Technical Screen. The round that replaces the recruiter-plus-engineer phone screen.
Twenty-five minutes of conversation about work the candidate has actually done. No coding, no whiteboard, and no take-home. It is the highest-volume interview on the platform, the round every company already runs in some form, and the first one worth replacing.
It follows the candidate, not a script
The probe sequence is built from what they say they have worked on. Two candidates on the same job get different questions and are measured against the same anchors.
Start anywhere
"Describe a service you own end to end. What does it do, and who calls it?" Everything after this is derived from the answer.
Follow the specifics
A candidate who mentions a nightly job gets asked what the largest table it touches is, and what has gone wrong with it. Generic answers get specific follow-ups until they are either grounded or shown to be thin.
Cover enough ground
Five areas are available: services and APIs, data stores, reliability, delivery and operations, debugging. Three of five is the floor for a scored evaluation. Below that the result is Insufficient Signal, not a low score.
The candidate can see the coverageAn adaptive interview looks like a disorganised one if you cannot see the structure, so the areas covered so far are on screen throughout. A candidate who notices a gap and steers toward it is giving you information, not gaming anything.
How it is weighted
Technical Depth dominates at junior level and gives way to judgment as the level rises.
| Dimension | Junior / Mid | Senior | Lead / Staff+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Problem Decomposition | 0.20 | 0.25 | 0.30 |
| Architectural Judgment | 0.20 | 0.25 | 0.30 |
| Technical Depth | 0.40 | 0.35 | 0.25 |
| Communication | 0.20 | 0.15 | 0.15 |
A common configuration is the Screen first, with Coding or System Design released only if it passes a threshold you set. That gating is a job-level rule and it is where most of the engineer-hours are saved.
The fastest way to stop wasting senior engineers.
Most companies run this round with an engineer on the call. This is the one to replace first.
The other interview types: Coding · System Design · Data Science