Are you overwhelmed by candidates who are clearly not qualified, despite being an on paper match? Are you worried that your ATS or recruiting department is filtering out good candidates based on arbitrary AI or keyword matching? Are your engineers spending hours per week in interviews that go nowhere?
We monitor the top of your hiring funnel, and review all applications. Candidates who don't pass basic application instructions or resume requirements are eliminated.
All remaining candidates undergo an async video interview, using our video interviewing platform. Videos are reviewed after the interview by our senior technical staff.
Finalists can be tech interviewed personally by our CTO before being referred to you; or, if you prefer, can be sent to your staff to take over.
1 hour video interview, reviewed.
(Optional) 1-2 hour tech interview covering your stack.
(Optional) Your branding and domain in the interview platform.
Like many other things in life, the answer is a qualified "it depends". However, we can make a couple of assumptions based on experience: for a senior software engineer, we might see 1 hire for 25 who went through the video screening process, 6 of whom made it to CTO interviews, and 3 of whom were recommended to you for final round interviews. Supposing that the average candidate goes through 2 video interviews, this works out as $4,550 per hire, plus your costs of interviewing the final 3 for fit.
Contrast this against (at the low end) $15,000 for a contingency recruiter for the same position (who, we note, is not doing tech interviews), or (at least) a 20% markup on rates for talent agencies, and the value is obvious.
There is considerable talent on Upwork; like it or not, it is the dominant marketplace for hourly workers. However, it is swamped by agencies and barely qualified / bootcamp programmers. When posting on Upwork, expect the funnel reduction in the initial review step to be more extreme than on many other platforms. We have a lot of experience in helping to surface the signal in the noise.
Any. Our video interviews are designed to allow candidates to demonstrate their practical abilities in the tech stack that you are hiring for. Our CTO interviews will go deeper in your particular tech, and also wider to test the candidate's adaptability.
When hiring engineers, it's a very common mistake to screen for N years of a particular skill that candidates can come up to speed with in their first week on the job. Particularly now that LLMs are a daily part of life for every developer, you'll find that the best engineers on your team can develop in a platform that's brand new to them with almost the same velocity as they demonstrate in tech stacks that they've spent years in.
There are of course certain skills worth screening for - e.g. developers who have spent all of their lives doing web development are likely not going to be immediately successful writing kernel drivers; however, in general, our recommendation is to cast a wide net and look for a combination of experience and deep engineering aptitude. We'll help with this.
Take home tests were always flawed when interviewing agency talent, as oftentimes agencies would have more senior engineers take tests on behalf of junior candidates. However, now that LLMs exist, take home tests are now completely obsolete - if you can't tell what your candidate did directly vs what their preferred LLM produced, you have no good way of evaluating their skills.
Don't get us wrong - LLMs are an important part of every engineer's toolbox, and, in fact, it's important to evaluate how they make use of them. That's why we lean on the video interviewing setup; we want to see candidates work on realistic problems with all of their tools, and we want to see how they utilize each of their tools.
Every code test platform we've looked at has candidates work in an artificial online environment, and most of the time on artificial gotcha style questions. On the other hand, we want to see candidates work in their own IDE, on realistic problems. The silicon valley style tech screen is great at finding puzzle solvers; puzzle solvers may not be the most effective at cranking out software on a day-in day-out basis. Our process is designed to help you find "10x"ers, i.e. engineers who are deeply productive.
Some companies successfully combine relaxed interviewing with short on-the-job evaluation periods; however, in the context of a small team attempting to be productive, this can be quite distracting and inefficient, and in some cases the churn of new candidates can affect morale. Doing this successfully also requires you to be extremely attentive to early red flags, and to be ready to act on these.
Furthermore, this can be disrespectful to candidates, and you'll likely eliminate many candidates who are employed and semi-casually putting out feelers to find their next job.
This approach certainly isn't a time saver over our method, and will likely end up costing you more once your staff's time (and also, perhaps, missed opportunity) is accounted for.