Placing product roles you can't assess yourself
Recruiters placing product and design roles are paid for judgment they usually can't exercise: almost nobody in recruitment can assess design or product craft. An assessment attached to your shortlist turns “here are five CVs” into “here are three people, scored, with the evidence”. That difference is what your fee is supposed to buy.
Request access to the betaNo card or call needed, and the report is ready the second they finish.
What usually happens
Your client's hiring manager can evaluate the work. You can't, and both of you know it. So your shortlist is built on CV pattern-matching, company names and a conversation, and when a placement fails at month three, the credit you lose is out of all proportion to the reason.
Meanwhile every other recruiter approaching that client is sending the same profiles from the same LinkedIn searches.
15–25%
Of first-year salary, the standard contingency fee. That's for a shortlist built without any assessment of the craft being hired for.
The objection we hear
“Adding a step will lose me candidates.”
It will lose you some, and it's useful to know which. The format is built to keep that number low: fifteen minutes, a fictional company, nothing to prepare, and candidates sit it once rather than once per company.
The candidates who complete it also become more placeable. A scored report attached to a profile is a reason for a hiring manager to take your call over the next recruiter's.
How it fits your process
01 / 03
Assess before you submit
A shortlist that arrives with evidence changes the conversation with the hiring manager. You stop defending a CV and start discussing a result.
02 / 03
It compounds across searches
Someone you assess for one client is already assessed for the next. The report belongs to the candidate and travels with them, so your network becomes progressively more valuable to place.
03 / 03
Charge it through, or absorb it
At $89 against a fee of several thousand, most recruiters absorb it and use it as a differentiator. Some itemise it. Either works.
Roles you probably hire
Product Designer
The CEO: “We need a guided onboarding with tooltips. I saw it at a competitor and it works.”
Product Manager
The CRO: “Sales lost three deals this quarter because we don't have SSO. Put it in the next sprint.”
UX Researcher
The Head of Product: “Run some user interviews and tell us whether people want this feature.”
Questions
Questions from recruiters
Yes, that's what it's for. On the agency plan it carries your brand.
Yes, always. Assessing someone without telling them who is looking would be indefensible, and they consent before starting.
Then check what it measures. Most general libraries score knowledge with multiple choice, which answers a different question from this one. If they measure judgment already, you don't need us.
Related reading
Read these before you decide
8 min
How to evaluate a design engineer
Evaluate a design engineer on the decisions nobody logs: when a component should be new, a variant, or shouldn't exist at all; how they trade system consistency against shipping this week; what they do with a design that ignores the system; and which debt they choose to take on. A GitHub profile shows what they merged. Most of this role's value sits in what never got built.
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How to evaluate a UX writer
Evaluate a UX writer on whether they fix the interface or just the sentence: whether they flag the broken flow behind a confusing message, how they handle a destructive action, what they do with a legal constraint they can't remove, and how they decide what not to say. A writing sample shows the final line. It never shows what the screen looked like before, or what they refused to paper over.
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How to hire a product designer
Hiring a product designer well comes down to assessing decisions rather than screens: whether they reframe a badly posed brief, what they ask before designing, what they cut when resources disappear, how they respond when a constraint changes, and whether they can name the weakest part of their own proposal. Visual craft is necessary, but it's the easiest thing to verify and the least predictive of seniority.
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