Meet the Speaker — Shawna Martell

Shawna Martell is a Senior Staff Engineer at Carta, Inc, Her session at WITS Midwest is Rubrics cubed: Attempting to quantify the qualitative in the interview process.

• Why is speaking at WITS important to you?

First, to be selected for such an incredible event is an honor and a thrill. I am humbled to be joining the wonderful speakers at WITs Midwest. This experience is important to me because it’s an opportunity to share and learn from women across all different aspects of technology. Events like WITs are crucial for building and strengthening communities. By coming together and sharing our knowledge and experiences, we can work towards creating a more inclusive and equitable industry for all of us.

• What or who inspires you?

I am most inspired when I am working with other people to solve a problem. In my spare time, I do extensive work in local politics, and those problems are just as interesting and inspiring as technology problems. I really just love to work on problems. If I could knit, I’d try to solve problems with knitting, but I can’t. So I use technology, because that’s the thing I know.

• Most useful article you’ve read in the last month

ChatGPT is everywhere, and I recently revisited Dr. Stephen Wolfram’s piece on What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?. (In the interest of full disclosure, I was formerly an employee at Wolfram Research)

• When you were a kid what was your dream job?

I really wanted to be a teacher when I was a kid. My grandmother and my aunt were both educators, and it was clear how much they loved the work. I get to use some of my love for teaching by participating in Carta’s onboarding program for new engineers.

• Tell us something about your session

In my session, I’m going to give you a view into how Carta reimagined our interviewing process from the inside out. Instead of starting with questions to ask we considered the signals to capture, and we built our questions from there. I’ll be sharing some practical tips on how you can bring more structure to your interview process and the benefits of turning your interviewers into data gatherers instead of deciders.

• What other sessions or speakers are you most excited to see?

I cannot wait for Reedhima Mandlik’s discussion on the rise of deepfakes. Deepfakes are something we talk about a lot in politics, and I am looking forward to hearing from Reedhima about what we can do to stop the influence of deepfakes in society.

Hear from Shawna and the other amazing women speaking at WITS Midwest by registering here!