Show HN: I was tired of wasting engineer time on screening calls so I built Niju
niju.dev
niju.dev
Furthermore, Niju does not automate the decision. AI is only used to create a transcript, a summary of the interview with, a list of important moments and a set of indicative scores on a number of criteria.
The decision is always with the human.
As someone with the privilege to be able to reject job opportunities, it's all but certain running into a tool like this would result in me immediately doing so.
Hiring is the most important part of your job.
In my personal experience, screening software engineers has always put pressure on internal engineering teams. Over the years, I’ve tried different approaches to streamline the process, but nothing has really fixed the problem of investing engineering time into screening.
At the start of the year I went through BetterStack’s recruitment process. Their first stage, an in-house built async screening test, was a revelation for me. I thought this was a fantastic alternative for an early stage in the recruitment pipeline. Back in February, while I was actively hiring at the startup I was working with, I prototyped a solution and trialed it - it was a success.
Fast forward a few months and I’ve now been able to turn the early prototype into a product. Meet Niju.
Niju replaces the traditional screening call with a 20-minute, asynchronous, recorded coding session.
A candidate gets a link, shares their screen, and "thinks aloud" while solving a practical coding challenge (no abstract algorithms).
After 20 minutes, Niju analyses the entire session: the code, the audio, and the thought process. It gives the hiring manager a concise report, transcripts, code playback and the raw footage with the important parts annotated. This means that, on average, a Niju interview takes 5 minutes to review.
* Cheating: Yes, a candidate can use Google. That's the point. I want to see how they solve a problem, not what they've memorised. The screen recording shows their whole process.
* AI: The AI does not produce a "pass/fail" decision. It just summarises the data to help a human make a better, faster, and more consistent decision.
* Stack: As a solo builder, I'm keeping it simple: SvelteKit, DrizzleORM, BullMQ, Postgres, Redis, Azure OpenAI.
The goal is to help busy engineering teams reclaim their time.
You can try the first interview for free.
I’ll be here for a while to answer questions and I'd be honored to get your feedback.
Radu
I would never approve the use of async interviews further down the pipeline, but for screening purposes (from a candidate POV) I personally don't have any problems.
Keen to hear your point of view!
This is pretty gross, honestly. I recommend some reflection.
This is a screening interview, and the AI component simply assists the hiring manager, it does not automate the outcome in any way.
Which as yanyu says is a signal the company isn't "willing to spend the effort, time, and money to provide a good recruiting process, [which is] a huge red flag for the kind of candidates you want and the kind of employee experience you provide".
Which circles around and creates even more incentive for good candidates not to participate.
There's no doubt a market on both sides for hiring mediocre candidates. Approximately everyone has a job after all, not just the best people, but a tool like this is clearly optimizing for that not for excellence.
[1] See the excellent description of why this is problematic as a candidate who values your own time here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45801853
And to be clear, I think hiring today is completely broken already. This kind of thing is just one more step in the direction of marginalizing people who are already struggling to find work. In an already broken hiring system, these approaches to "save engineering time" or "drive a more efficient hiring process" exacerbate the divide between those who have jobs and those who are desperate to get a fair shot, and that’s what feels truly dehumanizing.
This is a screening interview. It's at the top of the recruitment funnel. The alternative is seeing fewer candidates (because you can't have engineers do non-stop interviews) or just filtering heavily based on CVs. Neither option is good.
There needs to be some cost or pain for the interviewers to signal that they actually care.
So, to answer your question, if a company were to outsource their screening calls, it signals to me that they do not have the time to understand their candidates. They simply do not care, which means they don't care for their employees either.
The technical screening call typically happens after an initial screening chat with HR or the hiring manager. The tech screening interview comes in after that.
I need to be clear: I 100% agree with the core sentiment here. As a candidate, the hiring process is often broken, dehumanising, and feels like a one-way street. Many of you are right when saying a tool like this could be abused.
I'm not trying to automate the human part of hiring. I'm trying to fix the part that's already broken.
The real-world alternative at most companies isn't a friendly 1-hour chat with a senior engineer for every single applicant, that just doesn’t scale.
The alternative is:
1. A harsh, biased CV filter that rejects 95% of applicants in a couple of seconds.
2. A 4-hour take-home exercise that massively wastes your time and is genuinely pointless because anyone can vibe code it.
