Six months into my first in-house role at a fintech scaling fast, I had more roles open than hands to fill them. Around fifty agencies wanted the work. I wanted partners.
I asked every agency the same thing.
If I ask you for Java backend engineers, how do you measure seniority before you introduce someone?
What do you ask in a first conversation, without turning it into a syntax quiz?
What does a senior answer actually sound like?
It came back the same, conversation after conversation:
"We ask about their tech stack, and whether their projects match the role. If it's a payments company, we check for payments projects. But we don't ask technical questions."
Matching a CV to a role is useful work. It just isn't an evaluation.
To be fair to those firms: product and commercial roles were getting filled. The gap was specific. Engineering calibre, the thing the roadmap depended on, was exactly where the market's evaluation stopped at the CV.
The cost was not only the hires we missed. It was the hours my engineers spent in interviews that should never have been booked.
We closed the door on agencies for technical roles and did the work ourselves. Not out of principle. The depth we needed wasn't on offer.
It was slower and harder. The bar kept rising, the roles got tougher to fill, and the team had to learn to measure engineers properly: what to ask, what a real answer sounds like, when a track record holds up and when it only reads well. That period shaped how I evaluate to this day.
A senior answer sounds different, and you can hear it early. It reaches for the architecture they rejected as readily as the one they shipped, the incident they owned, the call they had to defend afterwards. It arrives with examples rather than adjectives.
What I learned measuring engineers turned out to travel. The same discipline works on a compliance lead, a finance director, a commercial head: ask what they actually decided, what it cost them, and what happened after. The subject changes. The standard does not.
Years later, ValCera is the firm built to pass that test. Every search runs the way I wished those fifty conversations had gone: the work examined, not the wording. A written evaluation behind every introduction. And a reason, always, when the answer is no.
Ask me the same question. I'll answer.
Orson Oduber
Founder