Solutions / Startups
Hire Fast Without Hiring Wrong
You're scaling from 20 to 100 engineers. Every hire matters. One bad senior engineer can set your roadmap back six months. LayersRank helps you move fast with confidence — structured first-rounds in 48 hours, not 2 weeks.
The startup hiring trap
You close your Series A. The board wants headcount growth. You post five engineering roles. Applications flood in. Now you're spending 12 hours a week on phone screens instead of building product.
You make offers based on gut feel. Some work out. Some don't. The ones that don't are catastrophic.
At a 50-person startup, one bad senior engineer isn't just a salary cost. It's a team drag. Engineers around them slow down. The manager spends 30% of their time on performance management. Morale drops. Good people start asking if the company can execute. Some leave.
The trap:
You need to move fast, but moving fast means quick decisions with limited information, which means some decisions will be wrong, which means moving slow overall because you're cleaning up mistakes.
LayersRank breaks this trap. Speed and rigor are not opposites.
Why startup hiring is different
It's not “hiring with less resources.” It's a fundamentally different problem.
Every hire is high-impact
At a 30-person company, one mediocre engineer is 3% of your workforce. They're in every Slack channel, every planning meeting. Their judgment shapes technical decisions that compound for years. The margin for error is near zero.
Founders are the bottleneck
You're the technical filter, the culture screen, and the closer. Every hour on a candidate who won't work out is an hour not spent on product, customers, or fundraising. But you can't delegate to someone without technical judgment.
You're competing against Big Tech
The same candidates are getting recruiter spam from Google, Meta, Amazon. Your advantage is speed and mission. But if your process takes three weeks while Google extends an offer in ten days, your advantage disappears.
You don't have hiring infrastructure
No ATS. No recruiting coordinator. No interview training. No calibration sessions. No standardized rubrics. You're making enterprise-level hiring decisions with seed-stage resources.
How LayersRank helps startups
Async interviews that don't require your time
Candidates complete structured interviews on their own schedule. You're not blocking calendar time for phone screens that may or may not happen. You wake up to completed interviews. You review scored reports during focused work time. You make decisions based on documented evidence, not hazy recollections of a 30-minute call.
24-hour turnaround
Candidate completes interview today. You have a scored report tomorrow morning. Monday: send interview links. Tuesday: candidates complete. Wednesday morning: review reports, shortlist. Wednesday afternoon: schedule final rounds with your top 3. Friday: extend offer. One week from application to offer.
Founder-friendly reports
Reports lead with a clear verdict: Strong Candidate, Worth Interviewing, Borderline, Below Bar. You know the recommendation in one second. Detail is there when you need it — dimension scores, key strengths, suggested probes for your final round. But you don't have to wade through it for routine decisions.
Priced for startups
No enterprise contracts. No annual commitments. No per-seat licensing. Pay per completed interview. Start with 10. Scale to 100. Your cost scales with your hiring, not with arbitrary vendor pricing tiers.
The Speed Advantage
Time kills deals
The best candidates have multiple processes running. The startup that moves fastest usually wins.
Traditional Timeline
Day 1: Review resume, decide to screen
Day 2-4: Exchange emails to schedule
Day 5: Phone screen (if they show up)
Day 6-8: Decide, schedule technical
Day 9-12: Technical interview happens
Day 13-15: Schedule founder conversation
Day 16-18: Founder conversation
Day 19-21: References, deliberation
Day 22-25: Extend offer
3-4 weeks
Candidate has two other offers by now
LayersRank Timeline
Day 1: Review resume, send interview link
Day 1-2: Candidate completes async (their schedule)
Day 3: Review report, decide to advance
Day 3-4: Final round (conversation + deep-dive)
Day 5: Reference check
Day 5-6: Extend offer
Less than 1 week
You're their first offer
That speed difference isn't just efficiency — it's competitive advantage. You get first choice. You close before competing offers. You build a reputation as a company that moves decisively.
What founders worry about
"Will candidates actually complete async interviews?"
Completion rates average 78% — higher than phone screen show rates at most startups. Candidates appreciate the flexibility. And candidates who don't complete have self-selected out, saving you time.
"Can AI really evaluate technical skills?"
