A recruiter without engineering fluency slows hiring, increases interviews, and misses great talent. Here’s the fix.
Hiring engineers isn’t just about spotting keywords on a resume. It’s understanding how a backend engineer thinks, why a DevOps profile differs from a cloud admin, and which signals indicate a scalable hire vs a short-term replacement.
Most companies know this problem well.
You post a job → recruiter screens resumes → hiring manager interviews → 60–80% get rejected in the first technical round.
Not because there’s no talent.
But because the filtering layer wasn’t technical enough.
Where traditional recruiters break the pipeline:
1. Screening ≠ Reading skills on a CV
Many recruiters forward profiles based on buzzwords: Java, Kubernetes, microservices, Docker.
But they can’t distinguish:
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Spring Boot vs Spring MVC
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Kubernetes admin vs application deployment
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Docker familiarity vs production CI/CD integration
Surface understanding → shallow shortlisting → wasted interviews.
2. Wrong evaluation signals during screening
A technical recruiter must ask:
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What type of systems have they built?
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What was scale? traffic? concurrency?
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How do they debug failures?
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CI/CD familiarity or actual ownership?
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Unit testing mindset or code-only execution?
Keyword screening never tells this story.
3. Engineers lose trust when the first touchpoint is non-technical
Developers can instantly tell when the interviewer doesn’t understand their work.
You lose strong candidates early simply because communication didn’t match their depth.
How technically fluent screening changes everything
When initial evaluation is done by someone who has been inside engineering work:
✔ You filter better before the hiring manager
✔ You reduce interview load on senior engineers
✔ The quality per round increases noticeably
✔ You identify engineering red flags early
✔ Candidates feel respected → higher acceptance
Hiring becomes intentional, not luck-based.
What technical vetting looks like in practice:
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Competency-based resume review
Not just skills — impact, ownership, systems handled. -
Technical first-round discussion
Real conversation about architecture, workflows, failures, debugging. -
Scenario-based evaluation
“How would you scale X?”
“What happens if service latency spikes?”
“How would you optimize CI build times?” -
Culture & long-term fit
Startups need builders.
Mature teams need maintainers.
Different DNA → different hire.
Hiring without wasting weeks
Fractional recruitment gives companies access to technical hiring without a full-time TA cost.
Instead of paying for effort, you pay for outcomes:
Better pipelines. Better interviews. Better hires.
When does this model make the most sense?
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No internal technical recruiter
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Engineers are spending too much time screening
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Rejections are high in round 1
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Hard-to-hire skills open for months
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You need hiring support only when needed
Closing CTA
If you want your engineering interviews to start with qualified candidates — not guesses —
Let’s talk. Even a 15-minute call shows what bottleneck is costing you most.
📩 Contact: archan@arckits.com