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“Pre-vetted” is a claim about someone else’s hiring process. You are buying their screening, so the useful question is what that screening measured.
What the label can mean #
A vendor that calls its developers pre-vetted has run candidates through some mix of a résumé screen, a technical interview, a coding exercise, and a reference call. Those are very different filters. A résumé screen tells you the candidate had the right keywords. A paid exercise on a realistic bug tells you something about how they work.
The research on hiring points the same way. A 2022 re-analysis of personnel-selection studies in the Journal of Applied Psychology (November 2022) found that structured interviews ranked first among selection methods, and that the validity estimates for most methods were 0.10 to 0.20 points lower than earlier summaries had reported (Sackett et al., 2022). Two readings follow. Every screening method is weaker than vendors’ marketing suggests, and a vendor that can describe a structured process is more believable than one that says “rigorous”.
Five questions to ask before you rely on it #
- What did the candidate do, in order? Ask for the steps, not the adjective. “Rigorous screening” is not an answer. “A 60-minute pairing session on a bug in a Rails app, scored against a written rubric” is.
- Who ran it, and have they shipped what you are building? A reviewer who has never run a Rails app in production cannot vet a Rails developer.
- Can I interview the person who will do the work? Not a sales engineer. If the person changes after you sign, the vetting applied to someone else.
- What happens if it is not working in the first month? Ask for the replacement terms and the notice period in writing.
- Who owns the code and the accounts? Put it in the contract, not the pitch deck. For U.S. copyright, software written by a contractor is not automatically yours, and the law lists only nine categories that can be “work made for hire” by written agreement (U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 30). A signed assignment closes the gap. Ask a lawyer to write it.
What vetting cannot do #
Vetting predicts how someone codes in an exercise. It cannot predict whether they will understand your customers, whether they will tell you when a deadline is fiction, or whether they fit the way your team runs reviews. You find that out in the first few weeks of real work, which is why the replacement terms in question 4 matter more than the screening story.
It also does not remove your own job. Somebody on your side still has to read what is delivered each week and say whether it is what you asked for. If you cannot do that yourself, pay a senior engineer for a few hours of review before you commit to a long engagement. Our guide to vetting engineers as a non-technical founder covers how.
If you want an embedded team instead of a single hire, see how we work. JetThoughts is rated 4.8/5 on Clutch.
Sources #
- Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens, Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022 - structured interviews ranked first; validity estimates revised down by 0.10 to 0.20.
- U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 30: Works Made for Hire, revised August 2024 - the nine commissioned-work categories and the written-agreement requirement.
