# Rachel Sternberg, Co-Founder & COO at Laneshift — read of Northstar, May 9 2026

> 8 years in ops and early-stage hiring, currently managing HR myself at a 14-person freight-tech startup while also running finance and onboarding. My last hire took six weeks and I cried twice.

## How I got here

Googled "how to screen resumes without an ATS when you have no HR" on Tuesday night, somewhere around the third hour of manually reading cover letters on my couch. A Reddit thread in r/startups mentioned Northstar in a comment that didn't feel like a plant. Clicked. Read the whole thing standing in my kitchen waiting for pasta to boil.

## What I clicked first

The hero stat stopped me: "eliminates the busywork that costs you 40 hours per hire." I don't know if 40 is my number but it's close enough that I didn't close the tab. "You make the judgment calls" is exactly the right framing. I've tried tools that try to replace my judgment and I hate them. This is positioning against that.

## Where I paused

The FAQ answer on resume scoring: "You set the weights; Northstar runs the math." I read that three times. That's either the most important sentence on the page or it's completely meaningless, and I can't tell which from a sentence. What does "set the weights" actually look like? A slider? A dropdown? A text field? I need to understand that interaction before I believe the "4.2x more qualified candidates" number means anything.

## What I distrusted

The logos. Northbound, Clearpath, Fieldstack, Ironbark, Meridian Labs. I Googled three of them. Nothing. I know logos on startup landing pages are often small companies or pre-launch partners, but these read like names someone generated to sound like real companies. If Marcus Chen at Fieldstack is Series A, Fieldstack should be findable.

The stats block is also a problem. "92% of users say their last Northstar hire outperformed previous hires." Outperformed by whose assessment, over what time period, from a sample of how many? This is the kind of number that gets made up in Notion and copy-pasted into Webflow. I'm not saying it's fake. I'm saying there's zero methodology and I've been burned by numbers like this before.

"Legally clean offer letter" followed immediately by "we recommend attorney review for critical senior hires" is a sentence that cancels itself. Pick a lane. Either the letter is solid or it isn't. The hedge makes the feature feel like a liability disclaimer wearing a marketing hat.

## What would convince me

A real screenshot of a scored resume. Not a mockup with placeholder candidate names. An actual output where I can see what a 74 looks like versus a 41 and whether the reasoning makes sense to me. That's the whole product in one screenshot and it's not on the page.

One case study from a company I can Google, with a specific role type. "Priya Nair hired three people in 90 days" tells me nothing about whether this works for a customer support lead in a regulated industry versus a generalist ops hire at a 6-person consumer app.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The resume scoring FAQ says I "set the weights" for the rubric. Can you show me what that interface looks like before I sign up? A 60-second screen recording of that specific step would probably close me.

2. The offer letter page says "legally clean" and "at-will language across all 50 states." My last attorney told me at-will language alone isn't sufficient for California hires because of WARN Act addendums and specific termination clauses. Have California-based founders used the generated letters without modification?

3. What happens to my candidate data? Who owns the scoring rubric I build, and is it used to train anything?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The pain framing is honest and the three-step process is clear. But the proof layer is thin in exactly the ways that matter to me: the logos are unverifiable, the stats have no methodology, and the one feature I'd actually pay for (resume scoring) is described in two sentences with no visual evidence of what it produces.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-09. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*