role scope × Impact = $ Comp

Together, blind hiring and structured compensation change the order of decisions.

Bias is not solved by good intentions. It is solved by changing the system.

Blind hiring forces performance to be evaluated before identity. It removes low-quality signals and replaces them with evidence that actually predicts success. It gives founders structure when they are hiring under pressure and gives candidates confidence that their work will be evaluated fairly.

tapMERiT exists to make hiring calmer, fairer, and more effective for everyone involved.

Not perfect decisions. Better ones.

If you are building a team or looking for your next role, tapMERiT was built for you.