Why technical hiring is broken has a short answer.
On this page
Most loops measure things nobody agreed on in advance.
Interviewers are never trained. Rejections say nothing, because legal risk is easier than feedback.
I have run more than 100 technical interviews. I started SmartHiring to fix the room where the decision happens.
Candidates say they cannot find work. Employers say they get 500 applications and no good ones.
Both statements are true at the same time. That is the shape of the problem.
Why technical hiring is broken, in three failures
Three failures, and they compound. Companies test algorithms for jobs that never touch them.
Others ban the AI tools their engineers use every working day.
Leadership rounds are the worst of the three.
The interviewer holds a perfect answer in their head. You do not match it, so you are rejected.
The algorithm round nobody can defend. Ask your panel what the last tree question told them about the job.
Most teams cannot answer. The round survives because it was there last year.
The AI ban. Engineers use these tools all day, then must prove “real knowledge” without them.
The perfect answer in someone’s head. Nobody wrote it down, so nobody can check it against anything.
Two interviewers then disagree about the same candidate and neither can say why.
Why do rejections say nothing?
Saying something feels like risk. Saying nothing feels free.
“After careful consideration” costs nothing to send. It also teaches the candidate nothing.
Companies call this legal caution. In most jurisdictions no law requires silence.
The real exposure comes from feedback that describes the person rather than the behaviour.
A second source is feedback citing a criterion nobody published in advance.
Both of those are fixable in one afternoon.
Write what you can safely say once, tie it to the scorecard, and reuse it.
A specific rejection is the cheapest reputation work a hiring team can buy.
What does broken technical hiring cost you?
More than the salary, and the salary is the part people quote.
A bad hire costs six months of pay before anything else is counted.
Sometimes a full year. Then add the damage to the team and the cost of hiring again.
I have watched managers lose 20 hours a week to interviews.
Most of those hours went to the wrong candidates.
The rehire. Sourcing, five rounds, the debrief and the agency fee, all of it a second time.
The team. Your strongest engineers cover the gap and rewrite the work. That is the largest hidden number.
The brand. Every rejected candidate talks, on LinkedIn and on Glassdoor.
Your employer brand pays for every bad interview you run, hire or no hire.
Who is this for?
People who can change the process, not people who want to complain about it.
Founders and CTOs at startups scaling after a raise.
Directors and VPs who own technical hiring at their company.
Engineering managers and engineers who run interviews and want to run them properly.
If your technical hiring is already “established” and settled, this work is not for you.
Ask yourself two questions before deciding.
Are your interviewers doing this well, and how would you know?
Does the panel judge on evidence, or on a feeling from the first four minutes?
Am I competing with your recruiters?
No, and the split is clean.
Recruiters own the funnel, the sourcing and the candidate experience.
I fix what happens inside the room where technical hiring is decided.
Better criteria mean fewer wasted screens, which is a recruiter’s own metric.
We work as a pair. I have never met a recruiter who wanted vaguer criteria.
What I write about here
Seven questions, one a week, in the newsletter and in longer form on this blog.
- How to define who you actually need.
- How to write a job description that filters.
- How to build a pipeline that works.
- How to train interviewers nobody trained.
- How to test real skills.
- Whether you need to interview algorithms at all.
- How to use AI instead of banning it.
The first one is already here: write the scorecard before you write the job ad.
The candidate side of the same problem lives on my other site.
Common questions
What does SmartHiring actually do?
SmartHiring audits technical hiring at one company and trains the panel that runs it. It also calibrates the people who score. The work is the interview room, not the funnel. Engagements run from a 500 euro audit to embedded shadowing across a hiring quarter. The first call is 20 minutes and free.
Why should a hiring manager listen to you?
I have run more than 100 technical interviews and hired over 10 engineers. I defined the hiring process used across 27 markets at Zalando. Before that I was a senior engineer at Shopify. I have also been rejected by loops I could not defend. That is the other half of the qualification.
Is this only for big companies?
No, and small teams get more from it. A 20-person company makes every hire matter more. It also has no internal process to unlearn. Most of the work is writing down what a strong candidate looks like. That costs an afternoon and does not scale with headcount.
What is the smallest change worth making first?
Require written scores before anyone speaks in the debrief. It costs nothing and needs no scheduling. Apply it to the next debrief already on your calendar. Opinions contaminate each other within seconds. The first person to speak anchors everyone else, including you.
How do you hire an engineer?
Write down what the person must do in year one, before the job ad exists. Then decide what evidence proves they can. Four rounds cover it: a screen, practical coding, a depth round, a hiring manager conversation. Train the interviewers, or the rest of the process is decoration.
The short version
Most interview loops measure things nobody agreed on in advance.
Interviewers were never trained, and rejections say nothing.
The bill arrives as rehires, as your best engineers’ time, and as your brand.
Writing the criteria down before the conversation fixes most of it.
Want it done with you rather than by you? Audit from 500 euro.
The first call is 20 minutes and free. I will say if your loop is already fine.
Read next
Why Your Interview Loop Rejects Good Engineers
Unstructured interviews explain about 4% of job performance. Structured ones explain 26%. Here is where the signal leaks out, and what to fix first.
The Scorecard Template, Written First
Most hiring problems start before anyone interviews. If you cannot describe a strong answer in advance, the loop will produce noise.
What a Published Salary Range Changes
Publishing the band changes who applies and what your team finds out later. Including the parts that are uncomfortable.
Want this fixed in your loop?
Book a free 20-minute audit call. I’ll show you where your interview quality breaks and what to fix first.