How we vet
Every engineer,
checked by people.
Five stages, all run by experienced engineers: an English test, a take-home task, live coding, a video interview and a final review. About 1 in 100 applicants makes it through.
From brief to
start date.
Submit a request
Tell us what you need. Share your tech stack, project details, and team context.
Get a CV in 18h
We send you CVs of vetted engineers who match your stack and working hours.
Interview
Meet the candidate to ensure technical and cultural fit before making a decision.
Ready to work
Your new engineer joins your tools and standups and picks up real tickets in the first week.
Vetting standard
What we look for
Since 2022 we have screened thousands of candidates and learned which signals actually predict whether someone will do good work with little supervision.
We don't rely on automated tests or AI screening. Every stage is run by a person who has built software in production.
How do we identify a good candidate?
Proven commercial experience
Real production work with the stack you need, not just a line on a CV. Candidates prove it by solving realistic problems in a technical interview.
Fluent English & effective communication
We test everything from casual conversation to talking through a tricky design decision, because most of the job is working with other people.
Self-management & responsibility
Screening involves several rounds of back and forth. Candidates who miss calls or deadlines along the way don't move forward.
English test
Spoken and written, so day-to-day communication with your team is easy.
Programming task
A take-home task based on the work engineers actually do, completed in their own time. No whiteboard puzzles.
Live coding with a Senior Dev
A senior engineer goes through the take-home with the candidate and asks about their decisions, then sets a short live task to see how they debug.
Video & face-to-face screening
A video interview covering communication, reliability and how the candidate works with a team.
Final verification
Once the candidate has passed the entire process, we meet to share feedback and discuss start dates.
Isn't this too strict?
We hear this a lot. Here is why we do it this way.
It takes us longer
We review hundreds of applications for every engineer we accept. That is slow for us, and it is why we can send you CVs in 18 hours.
The interviews are hard
We dig into what candidates have actually built. People who can only talk about their work at a surface level don't pass.
We say no a lot
A bad hire costs you months. Turning someone away at the start costs us an afternoon.
It makes your job easier
The harder we are on candidates up front, the less you have to manage them after they start.
Why companies hire through us
How we compare to hiring directly or through a traditional agency.
People, not software
Every candidate is reviewed by people at every stage. We use software for scheduling, not for judging engineers.
Work directly with your engineer
No account manager in the middle. Your engineer joins your Slack and your standups from day one.
More than coding ability
We also assess how candidates take feedback, work in a team and adapt to the way you do things.
No hidden fees
You pay an hourly or monthly rate for the engineer. There is no separate placement fee.
What clients have to say
“Before we found ZeroIntake, hiring senior engineers was a distraction taking away our core team's velocity. Their vetting pipeline genuinely delivers the quality they advertise — without compromises.”
Eric Collins
CTO at TechBridge
“It's easy to test coding skills via remote tasks. What ZeroIntake did perfectly was finding someone with deep autonomy who fit right into our asynchronous communication style.”
Amanda Shah
VP Engineering at GrowthFlow