Reader, Wow, are we halfway through February already? That was fast. Hope you had a great V Day over the weekend 🫶 Let's talk about another interview I had back in December.This was with a facilities management SaaS company for an SDET role. A friend from a past job referred me, so I thought it would be a walk in the park.(This is a terrible posture to take when getting referred, by the way. Great recruiters often speak with referrals so make sure you educate your candidate on mindset before...
9 days ago • 4 min read
Reader, In Part 1, we talked about Jake, one of the best recruiters I've ever worked with as a candidate. He was great, but ultimately had a "miss" in his hiring practice which cost his team time. Jake spent hours sourcing and interviewing candidates for this role, only to see every finalist rejected because they failed the assessment. At first, Jake thought he was just sourcing the wrong candidates. When we took time to compare the assessment to the actual job requirements, the misalignment...
12 days ago • 4 min read
Reader, Hey again. It's Steven, the QA Engineer who thinks he can talk about recruiting (I kid, that's what Jaclyn's here for lmao). Story time. While on the job hunt -- between November and January -- I interviewed with a productivity SaaS I shall not name. You'd know who they are, probably (maybe not, some folks I talked to hadn't heard of them). Anyway. I got all the way to the end of their interview process but flunked their Leetcode challenge. I almost wrote about this interview...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Reader, In Part 1, we talked about a bad tech assessment. Let's see how it could be better, 1 skill at a time. Recall that this was the list of skills they needed to assess for the role: is screencapping our own newsletter considered "newsletter-ception"? QA Automation (Playwright & POM) These fall under the QA Automation umbrella in the 1st item. Like I said in Part 1, they did a good job of testing the candidate on Playwright best practices. But they can do better. Instead of asking the...
19 days ago • 3 min read
Reader, Steven here. So, let's talk tech assessments. I was recently on the hunt for a new job thanks to my previous employer making some questionable business decisions in 2025. One of the first interviews I got was for a "field service management SaaS" company. AKA, they serve landscaper business owners who need help managing their operations. (No names 😉) But you're here because you want to know what their tech assessment looked like. It was a 2-parter: 1. Playwright expertise (refactor a...
23 days ago • 2 min read
Reader,In Part 1, I shared a story about a CEO who wanted to 2× his output without 2× headcount and realized his real constraint wasn’t talent. It was infrastructure. So now let’s get tactical. If you’re responsible for: Revenue Rep productivity Tech adoption and how work actually flows through your business …this is the part that matters. 1. Are you even AI/Automation-ready? Before you buy anything, ask yourself: Do we have clear workflows in place? Do we know where time is leaking every...
26 days ago • 4 min read
Reader, If you’re still manually sourcing talent and building sales call sheets in 2026...you’re behind. Not because you’re bad at your job.But because tech is changing options for better operations. I see this every week with staffing leaders who are trying to grow revenue using workflows built for 2021. Now is the time to assess. Example: Last week I met with a CEO of a consulting firm focused on engineering hiring.Sharp guy. Strong foundation. Great delivery instincts. His goal? 2× his...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Reader, At the bottom of today's email is the rubric I used with the hiring manager during discovery and interview debriefs. It was developed with a senior engineer in the organization who conducted a one-time discovery session with me and the client manager to understand the department’s initiatives and requirements. This approach immediately created a level of trust and shared accountability with the decision-maker and provided a clear framework for me to surface gaps and misalignment...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Reader, A few years back, I partnered with a manager at Ally Financial who had been with the firm for years and was rolling out Cypress across multiple departments. This wasn’t a short-term fix. These were long-term, contract-to-hire initiatives. The manager already had a strong development lead in place. What he needed was QA talent that could truly match that level. Early on, he walked me through upcoming projects and the friction points he expected to hit.That context mattered and we...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
