Match on the stack, not on the job title

The hardest part of technical matching is vocabulary. A brief asks for React; a resume says Next.js. A brief asks for AWS; a resume lists Lambda, S3, ECS and CloudFormation without ever writing the acronym. A brief asks for CI/CD; the resume says GitHub Actions. A keyword search misses all three, and the recruiter concludes the market is short of people who are sitting in their own database.

Surhires normalises the stack at parse time. Frameworks resolve to their language, managed services resolve to their platform, tools resolve to their category, and a brief written in one vocabulary matches a resume written in another. Where a match rests on an inference rather than a literal term, the score shows which requirement it satisfied and how, so a recruiter can judge it rather than trust it.

That last point is deliberate. A matching engine a recruiter cannot interrogate gets ignored after the third bad shortlist. Every point in a match score is attributable to a requirement.

A large part of technology recruitment is contract, and contract work prices differently. The number that matters is a day rate or an hourly rate, inside or outside a client's rate card, with a margin the desk needs to protect. A permanent band and a contractor rate are not interchangeable fields, and forcing one into the other is how a desk loses track of what a placement is worth.

Surhires holds both. A candidate record carries a permanent salary expectation and a contract rate expectation with its basis, and a client carries a rate card by discipline and seniority. When a recruiter prices a submittal, the ceiling from the rate card and the resulting margin are visible before the candidate is presented.

Where a market has a statutory contracting regime, the relevant status flag sits on the placement. UK desks carry an IR35 status field on every contract placement; US desks carry worker classification. The field records the determination that was made; it does not make the determination for you.

Technical screening produces evidence, and that evidence usually ends up in a separate tool, in an email attachment, or in a recruiter's memory. Six months later the same candidate is considered for a different role and the assessment is repeated because nobody can find it.

Surhires files assessment outcomes against the candidate record: which test, when, the score, the reviewing engineer's comment and a link to the full result in the platform that produced it. Integrations with assessment providers are listed with an explicit state, and where an integration is not yet live the result can still be attached manually rather than left in an inbox.

That record is also what makes rediscovery credible. A candidate who scored well on a systems design exercise last year is a stronger warm approach than a stranger, and the desk can find them.

The engineers worth placing are employed, are contacted several times a week, and have learned to ignore anything that opens with an exciting opportunity. The reply rate on a templated message is a rounding error, and volume does not fix it; it accelerates the reputational damage.

The Outreach Personaliser drafts a first message from the candidate's own history: the specific system they built, the talk they gave, the migration they wrote about, the stack overlap with the role. It is a draft, not an autosend, and the recruiter edits it. What the system contributes is the reading, which is the part that does not scale.

Sequences run across the channels an engineer actually uses, with a stop rule the moment someone replies and suppression that persists across campaigns so the same person is not approached by two recruiters in the same month. Consent state and opt-out are recorded per channel, because an approach that ignores a previous opt-out costs you the candidate permanently.

Most bad technical searches are bad briefs. The requisition arrives with nine must-have technologies, four of which the team does not use, because the manager listed everything on the current stack. The recruiter sources against it for two weeks and returns with nobody, and the conversation that should have happened on day one happens on day fourteen.

The Job Intake Agent turns a client brief or a forwarded email into a structured requisition with must-haves, nice-to-haves, a salary or rate band and interview stages, which forces the distinction between required and desirable to be made explicitly. Where the resulting requirement set matches almost nobody in your database, that is visible before the search starts rather than after.

Coded rejection reasons close the loop. When a client rejects eight candidates for lacking a technology that was listed as a nice-to-have, the pattern is a report rather than a suspicion.

Technology contractors move on six-month cycles and permanent engineers move every two to three years. The desk that wins is the one whose record of a person survives between those moments: which stack they were using at each engagement, what rate they last accepted, which clients they will not return to, and who else in their network they referred.

Surhires keeps that history on one record rather than in a series of application rows. A contractor coming off an assignment appears in the redeployment queue with their current stack and rate. A permanent placement inside its guarantee window stays visible until the window closes. A candidate who was rejected on seniority two years ago is a different candidate today, and the record shows why.