We know you want the best technical talent out there, but most engineers in space already have a job they like. They don’t need to prove themselves and have no desire to spend hours working on a technical test. Finding and keeping the best engineers means rethinking how you use the limited time you get with them. We’ll show you how.
Does Your Interview Process Attract Passive Talent?
A flight software engineer who’s shipped mission-critical code, or a GNC engineer who’s run their algorithms through a live validation cycle, is usually a few years into a role they’re not desperate to leave. And if they are thinking of leaving, their LinkedIn inbox is already flooded with opportunities.
That’s what “passive candidate” means in practice: comfortably employed, not browsing job boards, and only interested if something compelling enough comes along. If your mission and your product appeal to an engineer, they’ll apply their own filters before saying yes to an interview. Once you’ve got a strong candidate interested, the last thing you want is to lose the candidate due to an overly complicated technical stage.
We’ve been seeing engineers leaning toward the promise of faster liftoff startups offer and away from the slower pace of primes. This alone should tell you what they would expect from your interview process.
The Cost of a Technical Test
A take-home technical test is meant to filter for skill. In practice, it filters for something else: the willingness to sacrifice limited free time.
An active candidate will usually make the time. A passive one has no reason to. If you’re interviewing high-demand talent your recruiter has managed to headhunt directly, your interview process is as much a selling point as your company.
A take-home makes sense if you’re testing a developer. For a structural or propulsion engineer, the equivalent ask is a design review or a walkthrough of a real analysis. Either way, the test is a warning sign: it means the company hasn’t thought about the candidate’s time at all.
A Screening Process Designed for Passive Talent
One of our recruiters watched a fast-growing engineering team solve this exact problem. Every strong engineer they interviewed had other opportunities coming their way, sometimes half a dozen or more. A four-hour take-home test wasn’t just unpopular. It was actively costing them candidates.
So what did they do?
They replaced a four-hour technical test with a 90-minute technical conversation. Here’s what they talked about:
- how the candidate approached a real flight software or GNC problem they’ve shipped
- tools they used
- what their process looked like on a real project
- how they’d handle a crisis
That’s it. That change in their interview process helped the company grow its engineering team from two people to 45 over roughly four years, with a 98% retention rate across that period.
An Interview Process to Attract and Retain the Best Engineers
Here’s what to change if you want the same results with the passive engineering talent you need.
A considered interview process is not a checkbox exercise. This example proves that interviews can impact your long-term candidate retention as much as they can help you vet the technical skills you need.
- Replace the take-home with a scoped, time-boxed conversation, no more than 90 minutes, with the team the engineer will be working with.
- Ask about work they’ve already done: What have they built? Why have they made this decision and not that one? What would they change now?
- Respect the clock. If a passive candidate has agreed to interview, don’t spend it testing their patience.
A 90-minute conversation about how someone solves problems in the real world raises the bar on the candidates you have access to. It tests the actual job, not a synthetic one. Most of what a strong engineer does day to day is explain tradeoffs, defend decisions, and think out loud with teammates, not solve an isolated puzzle alone. A conversation tests that directly. A take-home tests something adjacent to it at best.
None of that matters if the candidate never hears about the role in the first place. Reach is still the harder problem, and it’s where a recruiter earns their keep: spotting the right profile, building the relationship, and selling the opportunity well enough that someone happily employed says yes to a conversation.
The Takeaway
Every open role in space is competing for a small pool of people who mostly aren’t looking. Your best candidate is not waiting to prove themselves. By using your interview slots wisely, you can show an engineer you value their time and skills. By doing that, you’ll find and keep the engineers who will help you scale.
How many roles are you hiring for, and over what period? If there’s one hire you can’t afford to get wrong, hand it to us. You don’t have the time to chase a candidate pool this small on your own, and you shouldn’t have to. If you’re not sure which of our solutions fits where you’re at, take a look and find the right one for your stage.