Our models evaluate reasoning depth, trade-off consideration, structured thinking, and communication clarity — not just syntax or keyword matching. We're not replacing your technical judgment. We're giving you a rigorous first filter so your time is spent on candidates who've already demonstrated baseline competency.
"What about culture fit?"
"Culture fit" is often where bias hides. We evaluate communication clarity, collaboration signals, motivation authenticity, and role understanding — behavioral competencies that predict team success without the bias risk. Your final round is where you assess chemistry.
"We're too small to need software for this."
You're too small to waste founder time on candidates who won't work out. If you're making 5+ hires this year, the time savings alone justify the cost. One bad hire avoided pays for years of LayersRank usage.
"What if a great candidate just had a bad day?"
Async interviews reduce "bad day" effects. Candidates complete when they're ready, not when your calendar happened to have an opening. Our confidence scoring also helps — ambiguous responses show lower confidence, prompting you to probe rather than reject outright.
Building the habit early
One underrated benefit of implementing structured hiring early: you're building organizational muscle for scale.
At 30 people, your hiring process is whatever the founders do. At 100 people, you need an actual system. Companies that grow fast often scramble to build hiring infrastructure while simultaneously trying to double headcount.
LayersRank is that infrastructure from day one. Your question library grows with you. Early hires inform what questions predict success at your company specifically. Reports create institutional memory. When you reach 100 people and hire a recruiting leader, they inherit a functioning system instead of starting from scratch.
Startup pricing
Simple, predictable pricing that scales with your hiring.
Starter
₹2,500
/ interview
Pre-seed to Seed · 1-3 hires/month
- Up to 25 interviews/month
- Standard question library (50+ roles)
- 24-hour report turnaround
- Basic ATS integration
- Email support
- Up to 3 team members
Growth
₹2,000
/ interview
Series A · 3-10 hires/month
- Up to 100 interviews/month
- Full library + custom questions
- 12-hour report turnaround
- All ATS integrations
- Slack + email support
- Up to 10 team members
- Basic analytics dashboard
Scale
₹1,500
/ interview
Series B+ · 10+ hires/month
- Unlimited interviews
- Full library + unlimited custom
- Priority turnaround (same-day)
- All integrations + custom API
- Dedicated success manager
- Unlimited team members
- Advanced analytics
Free trial
Your first 5 interviews are free. No credit card required. See the reports. Experience the speed. Then decide.
Live in 30 minutes
No implementation project. No sales calls required. No IT involvement. Just start.
Sign up and choose your first role
Select from our library or describe the role you're hiring for.
Review or customize questions
Default question sets work for most roles. Customize for specific technical coverage.
Send your first interview link
Copy the link. Paste into your email to the candidate. Done.
Review your first report
Within 24 hours, you'll have a scored assessment. See what confident hiring feels like.
From startups like yours
“I was doing 15 phone screens a week and hating my life. Now I review 15 reports in an hour. The time savings alone changed my relationship with recruiting.”
— CTO, Series A Fintech
Went from 25 to 60 engineers in 12 months
“Our first three engineering hires were rough. Really rough. We tried LayersRank as an experiment. Our next eight hires have all been strong. Something's working.”
— Founder, Seed-stage Developer Tools
“The confidence scoring is what sold me. Knowing when to trust a signal versus when to probe deeper has completely changed how I run final rounds.”
— Engineering Lead, Series B B2B SaaS
Frequently asked questions
Can I use this for non-engineering roles?
Yes. We have question libraries for Product, Design, Sales, Marketing, and Operations. Same structured approach, different competencies.
What if a candidate needs accommodations?
Contact us before they begin. We can extend time limits, adjust formats, or make other accommodations.
Can candidates cheat?
We track paste events, tab switches, and typing patterns. Suspicious behavior flags the report for your review. Can determined candidates still cheat? Possibly. But we make it risky enough that most won't try.
Do I need to integrate with an ATS?
No. You can use LayersRank standalone — just send links and review reports. ATS integration is available when you're ready for it.
How is this different from HackerRank?
HackerRank tests if candidates can code. LayersRank evaluates if they can think, communicate, and solve real problems. We assess the whole engineer, not just syntax. See our comparison page for details.
Stop trading speed for quality
Start your free trial. 5 interviews included. See what confident, fast hiring feels like.