How we work
Three concept walkthroughs, marked as such, not dressed up as client work. Each one shows the actual reasoning we apply on a live search: the problem, what got screened out, and why. What we don’t show is the exact mechanics. The tools and the playbook stay ours.
The situation
A Series A company building developer tooling for AI inference needed a Solutions Engineer who could run a genuinely technical demo in front of skeptical ML engineers, not walk a prospect through a slide deck.
The problem
Most inbound-looking candidates read well on paper: strong titles, recognizable employers. Very few had actually run hands-on technical demos against a buyer who could ask a hard follow-up question.
The approach
The hard requirement wasn’t a title or a company name, it was recent, hands-on work against a comparable technical stack. Qualification conversations probed for one thing: could this person answer an unscripted technical question, not just deliver a rehearsed one.
Who got screened out
A candidate with an impressive SE title at a well-known company was screened out. Their actual day-to-day was demoing a pre-built dashboard, not the product’s technical internals. It surfaced directly when asked what they’d do if the demo broke live.
A Series B company had already run a search through a contingency recruiter before coming to Cayus. The candidates were technically fine. Something else was off: every one of them was comparing three offers on comp alone, and the client’s own experience was that hires like that tend to disengage in the first ninety days the moment a bigger number shows up elsewhere.
What the resume said
What qualification found
A fast-scaling AI startup was expanding sales coverage across US time zones and needed Solutions Engineer coverage beyond a single hub city. Widening a search geographically is the easiest way to quietly lower the bar: more candidates in the pipeline, weaker average fit, and nobody notices until the interviews start.
Same criteria, six markets
Geography changed the sourcing radius. It didn’t change what counted as qualified: candidates in Chicago and Seattle were geographically convenient but didn’t clear the hard requirements, and were passed over rather than stretching the bar to fill the map.