Structured technical evaluation, designed by an engineering leader and executed against your team's actual bar — so your panel isn't running five different playbooks, and so the hires you make today still look like the right hires at thirty days and at eighteen months.
The cost shows up everywhere. Senior engineers pulled off the roadmap to run yet another screen. EMs running the same conversations week after week. The slow accumulation of team-wide friction when nobody quite agrees what "good" looks like.
Underneath it is a process that was never designed. Every panel runs its own playbook. Every rubric is somebody's Google Doc. Every debrief turns on whoever's most certain. Better candidates won't fix that. More interviews definitely won't. What's missing is the methodology layer — the part of the process nobody on your org chart is actually responsible for designing.
AI has compressed engineering work, which means each hire carries more leverage — and more downside when the fit isn't right. And the applicant pool has expanded, which means more candidates to evaluate against a higher bar.
The old approach to technical hiring — improvised interviews, gut-feel debriefs, intuition at offer time — was already producing variable results when stakes were lower. It doesn't survive the new math.
Start with screening to return your engineers' time. Move into system design to make the hiring process itself defensible.
We align on role profiles, technical bar, and team context. Rubrics and scorecards are built to your stack and seniority levels before the first screen.
We run structured technical screens against a consistent rubric. Every candidate gets the same rigorous process — evaluated against the same technical bar, every time.
Your team receives a clear recommendation and documented rationale for each candidate. The methodology and tooling remain yours after the engagement ends.
When the screening methodology has earned trust, we formalize it into a full evaluation system — role profiles, rubrics, scorecards, interview formats, take-home design, and panel training. Documented and ready for your team to operate without us.
The first engagement was a training workshop for the engineering team — semi-structured interviews, rubrics and scorecards, and bias-reduction techniques delivered in a single session that left the team with a shared vocabulary and structured approach for evaluating candidates.
The second engagement scaled the methodology into ongoing technical screening — running candidate evaluations against a calibrated rubric so the team's senior engineers could stay focused on the work that only they could do. Across the engagement, the screening process returned an estimated 250 hours of technical evaluation work to the engineering team. Four hires came through that pipeline. All four are still with the company.
The third engagement, currently in progress, has expanded scope into JD design, interview format development, and take-home assessment evaluation. Each step has built on the last because the work delivered — and because the methodology proved itself before the next layer was added.
Edward Morgan is the founder of Gordian Knot. He has spent twenty-plus years in engineering leadership, building an engineering organization from zero in regulated healthcare, and leading distributed teams across backend, iOS, and Android at a Fortune 500 e-commerce company.
The methodology behind Gordian Knot was built on the inside — refined across thousands of technical interviews and the debriefs and post-mortems that followed. The premise is simple: technical evaluation is the highest-leverage filter in the engineering hiring funnel, and the one most teams have left undesigned.
Edward has spoken on AI in engineering hiring at Google's GDG DevFest and the Global Data & AI Tech Conference, and writes regularly about hiring methodology, interview design, and the organizational psychology of technical evaluation.
If your team is burning time on technical interviews and you're still not confident in the hires coming out the other end, we should talk. A short call is enough to figure out whether this is the right fit.