How we screen engineering candidates
Every candidate is read by engineers who currently build production software, assessed on real code, interviewed for how they work with people, and scored against the actual requirement. A ranked shortlist takes five working days.
Engineers screen engineers
The first person to assess a candidate is an engineering manager or a software engineer who currently works on production enterprise software development. They are evaluating someone against work they do themselves.
Most screening fails in the same place. A recruiter matches keywords, a shortlist arrives, and the first technical interview becomes the real filter. That cost lands on your engineering team, and it lands after the calendar has already been spent.
Moving practitioner judgment to the front changes what reaches you. By the time a candidate appears on a shortlist, someone who writes this kind of software has already decided the experience is real.
What every candidate goes through
Four stages, in this order. A candidate who does not clear one does not continue to the next.
- 01
Practitioner review
Engineering managers and software engineers who currently work on production enterprise systems read the candidate first. Not recruiters, and not a keyword filter. People who ship the kind of software you are hiring for know within a few minutes whether the experience is real.
- 02
Coding assessment
A practical coding test, reviewed by an engineer rather than scored only by a machine. The point is how someone reasons through a problem and what they do when the first approach does not work.
- 03
Behavioral and cultural interviews
How someone works with other people, handles disagreement, and operates when requirements move. Strong engineers who cannot work inside your team are still the wrong hire, and this is where that shows up.
- 04
Ranking and shortlist
Our own software scores every candidate against the requirement, and the results are assembled into a ranked shortlist with the reasoning attached. You see why someone placed where they did.
Four things we score, and why
We built our own ranking software rather than filtering on keywords. It looks for the things that separate a resume that reads well from a candidate who fits the requirement.
Gaps
Unexplained breaks in a history, responsibilities that shrink rather than grow, and claimed scope that does not line up with the size of the team or system around it.
Authenticity
Whether the work described actually reads like someone who did it. Borrowed phrasing, duplicated project descriptions, and detail that thins out under specifics all surface here.
Experience against the requirement
Not whether a keyword appears, but whether the depth behind it matches what the role needs. Two years of incidental exposure and four years of ownership are not the same signal.
Resume against the requirement
The stated requirements checked line by line against what the resume actually evidences, so the gap between the two is explicit before anyone spends an interview on it.
Trained models and human experts, and you can see both
Scoring combines trained AI models and machine learning with review by working engineers. Neither one decides alone.
The part that matters is that the reasoning is visible. When a candidate ranks where they do, you can see what produced that result, which signals carried weight, and where a human disagreed with the model. A score you cannot interrogate is not worth much when you are deciding who to spend interview time on.
5 working days
From an agreed requirement to a ranked shortlist, with the reasoning attached to every candidate on it. One week, not a pipeline that stays open for a quarter.
Who we screen for
Software, cloud, DevOps, quality, data, machine learning, and AI agent engineers.
The process is the same across all of them. What changes is who does the practitioner review, because a cloud reliability hire and a machine learning hire are not credibly assessed by the same person.
More on the pillar itself is on the recruiting overview.
Tell us what the role actually needs
Send us the requirement and we will come back with a ranked shortlist, and the reasoning behind it, inside five working days.