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Subject

Hire people you have already watched work.

We research, interview, and test every candidate on real work before you meet them. You pay nothing until a hire starts.

Get in touch See what you get

Hiring with us

  • Concentrate AI
  • OpenObserve
  • Pointer
  • Infraspec
  • Timelaps
  • Blue Labs AI
Cost

What the old way actually costs

A technical role now sits open for 63 days on average, 43 percent longer than it did in 2021. The work does not pause while it does, it spreads across people who already had enough of it.

Then the invoice arrives. Somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of first-year salary, for a shortlist someone assembled by typing keywords into a search box.

63 days
Average time to fill a technical role

Up 43% since 2021

$70,000
Cost per hire

Including vacancy and lost productivity

1,000+
Applicants per role

Within hours of posting

20-33 %
What an agency charges

To send you resumes

Diagnosis

Your recruiter has never read a pull request.

They match strings. Nothing in a keyword search separates an engineer who has carried a pager at 3am from someone who listed the word.

What a search box sees

  • Kubernetes
  • 5+ years
  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • Go
  • CI/CD
  • Distributed systems
  • On-call

The same words every other applicant used. A language model writes them in seconds.

What we send

Fit
84 / 75
Session
2h 14m, recorded
Reached for AI
6
Rewrote by hand
1

Evidence of the work itself. People from unconventional backgrounds surface on merit, and a polished resume with nothing behind it stops being convincing.

Quoted from a client call

AI makes it easy to produce polished, generic solutions. The funnel floods with all working solutions that are hard to differentiate.

Platform engineering firm

Method

What we mean when we say pre-vetted

Every agency says it. It usually means somebody had a twenty minute phone call.

  1. Research

    • Repositories read
    • Shipped products read
    • Writing read
    • Career context read

    We read the work, not the claims. Most of what matters never makes the page.

  2. Conversation

    Us

    What made you leave?

    Them

    They moved off the platform I built.

    Us

    What did you do when it broke?

    Recorded, and followed up. Rehearsed answers do not survive a second question.

  3. Work trial

    $ migrate up --env staging

    ERR dirty version 41

    # checks the lock table

    A real task in a real environment, captured start to finish, including how they used AI.

Every candidate reaches you with the evidence attached.

Evidence

What lands in your inbox

Not a resume with a note attached. A record of someone working.

Candidate record Illustrative

Candidate

Withheld

Role

Platform Engineer

5 to 8 years

Fit

84 / threshold 75

Research

Six years on infrastructure teams, three of them on call for a fleet of roughly 400 nodes. Contributor to a widely used Terraform provider. Two of the three companies on the resume were pre-product when he joined.

Conversation

Left the last role when the team moved off the platform he built. Wants ownership of a system end to end, and said plainly that he does not want to manage people yet.

Work trial

Debugged a failing migration against a live cluster.

Session 2h 14m, recorded
Reached for AI to read unfamiliar Go
Reached for AI to read unfamiliar Go
Stalled on the migration lock
Reached for AI to search the error
Reached for AI to draft a rollback
Rewrote the rollback by hand
Reached for AI to check the index plan
Reached for AI to write the post-mortem note
0h 1h 2h
  • Reached for AI 6
  • Stuck 1
  • Rewrote by hand 1
Strength

Found the root cause without the runbook, and said out loud what he was ruling out as he went.

Gap
Thin on Terraform module design. Fixable, and worth naming before you interview rather than after.

Session recorded · 2h 14m · Full playback attached

Every dossier carries the session recording, so you can watch the work rather than take our word for it.

Process

How it works

  1. Day 0

    Intake call

    Thirty minutes on the role, the bar, and the taste behind it.

  2. Days 1-6

    We source and assess

    Research, conversation, work trial. You hear nothing while this runs.

  3. Day 7

    Shortlist arrives

    Three to five candidates, each with the full record attached.

  4. Day 8+

    You interview

    Two focused rounds, because the screening already happened.

Terms

It costs nothing to find out

No retainer. No upfront fee. No setup cost. We are paid when a person we introduced starts the job, and not a day before.

Every search carries a replacement guarantee. Our fee sits well below the 20 to 33 percent an agency charges, and you get the exact number before you commit to anything.

Upfront fee

Agency

Retainer, often

Rawcruit

None

Fee on hire

Agency

20 to 33% of first-year salary

Rawcruit

Meaningfully less

What you receive

Agency

A resume and a phone screen

Rawcruit

A researched, interviewed, work-tested record

If it does not work out

Agency

Varies, often nothing

Rawcruit

Replacement guarantee on every search

Record

What clients say

I have also met the other three, four agencies who are helping us. Yours is next level. It is different from all the others. I have seen how others source, it is different.

Head of HR and Operations Observability company, Series A

The overall quality is pretty decent compared to just random ones online. The first two candidates we would like to chat with, that is a very high hit rate already, two out of six.

Co-founder AI brand-analytics startup

This feels like zero risk at all for me. You made it very easy.

Co-founder AI B2B SaaS startup

From us

2 / 6

Candidates worth interviewing

From LinkedIn and other agencies

2-3 / 30

Same team, same roles, their own count

Scope

Who we work with

Startups and growing teams hiring technical and go-to-market roles. Most of our work runs from seed through Series B, where there is real hiring to do and no recruiting function to do it.

If you are filling one role a year, or hiring exclusively into a niche we have never touched, we are probably not the right people. We will say so on the call rather than take the search and disappoint you.

Roles we run most often

  • Founding engineers
  • Platform and infrastructure
  • Backend and full-stack
  • Forward-deployed engineers
  • Applied AI engineers
  • GTM engineers
Questions

Questions

Where do the candidates come from?

Outbound sourcing, our own assessed candidate pool, and referrals. Every candidate we put in front of you goes through the same process regardless of where we found them.

What happens if the hire does not work out?

Every search carries a replacement guarantee. If the person leaves inside that window, we run a priority search again at no additional fee. The window and the exact remedy are set out in your agreement, and we walk you through them before you sign anything.

Which roles do you cover?

Technical and go-to-market roles, from founding engineers through platform and infrastructure leads. We are strongest on engineering. If a role sits outside what we run well, we will say so.

How is this different from a normal agency?

An agency sends you resumes and a phone-screen summary. We send you a record of someone doing work close to the job, with the session captured. The commercial model is the same shape, so the buying decision is easy. What arrives is not the same thing at all.

How long does it take?

A shortlist usually lands about a week after the intake call. Time to a signed offer depends on how fast your team moves, which is mostly the point.

What does it cost to get started?

Nothing. There is no retainer, no setup fee, and no commitment. We are paid only when a hire starts.

Is the assessment fair to candidates?

Candidates know what they are doing and why. The work trial is close to the real job rather than a puzzle, they can use the tools they would use at work, and they get feedback. People who are strong but present badly on paper do better under this process, not worse.

Close

Nothing to start. Nothing until someone starts.

Send us the role and what you are looking for. If we are not the right people for it, we will tell you rather than take the search.

Get in touch