We Test the Half of the Job Other Recruiters Skip
Plenty of engineers can code. Far fewer can sit with a frustrated customer, find what they actually need and ship it by Friday. We test for both, so your team doesn't have to. You run the final interviews and make the call.
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.
Every candidate has passed steps 1 and 2 before you see them. Deployment strategists swap the technical screen for a business case. Each candidate does this core vetting once, and their core scores carry over. For your search, we add a short second role-play with a customer modeled on yours. If you sell to hospital IT, the "customer" is a hospital IT lead. Then we score every shortlisted candidate against your bar, not a generic one. Add steps 3 and 4 when you want more certainty before your final interviews.
Technical Screen
Real deployment work, not puzzles. One task: wire a messy, badly documented API into something that runs. For AI roles, we swap in a retrieval pipeline that gives wrong answers. They find out why and prove the fix with a small eval. We watch how they read unfamiliar code and how they debug when the docs are wrong, because the docs are always wrong.
What we score: working code · debugging · reading other people's systems
Customer Role-Play
A former FDE plays the customer: an operations lead with a vague problem, a skeptical VP and a deadline. The candidate has to find the real problem, set expectations and say no to the wrong request without losing the room. This is the step a resume can't fake.
What we score: discovery questions · clarity · pushback · composure
Live Build
The candidate turns the problem they scoped in the role-play into a working demo, then presents it back to the "customer." It's a compressed version of a real first deployment, so you see how they trade off speed, polish and scope.
What we score: shipping under pressure · judgment · the demo itself
Customer References
We talk to managers and, wherever we can, to the customers they deployed for. "Would you want them back on your account?" tells you more than any interview. If a reference makes us nervous, you hear about it from us before you make an offer.
What we score: trust · follow-through · how they handled a bad week
What Lands in Your Inbox
Not a resume and a "they seem great." Every shortlisted candidate comes with a scorecard written against your bar, plus a short clip from the role-play built around your customer, so you can hear them for yourself.
- Scores on both halves of the job
- 3-minute role-play clip
- Our honest concerns, not just the highlights
- What we'd probe in your final interviews
- Availability and notice period
What We Don't Do
No Whiteboard Puzzles
Inverting a binary tree tells you nothing about a deployment. Everything we test is work an FDE does in week one.
No Pedigree Filters
Some of the best FDEs came from support, consulting or solutions roles. We screen for what people can do, not for logos on a resume.
No Resume Forwarding
If we haven't tested someone ourselves, they don't reach you. A shortlist of three beats a list of thirty.
