Nate Smith would like your job interview to feel human

Nate Smith has a rather inconvenient idea about a job interview: the person being interviewed ought to have a decent time. Let them use a familiar keyboard. Let them work in a programming language they know. Let them search Google. An employer hoping to discover how somebody works might reasonably begin by allowing them to work.

It sounds almost impolite to point this out. Yet Smith, who co-founded the recruiting software company Lever and served as both its CEO and CTO, has spent years explaining why hiring deserves more thought than a test administered across a desk. A company is making a choice. So is the person sitting opposite. The interview has two customers, even when only one of them has been offered coffee.

That concern with the person using the system runs through his career: a redesign of Google Images, software for people working together, a hiring platform, and now another company, Collate. The industries change. The everyday friction remains an inviting target.

The college he chose for the people

Before there were customers or investors, there was a prospective student considering his future friends. At Olin College’s Candidates’ Weekend, Smith met the faculty, staff and students and decided that these were people he would be lucky to know for life. It is a pleasingly social reason to choose an engineering college.

He graduated in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering, part of Olin’s second graduating class. He also helped found Open, the college’s LGBTQ student group, and served as its president. Alongside the technical education, he was taking part in the work of making a community.

“Olin College created the first community where I felt like I belonged.”

Nate Smith, on joining Olin’s board in 2024

Years later, that connection acquired a different sort of responsibility. Smith joined Olin’s Board of Trustees in August 2024. By the college’s subsequent presidential search, he was serving on the search committee too. The graduate who had once chosen the place for its people was helping choose who would lead it.

A thousand images, fewer interruptions

At Google, Smith worked as a product manager on Analytics and Search. He led the first major redesign of the image search interface, launched in July 2010. Anyone who has tried to find a picture by describing it badly can appreciate the delicacy of the assignment.

The redesign brought a dense tiled layout, larger previews and continuous scrolling through as many as 1,000 images on a page. A hover pane offered a closer look and further information. Keyboard navigation helped people move through the results. These were tangible changes to how a search felt beneath someone’s fingers.

Smith’s launch announcement wandered cheerfully through sandstorms, Art Nouveau architecture and wedding cupcakes. The examples made a practical point: sometimes a picture answers a question that words handle poorly. His job was to help people reach that answer with less interruption.

There is a useful clue here to the work that followed. A system can contain a great deal of information and still be tiresome to use. Improving the experience means paying attention to the small movements between wanting something, finding it and acting on it. An interface earns its keep in those movements.

Collaboration, down to the code

Smith’s engineering work goes beneath the screen. He identifies himself as the author of DerbyJS and ShareDB, open source projects concerned with the awkward business of keeping shared information in agreement.

Derby is a framework for real time collaborative applications that run in browsers and on Node.js. Its synchronization engine, Racer, moves changes among browsers, servers and a database. ShareDB provides a real time database backend using operational transformation, a technique for coordinating edits to shared data.

For the people using such an application, the ambition is pleasantly ordinary: make a change and see it happen, without losing somebody else’s contribution. The sophistication belongs inside the machinery. Nobody should need a lecture on distributed systems before collaborating on a piece of work.

That makes the connection to Lever quite concrete. Derby’s own project resources list Lever among applications built with it. The recruiting company grew from a technical foundation designed to let people work together, rather than exchange a succession of increasingly out-of-date copies.

A person lasts longer than a vacancy

Lever joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 batch. Smith’s path through its leadership was unusually flexible: CEO, then CTO, then CEO again. By October 2020, he was discussing the business as its chief executive. The title had changed more than once; the company remained the shared undertaking.

Co-founder Sarah Nahm has described the early team embedding itself in organizations to study how hiring actually happened. She originally worked as a designer and became CEO in 2014. Her account gives the company’s beginnings a welcome texture: people observing a problem, testing their contributions and growing into different jobs.

The product combined an applicant tracking system, which manages an active hiring process, with candidate relationship management. This matters because a relationship can outlast the vacancy that first introduced two people. Someone unsuitable for one opening may be a good prospect for another. A recruiting database has to remember more than a verdict.

Lever’s suite extended into recruitment marketing and analytics. Its customer base included Netflix, KPMG and Cirque du Soleil. That is a varied guest list for one software product, united by the need to find people and keep a hiring process moving.

Those figures describe a company built with a team and investors. They also give some scale to the years behind the software. Employ acquired Lever in 2022. In November that year, the company announced Smith’s move out of leading the team and into an advisory role.

Let the candidate use Google

For a recruiting software founder, Smith is refreshingly interested in what happens outside the software. In a 2021 conversation about interviewing, he described an approach at Lever that allowed candidates to use familiar editors, keyboards and languages, and to look things up online.

The reasoning is straightforward. The interview should reveal something useful about the work a person would actually do. Artificial restrictions may produce a performance, but an employer still has to decide what that performance tells them. A borrowed keyboard is a curious instrument for measuring somebody’s future contribution.

He also urged interviewers to look actively for evidence of what a candidate could bring to a team. That gives curiosity a proper job in the process. While the company evaluates someone, it is also giving that person reasons to accept or decline an eventual offer.

In another discussion, Smith emphasized trust between recruiters and hiring managers. Each needs to understand the other’s contribution. Software can handle tasks such as prompting for feedback, leaving colleagues more time to do the work that requires judgment. The desirable outcome is less chasing and a better conversation.

He applies a similar discipline to measurement. Before arguing about a dashboard, people need a shared understanding of the steps in their process and what those steps are meant to achieve. Counting becomes considerably more useful once everyone agrees what is being counted.

A gift with company attached

In November 2023, Smith and his husband, Chris Cheng, pledged to match eligible donations to the Olin Fund up to $100,000. The offer covered gifts from new donors and increases from returning donors through the end of that December.

The design invited other people to take part. A first donation could count; so could an increase from someone already supporting the college. Olin’s following annual report recorded 285 gifts totaling $191,055 inspired by the challenge, including 50 gifts from new donors.

Cheng described himself as an honorary Oliner, having become close to many graduates. The college had become part of their shared life. Smith and Cheng live in San Francisco with two bernedoodles, Walnut and Brownie. Even a career involving database synchronization can accommodate names that sound like a bakery order.

Back on the building side

After Lever, Smith spent time on the other side of the startup conversation as a Visiting Group Partner at Y Combinator. The accelerator listed him among its returning visiting partners for the Summer 2024 batch. He was advising founders in the program his own company had joined a dozen years earlier.

By January 2025, he was building again. Collate launched with Smith as CTO and founder, alongside CEO and founder Surbhi Sarna and fellow founder Jigish Patel. Olin later recorded a $30 million seed round for the venture.

The company’s current leadership biography places his Google product work, Lever years and YC experience together. Its stated focus includes reducing paperwork and giving teams more time for their core responsibilities. The territory is new, while the irritation with unnecessary work has a familiar ring.

Smith’s career offers plenty of numbers. The smaller decisions are more revealing: choosing a college for its community, making shared work easier, giving candidates familiar tools, inviting other donors into a gift. Each asks what happens to the person taking part. It is a sensible question to put to software. It remains a sensible question to put to the people commissioning it.