How AyHire decides who to talk to first
AyHire gives you a decision instead of a score: who to talk to first, one line of why and one thing to check. Here is how that call is made, and what it never counts.
On this page
Many tools that rank candidates give each one a number. A number feels precise, but it leaves the real question to you: who do I talk to first, and what should I ask them? AyHire answers that question directly. This post explains how.
A decision, not a number
Every person in a role gets one of three calls:
- A pick: worth talking to.
- Set aside for now: the public evidence points away from a must-have, or their public work is below AyHire's general bar.
- Not looked at yet: found by the search, not scored yet.
The top of the role page says it in a sentence: “Talk to Mara first, then Dex, Ana and 2 more.” The card for each pick adds one line of why and, when there is one, one thing to check before you reach out. The short labels on the card are words too: “Storage engine internals · Strong”, never “8.4”.
What the call rests on
Every role has its own criteria: what the person needs, each marked Must have, Important or Nice to have. AyHire suggests them from the role's title and brief, and you change them to fit. Our guide on writing criteria covers how.
When AyHire scores someone, it reads their public work and judges each criterion: Strong, Some, Unknown or Not shown. Each verdict has a reason and links to the repos, commits or pull requests behind it. Picks are then ordered by how much evidence of fit their work shows. A Strong on a must-have counts the most, a Some counts for half, and an Unknown counts for nothing either way.
People who haven't been judged against the criteria yet come after the judged ones: open to work first, then by the general strength of their public work. The page says which order you are looking at.
“Talk to X first” has to be earned
AyHire only says “Talk to Mara first” when every must-have is clearly shown in Mara's work. If one is only partly shown or not visible at all, the top of the page says so instead:
No clear fit yet. Mara comes closest; storage engine internals isn't clearly shown.
We added this rule after a role we ran ourselves. A role for a GTM engineer put a person at the top whose work was building an agent framework, and AyHire's own reading called them “a framework builder, not a GTM practitioner”. The order was reasonable. The headline was too sure of itself. Now the headline can only be as confident as the evidence.
Unknown is unknown, not a no
Most engineers do their best work in private company repos. If AyHire marked people down for what it can't see, it would favour people with time for side projects over people who are good at their jobs.
So an unknown earns nothing and costs nothing. The only thing that sets a judged person aside is clear public evidence against a must-have, and that is rare. When it happens, the reason says what points the other way.
Unknowns don't disappear, though. They become the thing to check. A pick's card might say “Storage engine internals: unknown from public work. Ask about it.” The person's page lists questions that would settle what the evidence leaves open. That gives you the first questions for the call.
Having a job never sets anyone aside
Most strong engineers are employed, and most sourcing reaches people who aren't looking. So being employed never moves someone out of the picks. Availability changes the order a little, and the why line says what AyHire found: “Employed, but open to offers.” When the best pick who is open to work isn't the first pick, their card says so: “Your best pick who is open to work.”
Every availability answer shows its source and how sure it is, and a LinkedIn profile matched by name and company is marked as a guess.
The numbers are one click back
AyHire also scores each person's public work on four general counts, from 0 to 10 each: technical depth, shipping, communication, and hidden gem (strong work with little public attention). These describe someone's work in general. None of them is judged against your role.
That is why they never appear in the call. They sit on the person's page under See the proof, next to what each score measures. Use them to understand someone's work, not to rank people for a role: they weren't built for that.
What AyHire reads, and what it never reads
For each person, AyHire reads their public profile, their public repos, the READMEs of their five most-starred repos, recent commits and activity, a year of their work on other people's projects, and their public organisations and pull requests.
It never reads private repos or full source code. It never uses where someone lives, for a score or for a call, and it never guesses it. Criteria about age, gender, nationality or location can't be saved. Every claim in a call links back to what it came from, so you can check it yourself.
You still decide
AyHire's call is where you start, not where you finish. You choose who to shortlist and who to set aside with Not now, and AyHire never contacts anyone for you. A good call spares you reading every profile yourself, and tells you what the first conversation is for.