Why I built RepLabIQ

A few years ago, my boss told me it was time to leave.

He didn't say it as a criticism. He said it almost like advice. "You've spent fifteen years building a brand," he told me. "It's time to go make a withdrawal."

I'd never thought about it that way. For fifteen years I'd been so focused on being loyal, being useful, doing good work, that I never once thought about cashing in on any of it. But he was right. I had built something. Integrity. Humility. Leadership. Loyalty. The kind of reputation people describe unprompted, the kind that shows up when someone else tells your story for you.

My network knew all of that about me. Nobody outside my network did.

The trust I couldn't take with me

So I started exploring opportunities outside the company I'd spent fifteen years at, and I found out fast that I wasn't very good at interviewing.

When an opportunity came through my network, things were easy. Trust already existed in the room before I said a word. I could just be myself, humble and confident, because the people I was talking to had already heard good things.

Cold interviews were a different experience entirely. No relationship, no pre-loaded trust. Hiring managers started from skepticism, and I found myself overcompensating, talking myself up in ways that felt inauthentic and a little ego driven, even though I didn't need to. I know real confidence looks like the opposite of that. I've spent most of my career in go to market and sales. I'm decent at telling a story. But I kept thinking the same thing in every single interview: I wish they could just talk to my network. That would tell them more about me than anything I could say myself.

A research problem hiding in plain sight

I've spent over twenty years in research and insights, and there's a principle that governs all of it: no good research is based on listening to one person.

Apply that lens to hiring and the whole system looks broken. Companies make their most expensive, most consequential decisions almost entirely on self report. Resumes, now frequently built with AI to match a job description perfectly. Interviews, increasingly AI assisted on both sides of the table, full of polished answers and perfect stories. A background check, designed to catch legal red flags, not fit. And references, the one part of the process built on actual outside experience, get treated as a formality after the real decision has already been made. An unstructured five minute call. One question. Would you rehire them?

Meanwhile misrepresentation and fraud in hiring are rising. Employers now have to prove they're even talking to a real human before they can evaluate anything else about a candidate.

The people who've actually worked alongside a candidate, who've watched them handle pressure, seen their real strengths and blind spots, are often more qualified to describe them than the candidate is. I've always found it interesting that you get a clearer picture of yourself from what other people say about you than from anything you'd say about yourself. Other people can hold up a mirror you can't hold up on your own.

Three witnesses, one accident

Here's a story that stuck with me. A car accident happens on a street corner, witnessed by three different people from three different angles. One says it was clearly driver A's fault. The second is just as certain it was driver B. The third says nobody was at fault.

Who's right? None of them, entirely, and all of them, partly. Each person saw something true from where they stood. The real picture only comes into focus when you combine all three accounts. That's the closest thing to truth we get, and it's how the most important decisions should be made.

Hiring is arguably the most important decision a company makes. It still runs almost entirely on a single witness: the candidate, describing themselves.

What we believe

We believe there are no bad candidates. There are people who haven't landed in the right company, role, or culture yet, and today's hiring process has no reliable way to find real fit. That starts with trust, and trust starts with talking to the people who've actually worked alongside a candidate, in a structured way that looks for consistency across accounts instead of a single unstructured gut check.

RepLabIQ turns reference calls into what they should have been all along: the most reliable signal in the hiring process, not the last box to check. Every reference becomes part of a structured Candidate Intelligence Report, built the way any good piece of research is built, from multiple perspectives, before the offer goes out instead of after.

We're building toward a world where a resume is a nice to have, and where a person's reputation, the honest kind, earned over years and vouched for by the people who actually worked with them, is the clearer signal. A world where people land in roles they're genuinely suited for, and where companies build teams with outsized impact because they hired for real fit instead of the best story.

I didn't read about this problem in a market report. I lived it: as a recruiter, as a hiring manager building revenue teams, and eventually as a candidate on the other side of the table, wishing someone would just call my network.