Karat Names Twitch COO, Sara Clemens, to Board and Adds Rachael Granby as VP of Interview Delivery to Accelerate Expansion of the World’s Largest Technical Interviewing Solution

SEATTLE, June 8, 2021 – Karat, the world’s leader in technical interviewing, today appointed Twitch COO, Sara Clemens to its board, and expanded its leadership team with the addition of Rachael Granby as Vice President of Interview Delivery.

As the demand for technology talent continues to intensify, hiring software engineers is a business imperative. Karat tripled the size of its enterprise client base in 2020 and is on pace to conduct more interviews in 2021 than in its entire history. To support the long-term demand for its technical interviewing solution, Karat is adding leaders with deep experience scaling fast-growing organizations.

“The past year has dramatically amplified the trends that are driving global demand for software engineers,” said Mohit Bhende, Karat co-founder and CEO. “Karat is helping the world’s most exciting enterprise companies stay ahead of the competition for tech talent. Sara Clemens and Rachael Granby bring exceptional strategic leadership and operational expertise that will help Karat unlock opportunities for more organizations to hire, innovate, and grow.”

New independent board member, Sara Clemens, has extensive experience building hypergrowth businesses, having served on executive teams at Pandora, LinkedIn, and Xbox. Clemens is currently COO of Twitch, where she has successfully scaled the business to help millions of live streaming creators build communities online. With Karat, Clemens sees a similar opportunity to accelerate a new category that improves the interviewing process and helps more engineers land jobs.

“Expanding the talent pool by creating unbiased approaches to hiring is key to social and economic development,” said Clemens. “Karat’s unique combination of human empathy and purpose-built technology highlights candidates’ strengths. This empowers engineering leaders to look past pedigree biases and make tech hiring more equitable.”

Rachael Granby, Vice President of Interview Delivery, also brings unique expertise in building human+ technology solutions. Prior to joining Karat, Granby served as the Head of Product and Client General Manager at Wonder, where she was responsible for marketplace operations, client delivery, and product direction. Granby’s top priority will be scaling Karat’s interview capacity to help clients stay ahead of the long-term growth of software engineer hiring.

“Interviews are incredibly personal moments that can literally change lives,” added Granby. “Having the right mix of operational excellence, people, and technology is critical to scaling Karat while maintaining the consistency and humanity that makes Karat’s interviews predictive, fair, and enjoyable.”

Clemens’ and Granby’s expertise in growing digital communities will also unlock new innovations built on top of Karat’s solution and data.

Karat’s new Brilliant Black Minds program is one such innovation. Karat launched Brilliant Black Minds to help more Black software engineers break into the tech industry and grow their careers. The program uses Karat’s core interviewing solution to create more transparency and familiarity with the hiring process by delivering a series of free practice interviews with live coaching and feedback to participants. More than three-quarters of Howard University’s engineering students opted-in to the program last fall, and early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

“We founded Karat to fundamentally improve the way people get jobs,” concluded Jeffrey Spector, Karat Co-founder and President. “Harnessing the power of our solution and the data from our first 100,000 interviews enabled Karat to launch Brilliant Black Minds. It’s going to be exciting to see how Sara and Rachael help us grow and innovate over the next 100,000 interviews and beyond.”

About Karat

Karat unlocks opportunities for developers and tech-driven organizations by making every interview predictive, fair, and enjoyable. Karat conducts live technical interviews for the world’s foremost tech-driven organizations using enterprise-grade interviewing technology and a global network of experienced Interview Engineers. Karat’s process produces unmatched data visibility and insights, helping companies hire smarter and grow faster by unlocking productive engineering hours, improving the candidate experience, reducing bias, and delivering a hiring signal that software engineering leaders trust.