How to Optimise Hiring for Software, Platform and SRE Roles

The interview process for technical roles is becoming increasingly lengthy and costly. For more senior roles, it can become especially costly for the hiring company as well as stressful and time consuming for the candidates. It’s a standard practice to have interviewers that conduct the interview, write feedback and then a hiring panel that reads the feedback and makes a decision on whether to make an offer. An hour of the time of 4-8 senior level and higher employees is quite costly alone, not to mention the time required to write up feedback and the time that an interview panel has to spend reviewing the said feedback. On the other side, candidates usually have to take a day off from their work or personal life for a day packed full of back to back interviews as well as significant time to prepare for this day. CVs alone are not a strong indicator either. A CV does not always give an accurate picture of a candidate's abilities. Not only that but a CV is not a strong indicator if the candidate will be a good fit for the company. This makes it unreasonable to invite a candidate over for a full or even half day of interviews with 4-8 employees purely because their CV matches what’s required by the job description. Even if a recruiter ends up screening the candidate before they are invited to start the process, it might not be enough. The recruiter might be skilled but they might still miss some crucial details that someone with specific experience might instantly spot. In the State Of Tech Hiring 2026 report by Coderpad “Of our recruiters surveyed, 69% use the resume review to assess technical talent, but only 16% think it predicts performance”. It used to be a common practice to hand candidates a challenge that they can do at home. This used to work. It was easy to filter out candidates that were not interested in the job for example. Their solutions were often sloppy, did not implement all the requirements, had no unit tests, no comments or no explanation of what they did whatsoever. However, this way of filtering out candidates seems mostly obsolete now. Anyone can use AI to generate most of it and it will tick most of not all the boxes. Even if they don’t clean up the solution from obvious AI generated comments and other things, it’s difficult to say if it’s been entirely AI-generated. In The hiring crisis in an AI-driven world by HackerRank they note that “In our 2025 Developer Skills Survey, 56% of developers admit to using AI on their coding assessments. This data corroborates with our internal plagiarism detection currently flagging 6 out of 10 candidates for potential plagiarism.” Doing a 15-30 minute screening by the recruiter, followed by a 30-60 minute screening by an experienced engineer for technical roles might yield a better signal on whether a candidate will be suitable for the role they are interviewing for. This format can be potentially used to filter out candidates not only based on technical abilities but also touch a little bit on cultural fit. I experienced a version of this when interviewing for an SRE role at Apple several years ago. Before the onsite interviews there were two relatively inexpensive filters. The first one was a recruiter conversation and the second, an engineer-led technical screen. The technical screen combined discussion of infrastructure fundamentals with a small coding exercise. It was enough interaction for both sides to decide whether committing to the much more expensive interviews made sense. The goal is not to make the interview easier by lowering the bar. It’s to spend the time when it make sense. For both sides. A CV can tell you where someone has worked and what they claim to have done, but it is a poor substitute for talking to them. Likewise, a take-home exercise that can now be completed largely with AI provides less information than it once did. A short conversation with someone who understands the role can provide considerably more signal. It won't tell you whether to hire the candidate, and it shouldn't try to. It should answer a much simpler question: Is there enough evidence here for both sides to invest several more hours in finding out? An unnecessary interview loop doesn't cost only the candidate a day. It can consume hours from several of the company's most expensive employees. Filtering earlier, while keeping that filter relevant, consistent and fair can make the process better for both sides. NoxidJobs is a free job board and lightweight ATS for small businesses. We're building tools around the hiring process described above, from managing applicants through interview stages and hiring decisions.