“At the end of the day, there are a lot of great people and companies, but the current process makes it surprisingly hard for them to find each other,” Wes said. “One of the most rewarding parts of starting Stride has been helping people make sense of the market and articulate where they want to go next.”  

The Society for Human Resource Management reported that just 7 percent of survey respondents were notified by companies if they didn't get a job. Meanwhile, according to the Huntr job search platform, the average time-to-hire in the US jumped from 36 days in 2023 to more than 68 on average in mid-2025. 

“The idea for Stride came from my own frustration with the job market, both as someone trying to hire great people at Amazon and as a candidate navigating the application process,” he said. “There are some incredible new technologies out there, but I saw them being used to auto-screen applications or help people mass-apply to jobs rather than helping companies and candidates understand each other better.” 

The initial plan was for Stride to be a tech-forward company that served as a screening layer between companies and candidates. But Wes quickly pivoted, thanks to his experience in  Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program—a dual-degree program between Northwestern Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management. 

He leaned on human-centered design principles from the MMM program to test prototypes with hiring managers, executives, and job seekers.  

“We realized pretty quickly that people did not want another impersonal layer in the hiring process,” he said. “They wanted more trust, more judgment, and more information.” 

That led Stride to shift toward a more high-touch recruiting model focused on candidates who want to join rapidly-growing teams as an early hire. Making the right initial hires can mean the difference between startup success and a failed endeavor, Wes said.  

“The first few hires can completely change the trajectory of a company, but founders often don’t have the time, recruiting infrastructure, or experience to run a great process on their own,” he said. “My co-founder and I saw a chance to build a recruiting firm that combines our experience and judgment, candidate empathy, and modern technology in a way that creates more context and trust.” 

Wes left Amazon to work full-time with Stride in April. 

It was in MMM where he learned to flex his creative muscles. 

"Before MMM, I saw idea generation as something more mysterious, almost like great founders or designers had a special ability to see things that other people couldn’t," he said. "MMM helped demystify that." 

Wes learned the process for finding good ideas: 

• Understand the user's pain 

• Frame the problem  

• Generate possibilities 

• Prototype quickly 

• Test 

• Learn 
• Iterate 

"The program also taught me not to over-structure the work," he said. "You need enough process to make progress, but enough openness to leave room for intuition and creativity. Being able to balance structured thinking without losing the messiness of the creative process has been one of the most useful things I took from the program." 

Wes sees his role as a mix of operator, advisor, and matchmaker. He helps founders think through the support they need from a new hire, and he educates job candidates about the realities of the startup market.  

At the same time, he's working behind the scenes to help build the company's operations, displaying the comfort in ambiguity that he first learned in MMM.   

"We’re trying to run a very modern, AI-enabled recruiting business," he said. "Relationship-driven on the outside, but much more efficient and structured internally. The goal is to stay lean while delivering a more customized process for both companies and candidates."