You Don’t Have Time to Interview 10 Engineers. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Have To.

You closed your seed round. Your board expects product velocity in 90 days. You need two backend engineers. What you’re getting instead is a second full-time job as a recruiter.

The math

The industry average when working with a recruiter: 4+ candidates interviewed per engineer hired. Each interview cycle is 2 to 3 hours of your time. Two open roles, four candidates each, and you’ve burned a full sprint on hiring before anyone writes a line of code.

The expensive part isn’t the recruiter fee. It’s your calendar.

Why this keeps happening

The entire hiring funnel is optimized for the wrong thing. Job boards optimize for applications. Recruiters optimize for submissions. The metric everyone reports is volume. The thing that actually matters, whether the person can do the job and wants to stay, is nobody’s KPI.

The result is predictable: you see a lot of candidates. Most of them are wrong. You spend weeks figuring that out.

What “2 candidates per hire” actually means

At Telescoped, hiring managers see an average of 2 candidates per engineer hired.

This works because the filtering happens before you’re involved:

• Every engineer was referred by peers who have their own reputation at stake
• Candidates are matched against your stack, stage, team size, and working style
• The vetting that normally fills your 60-day hiring cycle already happened, upstream, inside the network

You’re the last step in the process. Not the first.

The downstream effects

• You get your calendar back. One or two focused conversations instead of three blocked afternoons per week.
• You make better decisions. Choosing between two strong options is a different exercise than searching a haystack.
• You ship faster. Weeks from “we need to hire” to “someone is writing production code.” For a startup burning $150K to $200K/month, that compression matters.
• You stop making panic hires. Bad early-stage hires happen when founders are exhausted from interviewing and just want it to be over. Fix the front of the funnel and the back of the funnel fixes itself.

The punchline

Most founders think hiring well means seeing lots of candidates. It doesn’t. It means only seeing the right ones.

Two candidates. One hire. Back to building.