Friday with Lorenzo, engineering manager who stopped doing intro calls
An engineering manager at a software SMB used to lose four hours a week to first-call screens that mostly went nowhere. Now he reads two-page Decision Packs in the morning and only takes the calls that should happen. Here's what changed in his calendar.
The problem Lorenzo had
Lorenzo runs a six-person engineering team at a 60-person software company in Milan. He has been a hiring manager for four years. His complaint, which he has voiced to his TA team approximately monthly, is the same: "I am paid to write code and lead engineers. Why am I doing 30-minute first-call screens with people who can't tell me what they actually built?"
His TA team agreed. The problem was that the first call existed because the CV didn't tell them anything they could trust. So they had to talk to the candidate to find out whether what was on the CV was real.
Eight months ago they started feeding shortlists from InTransparency into the workflow. Lorenzo's calendar changed.
09:00 Friday — the shortlist
This Friday Lorenzo opens his email. Federica from TA has sent him three Decision Packs for the open junior automation engineer role. (He doesn't run automation, but the company has a small embedded-controls team and the role reports to him.)
Each Decision Pack is two pages. Same format every time. He has read about 40 of them over the past few months. He has the routine.
Page 1: skill list, with confidence scores and links. He clicks through on Marco's PLC code link. The repo opens. He reads three files. He can tell in four minutes that Marco writes structured text in a way that's compatible with their codebase. He doesn't need to ask Marco about it on a call.
Page 2: grades (normalized so he doesn't have to know the Italian system), personality summary, employability prediction. He skims. Nothing surprises him. Marco's personality section says he's "more confident in writing than verbal" — Lorenzo notes that for the interview structure.
He spends 12 minutes on Marco. Eight on Anita. Five on the third candidate, who he rules out — the project portfolio doesn't show any controls work.
09:35 — Two emails
He sends two emails. One to Federica: "Yes to Marco and Anita, no to the third. Here's what I want to focus on for each of them." For Marco he asks for a half-day trial instead of a long interview, because Marco's profile suggests he'll show better doing than talking. For Anita he asks for a standard structured interview because her profile suggests she'll handle that well.
He copy-pastes a one-paragraph blurb about each candidate into a Slack DM with the team's tech lead. Tech lead reads, agrees, asks one clarifying question.
That's his morning hiring work. It cost him about 30 minutes total. He goes back to a code review.
What used to happen
Six months ago, the same Friday would have looked different. Federica would have forwarded him 8–10 CVs. He would have spent maybe 90 minutes reading them. He would have flagged 4 to interview. The TA team would have scheduled four 30-minute first calls, three of which he would have done himself, one of which a senior engineer would have done. So another 90 minutes of his time, plus 30 of someone else's. Total: at least 3 hours of engineering time, mostly on calls that confirmed what he already suspected from reading the CV.
Net difference: about 2.5 hours of his engineering time per week, returned to engineering work.
The deeper change
The hours saved are the easy part to talk about. The harder thing to articulate is what it does to interview quality. When Lorenzo finally gets on a call with Marco for the half-day trial, he isn't burning the first 20 minutes finding out whether Marco can do the basics. He already knows Marco can do the basics. The trial is for the things you actually need a trial for: how Marco thinks under uncertainty, how he writes a commit message after he has a working solution, how he asks for help when he's stuck.
That's a better interview. Not because it's longer, but because the prerequisite verification has already happened.
What Lorenzo will tell you
If you ask Lorenzo what InTransparency does for him, he won't talk about features. He'll say: "I get my Friday mornings back, and the people I do interview turn out to be people I should be interviewing." That's the hiring-manager pitch, in one sentence.