3. An algorithm test from a platform like HackerRank for which the majority of engineers have to prep many hours.
I built Niju to be less painful than those. It's a 20-minute, practical, "think-aloud" test. The AI's only job is to summarise the data so a human can review it faster, making it more likely they'll widen the funnel and give more people a shot beyond just their CV.
My goal isn't to replace engineers but to stop wasting their time on a broken process, so they can have better, human interviews with the top 20% of candidates.
It's a massive challenge, and this thread, as well as most of the others, show the raw nerve I've hit.
The broken part appears to be that somebody spends 20 minutes screening a candidate rather than 5 minutes reviewing an AI summary of the screen. Inefficient, maybe.
Why does this actually get rid of the alternatives? You've reduced the active time to screen a candidate by 75%. But a CV filter reduces it by 95%. Why would your system involve less prep than HackerRank? It is still a test with a critical outcome. The idea that if only we didn't ask algorithmic questions that nobody would spend time rehearsing for interviews is ridiculous.
Let me just apply one example. A few years ago I was screening candidates over a 30-minute live coding interview covering pretty day to day stuff. That required a 30 minute investment from the applicant in what is a high-stress situation for many. I can't tell you how many times they seemed very stressed simply because they had to code in a live interview setting knowing someone is actively watching what they are doing.
Now compare that to a 20-minute screening interview where most of that pressure is gone. You can do it whenever you want to.
That is my rationale behind it, thinking both as an applicant and as a hiring manager.
Why do you think this leads to more wasted time?
Also, your 20 vs 30 minute calculation ignores that companies are incentivized to conduct more screening tests if it becomes practically free for them. But the number of positions stays the same. So if instead of 10 screening calls they do 16 tests for one position, that's already more time being wasted, even if the tests are 1/3 shorter. And realistically, the number will shoot up much more.
For your last point, a review takes on average 5 minutes for a hiring manager. And I think screening more is not inherently a problem. Imagine they turned down the dial on their CV filters and had more applicants do a technical screen - wouldn't that give more applicants an opportunity to shine? In most cases it unfortunately is a numbers game.
They'll keep running screenings after they've got someone they're almost sure they are going to hire, because if the deal falls through its better to have candidates in the pipeline.
They'll run screenings before they bother to evaluate if they're even interested in a candidates skill set, because you've made it cheaper to filter out candidates for lack of technical skills than lack of job fit. (And no forcing them to meet the candidate once before running this tool will not change the fact that they will do this)
And so on and so forth. Which is ironically why using this tool would filter the best candidates from the hiring pipeline while simultaneously making life worse for everyone who isn't one of the best candidates and who does have to put up with many companies wasting their time to get a single job offer.
How many companies still ask for take-home exercises?
how its gone? Candidate is still being judged, but now by unknown potential AI judge without understanding how he will be judged..
Let's look at two cases to see why this is: Case 1: company does 10 30 minute in-person technical interviews for a role for equally qualified candidates, doesn't use automated testing. Every candidate knows that because they're talking to a human, so they know they're dealing with a human hiring process that deals with time constraints. They KNOW that they're one of a small group of people selected to move forward. They can reasonably calculate a value for their in-person technical interview as having a 10% chance of success. If they do 7 interviews like this they have a >50% chance of getting hired by someone, which would take them only 3.5 hours of interview time to achieve. Each such hiring process has only take up a combined 5 hours of candidate time.
Contrast this with case 2: company uses your system, and so technically screens 1000 equally qualified candidates in the same period with no human interaction. The candidate now has no idea where they stand in the applicant pool, but they effectively have a 0.1% of getting hired by this company. If they do 666 interviews, they still don't have a 50% chance of getting hired by any company doing interviews like this, and they will have spent two whole weeks of their life not eating or sleeping, just doing interviews. That company will have wasted three weeks of candidate time conducting this round of interviews.
Furthermore, the 10 minute time difference is irrelevant, the candidate already doesn't care when they do the interview, and the pressure in no way lessened. They still have to perform in a 30 minute window, and they will still be nervous. The only difference is the recorded screening is more impersonal, which allows the candidate less opportunity to make a human impression on the hirer.
Your system assumes the applicant's time has no value.