Scaling engineering hiring without lowering the bar

01

The challenge

Delivery commitments had been made to customers before the engineering team existed. Forty engineers were needed across two quarters, spanning backend, platform and quality engineering.

The leadership team's stated constraint was that the technical standard could not move. A previous ramp had been filled on time and produced a retention problem that took a year to correct.

02

The hiring environment

Three sites were hiring independently, each with its own interview questions, its own definition of a strong answer and its own informal bar.

Interview feedback lived in free-text notes, so a candidate rejected in one location could pass in another without anyone noticing the inconsistency.

03

What Saanvi Nexus changed

Role briefs were rewritten around delivery outcomes for the first ninety days and benchmarked against local market supply, which changed the seniority mix in two of the three locations.

A single capability scorecard was applied to every interview across all sites, with panel scoring captured before the debrief rather than during it.

Saanvi AI ranked inbound and sourced candidates with the reasoning attached, so calibration disagreements were resolved against evidence instead of preference.

04

How it was delivered

A four-week calibration phase ran before volume sourcing opened: shared scorecard, interviewer training and a benchmark panel on ten candidates across the three sites.

Weekly pipeline reviews tracked conversion by stage and by location, with brief corrections applied where shortlist-to-interview conversion fell below the agreed threshold.

Offer and onboarding coordination stayed centralised so start dates and equipment were owned by one team rather than three.

05

The outcome

Forty roles were filled across two quarters against a consistent standard, with roughly one offer for every four candidates shortlisted.

Probation completion held at 97 percent, materially above the client's prior baseline for a comparable ramp.

06

Key learnings

Calibrating before volume sourcing cost four weeks and saved considerably more in rework and re-interviewing.

Where the same scorecard is used everywhere, location differences show up as market supply questions rather than as arguments about quality.