[karaterobot]

Oh, I wasn't even thinking about recruiting staff, I was specifically thinking about outsourcing technical screening to a third-party company.

I'm specifically thinking of the time I was asked to do a karat technical screen when applying for a position with a small company, and it was a big red flag for me. This is a service that does a remote, screen-share-based technical screening. My view is, you're only going to get a worse outcome with this approach compared to doing the screening yourself: either you're spending a lot of time going through the recording afterward, in which case you might as well have just done it yourself in the first place, or else you are just looking at the feedback by the third party company and deciding based on what they tell you. Since the third-party screener doesn't know you business, product, culture, or tech stack, that seems like a terrible idea.

People will often acknowledge that hiring (or not hiring) is the riskiest thing a company can do, and yet take stupid shortcuts to save a little time on it. That's the mentality of companies I want to avoid.