Questions founders ask

Agencies typically charge 20 to 25 percent of a hire’s first-year base salary, so a senior engineer at $170,000 costs $34,000 to $42,500 to place. Retained firms add an upfront fee paid whether or not they fill the role. Keystone charges a success fee only, below that range, quoted for your role before the search starts, invoiced when the hire signs and payable within 15 days. Nothing is owed if you do not hire.

Industry surveys put the average time to fill an engineering role at seven to eleven weeks. Keystone delivers a scored shortlist within ten business days of a signed agreement. From there the clock is yours: the interview loop and the offer.

Contingency means you pay only when you hire someone the recruiter introduced. Retained means you pay in advance, usually in thirds, whether or not the search succeeds, and it is the norm for executive searches. Keystone is contingency, with no retainer and no exclusivity, so you can run other channels at the same time.

A structured interview asks every candidate the same questions in the same order and scores the answers against written anchors. Decades of research show it predicts job performance about twice as well as a free-flowing conversation, because it measures what the candidate has done and how they reason rather than how they come across. Every Keystone candidate has had one before you meet them, rated twice and independently.

A scorecard is a one-page written description of what the role actually needs: the criteria, their weights, and the three must-haves. Keystone writes it from a thirty-minute call with the hiring manager and sends it the next business day, and you approve it before anyone is contacted. You keep it whether or not you hire us.

Everything between the signed agreement and the shortlist: reading hundreds of profiles across North America, scoring each one against your scorecard, contacting the best, screening them in structured calls, and writing a one-page brief per candidate. The ten days start the day the agreement is signed.

If the person leaves within ninety days of starting, Keystone runs the search again for the same role at no additional fee.

Senior engineers, data and machine-learning engineers, infrastructure and security engineers, and product roles with a technical core, at companies of 10 to 300 people in the United States and Canada. Not sales, marketing or executive search today.

Each search reads licensed professional databases, public code, public job-seeker posts and the roles companies publish, across North America, hundreds of profiles per role, and scores every one against the scorecard on evidence. We do not scrape LinkedIn, and we never collect email addresses from code repositories.

You see the brief: why this person, the evidence it rests on, what to probe in your interview, and the one thing we are unsure about. The attributes, weights and signals behind the score are the method and stay ours.

They are told who we are and that a company pays our fee. They learn the company’s name before any introduction, nothing about them is shared without their yes, and a “no” ends the conversation. Call notes are kept for twenty-four months, then deleted unless we have been in touch since.

We do not rely on our own technical opinion. The criteria come from your engineering lead, written into the scorecard before the search; the evidence comes from the candidate’s own work, the code, the shipped products and the writing, scored the same way for every profile and quoted in the brief; and the structured call tests whether answers hold up when probed, which is about substance rather than fluency. The deep technical interview stays yours. Decades of selection research show that a structured process predicts performance better than an expert’s instinct, which is the finding this firm is built on.

Montreal, Canada, working with companies across the United States and Canada. Clients pay in US dollars by bank transfer; the terms are on the contact page.