Engineering solved candidate evaluation years ago. Imperfectly, often unpleasantly, but it solved it: there is a technical interview, a standard exercise, and a shared idea of what good looks like.
For the roles that decide what gets built — design, product, research, front-end — nothing equivalent was ever built. The state of the art remained a portfolio and a conversation, both of which reward presentation and neither of which can show what someone does when the brief is wrong or the plan breaks.
Generative AI then removed what little signal those artefacts still carried. A convincing case study now takes four minutes to produce, whether or not the work behind it ever happened.
So we built the missing instrument, and we are trying to build it properly rather than quickly.