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Ten years ago, I sat across from an engineering leader at a mid-sized product company in Bengaluru. We were talking about evaluation – what good looks like, how to measure it consistently. He was sharp, thoughtful, genuinely trying to solve the problem.
He couldn’t describe it.
Not because he hadn’t thought about it. Because nobody had ever shown him a version of engineering evaluation that actually worked. He had language for broken. He had no language for good.
That conversation has repeated itself more times than I can count.
There’s a concept in positioning – an idea needs a neighbourhood to live in. Something already familiar that the new thing can lean against. Without it, even a genuinely good idea floats in and floats back out.
This is the deepest reason hiring technology never had its breakthrough moment.
Not because the problem isn’t real. Not because the tools haven’t improved. Because the neighbourhood doesn’t exist. There’s no shared mental infrastructure around what good engineering evaluation looks like. So every new solution, however good, lands in empty space.
Compare it to what happened with AWS.
When AWS arrived, engineers already understood servers. Already felt the pain of provisioning. Already had language for what they were trying to solve. AWS gave them a better way to do something they already understood. The idea had a neighbourhood. It clicked immediately.
Ask ten engineering leaders what great evaluation looks like – not faster, not cheaper, genuinely great, and you’ll get ten different answers. Vague ones. Most describe the absence of pain rather than the presence of something better.
They know what broken feels like. They have no shared picture of what good feels like.
This is why every hiring technology pitch sounds like every other hiring technology pitch.
Structured interviews. Consistent signal. Better assessment. Real ideas. But abstractions without a neighbourhood. A buyer who has never experienced what structured evaluation actually produces has no framework to attach these words to. They arrive and dissolve. Same as the last pitch. Same as the one before that.
So the industry retreated to what it could sell. Speed. Cost reduction. Efficiency.
These connect. Buyers understand them. But efficiency is not quality. A faster version of a broken evaluation process is still a broken evaluation process.
The industry optimised what was easy to pitch. Not what was hard to fix.
We’ve now worked with engineering teams at companies like Intuit, Target, and Tesco. We’ve run thousands of structured technical evaluations. And the thing I’ve learned is that what’s missing isn’t a metric or a benchmark.
It’s a picture.
A felt sense of what it looks like when evaluation actually works.
An engineering leader who trusts a candidate’s signal before the final round – because every stage before it was structured, consistent, and run the same way regardless of who conducted it. A senior engineer who spends 60 minutes in a real technical conversation, not a guessing game, and walks out feeling the hour meant something. A candidate who is assessed on what they actually know, not on how confidently they perform in a room.
These aren’t ideals. We’ve seen them. We’ve built toward them for ten years.
But the category never made them visible. Never gave buyers the language. Never built the neighbourhood where this picture could live.
That’s what needs to change now. Not just better tools. A clearer image of what better looks like — shown specifically enough, often enough, that the people who need it can finally recognise it.
Ask for it.
Refuse to settle for less.
You cannot want something you have never been shown.