Methodology
Most technical recruiting treats hiring as a sourcing problem. Find enough people, send them to the client, let the client figure out who's actually good. The result is noise: 15 resumes, 8 phone screens, 4 full loops, 1 hire, 10 weeks elapsed.

Wizhire treats hiring as an evaluation problem. Sourcing is not the hard part. Accurately evaluating technical depth — and compressing the decision cycle without compromising the quality of that evaluation — is.

The Hiring Manager Intake
Every search starts here. Before a single candidate is sourced.

The intake is a structured 60–90 minute session covering 10 dimensions of the role:

Technical stack — the actual technologies the hire will work with day-to-day, not the wishlist in the job description
System ownership — what systems or domains the person will own, what decisions they'll make autonomously
Operating level — what "good" looks like in 30, 60, and 90 days
Seniority calibration — where on the IC4/IC5/IC6 spectrum this hire needs to sit, and what signals distinguish the levels in this specific context
Candidate anti-profile — who this role is specifically not for. This is often as useful as the positive profile.
Compensation range — realistic comp expectations calibrated against the LatAm market, so we are not presenting candidates who will decline the offer
Team context — who they'll work with, how the team operates, what the engineering culture is actually like
Evaluation criteria — what the client's own interview process looks like, so we calibrate our screen accordingly
Must-haves vs. nice-to-haves — forcing the ranking of requirements to distinguish what will actually drive a no-hire decision
Definition of success — what does a great hire in this role look like 6 months in

The output of this session is a calibrated role profile — not a job description. It drives every sourcing and evaluation decision that follows.

Sourcing
Wizhire sources from a 50,000+ engineer network, not job boards. The target is passive candidates — engineers not actively job-hunting but open to the right opportunity.

Outreach is personalized and role-specific. The message is built around the calibrated profile from the intake, not a generic pitch about "exciting opportunity." Response rates are materially higher when candidates understand specifically why they're being contacted.

No spray-and-pray. Sourcing volume is deliberately constrained to maintain evaluation quality.

Technical Screening
Every candidate shortlisted by Wizhire passes a structured technical screen run by a Staff-level engineer in the same discipline. Not a generic technical screener. A practitioner who has operated at or above the level being evaluated, in that specific field.

The screen uses Wizhire's published leveling rubrics. These define what Senior, Staff, and Principal mean in five dimensions for each discipline:

Technical Depth — how the candidate performed on discipline-specific technical questions and their ability to reason about systems at the appropriate level
Ownership Evidence — scope of what they've owned, what decisions they've made, what they've built from scratch vs. maintained
Communication & Influence — quality of their technical communication, how they explain trade-offs, how they interact with non-technical stakeholders
Ecosystem Fit — alignment with the client's specific stack, scale, stage, and team model