Our Leadership Team

Gershon Goren is the Founder and CEO of Cangrade, an AI-powered candidate screening platform helping organizations make talent decisions that improve business and employee outcomes throughout the entire talent lifecycle. Cangrade’s assessments and AI tools have supported hiring decisions for over 10 million candidates across organizations including Wayfair, FDNY, and Applied Industrial Technologies.

Gershon brings more than two decades of experience building enterprise software at scale. He led the engineering group at Webdialogs, a provider of online meeting and collaboration solutions acquired by IBM, where he went on to serve as Chief Software Architect in the Lotus group. In that role he helped deliver LotusLive (now IBM SmartCloud), one of the first major enterprise cloud collaboration platforms. Giving him an early, hands-on perspective on what it takes to build AI and cloud systems that organizations trust and deploy at scale.

After leaving IBM, Gershon founded Cangrade to remove biased and inaccurate hiring decisions from talent acquisition through predictive, validated candidate screening and assessments grounded in I/O psychology and ethical AI.

He is a frequent contributor to HR and business publications including HRTech Cube and CIO.com. His writing and research focus on the intersection of AI, hiring, talent management, and what it means to hire fairly.

Gershon holds degrees in Computer Science and Management of Information Systems from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is based in the Boston area and is an avid cyclist.

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Jen Rifkin is the Chief Customer Officer at Cangrade, an AI candidate screening platform helping organizations make more efficient and effective hiring decisions. Cangrade’s first customer success hire, she has spent nearly a decade building and expanding the customer success function, and now leads both CS and sales as the company has grown.

Jen’s background is in workforce analytics. Before Cangrade, she worked at SurveyTelligence, an early-stage workforce optimization company, where she developed, deployed, and analyzed employee assessments to help organizations identify cultural, managerial, and strategic inefficiencies. That ground-level experience with people data and client outcomes has shaped how she thinks about customer value ever since.

She holds a degree in Managerial Economics from Bentley University.

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Sarah Gurr is the Chief Marketing Officer at Cangrade, an AI candidate platform improving talent decisions and outcomes throughout the entire talent lifecycle. She has built and led the marketing function since 2020, and has been the architect of Cangrade’s growth to an established player in the HR tech space.

Before Cangrade, Sarah headed content marketing at ezCater and led content services at Skyword, working across a wide range of industries and company stages, including Colgate, Waze, and Paychex.

She holds a B.S. in Mass Communications from Boston University.

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Vinisha graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. Vinisha enjoys challenges, solving problems, and learning new technologies. She joins the Cangrade team as a Software Developer where she will focus on maintaining and enhancing highly complex software for machine learning and data analytics for data-driven, bias-free hiring. Outside of work, she likes to spend time with her family, watch TV shows and games of Cricket.

Kaylie is a Customer Success Administrator who has over 10 years of customer service experience. She is passionate about building strong relationships, driving brand loyalty, and increasing customer engagement. She has always been eager to help people. In her free time, she likes to spend time with her dog, cook up something tasty in the kitchen, and read a good book.

Steve is an Associate in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. In his academic work, he combines survey instruments with cognitive response time tasks designed to capture unconscious cognition to address issues at the intersection of psychology and business. He believes that Cangrade can be used as a forum to help employers and job-candidates make more objective selection decisions while furthering the study of psychological science. Prior to his current work, Steve was a professional tournament poker player and entrepreneur. He holds a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Nevada- Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University.

Yang’s research interests include applied game theory, structural econometrics, and empirical IO. The substantive focus of his current research projects include managerial forecasting and decision making, competitive dynamic pricing, role of consumer reviews on risk aversion, and competitive incentive structures of firms with shared sales agents. Yang is currently a doctoral candidate in marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Prior to pursuing a Ph.D., Yang worked as a revenue management and resort services analyst at the Las Vegas Sands.