ProbeHaus.
Get a tailored assessment
Back to the blog

Blog / Interviewer toolkit

Before you write the test,
choose the decisions.

The assessment planning partner helps you turn a job title into specific things you need to learn about a candidate. Use this approach yourself, or work through it with ProbeHaus.

Included with your ProbeHaus assessment
01

Start with an ordinary week.

Pick three situations the new engineer will face. Describe the work in your team’s terms: extending a feature, debugging a customer integration or deciding whether a separate service is justified.

Give the planning partner your stack, team size, operating constraints and how your engineers use AI. Include the seniority, relevant experience and support you expect this person to need. A list of technologies alone leaves too much unanswered.

  • What would make their first three months successful?
  • What will this person be trusted to decide without checking with you?
  • What mistakes would be difficult for the team to recover from?
  • Which abilities must they bring, and which can they learn on the job?
02

Ask for a short list.

Choose two or three abilities for one exercise. You may want to see how they clarify a brief, direct an agent and verify the result. An assessment that tries to cover everything can become long without revealing much more.

Ask the planning partner to connect each ability to something observable. “Good judgment” needs a concrete decision you can discuss.

A prompt to try

Help me plan one assessment for a [seniority] [role] on a [team size] team using [stack]. Their day-to-day work includes [workflows]. Success after three months means [outcomes]. They need [relevant experience] on entry and will have [support available]. Ask me one question at a time about the work, the decisions they will own and what we will teach them. Then suggest three abilities to assess, with an observable decision and a follow-up question for each. Propose one exercise suited to that level, with a time limit to pilot and consistent criteria for all candidates in the hiring round. Explain what it would still leave uncertain.

03

Check the plan against your work.

If the suggested exercise assumes a large platform team and you have four engineers, change it. If the AI adds services or requirements that your team would avoid, make that a question to explore.

Once you have piloted the brief, use it for everyone applying for the same role in that hiring round. You save preparation time and can compare their work against the same criteria. Record any meaningful changes; submissions completed under different conditions may be harder to compare.

The output is a draft for you to review. ProbeHaus uses this planning conversation to shape the assessment you see before you pay.

Let us prepare your assessment.

The planning partner, interview practice and guides are included in your €5,000 hiring round.

Get a tailored assessment