Your resume mentions scaling the order service. What broke first when traffic doubled, and what did you change?
The Postgres connection pool saturated first. We added PgBouncer, then split reads onto a replica and moved sessions to Redis…
Every score opens onto the transcript and video it came from.
What makes software engineers hard to screen
The stack list tells you nothing
React, Node, Docker, AWS — on almost every CV in the pile, at wildly different depths, described identically.
Take-home tests lose the good ones
A strong engineer with a job and a family will decline a four-hour unpaid exercise, and you never learn they applied.
Live coding tests nerves as much as skill
It measures performance under observation, which is not how anyone on your team writes code on a Tuesday.
How Career1 does it
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01
Post the role
Type a job title and Career1 drafts the description, or dictate it, or upload the JD you already have. You choose what the application form asks for — phone, city, and any screening questions of your own.
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02
Everyone gets interviewed
Every applicant, not a filtered subset, gets a link to a spoken interview they can take at 2am on a phone. It asks about their actual experience, follows up when an answer is thin, and runs about eight minutes.
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03
Read a ranked shortlist
You get a match score, the verified strengths, the risks, a hire recommendation, and the full transcript and video behind every claim. The evidence ships with the score, so you can check the reasoning instead of trusting it.
What the interview probes for in software engineers
- What they personally built
- Not what the team shipped — which part they wrote, and what they decided along the way.
- Debugging instinct
- How they found the cause of the worst bug they can remember, which separates people who read stack traces from people who restart the server.
- Trade-offs they've regretted
- Engineers who have owned a system in production talk about trade-offs. Engineers who have only built features talk about features.
- Explaining to a non-engineer
- Whether they can describe their architecture to someone who doesn't know the codebase.
Questions people ask
How do you screen software engineers without a coding test?
By asking them to explain work they've actually done in enough detail that it can't be faked — what they built, what broke, what they'd do differently. Career1's interviewer follows up on each answer, so borrowed experience runs out quickly. Use it as the first round, then spend your engineers' time on the shortlist.
Can it screen for a specific stack?
Yes. The interview is grounded in your job description, so a role asking for Go and Kubernetes produces questions about Go and Kubernetes, and the report scores against what you asked for.
What do I get back for each engineer?
A match score, the strengths the interview verified, the risks, a hire recommendation, and the full video and transcript so your team can check any of it.
Also hiring for
Start with two candidates, free
Post a role, send the link, and read the first scored report tonight. No card, and nothing for your candidates to pay or install.
Vet your first software engineers free