DevCard Concepts

Key terms you'll see throughout DevCard.

Fit Score
How well a candidate's skills, experience, and cognitive strengths align with a job's requirements. Uses structured ontology mapping, not keyword matching.
Confidence Score
How much verified evidence supports a fit score. More project details, linked accounts, and peer verification increase confidence.
Transferability
The ability for skills in one technology to apply to related technologies. For example, React experience transfers to Vue because they share component architecture patterns.
Cognitive Archetype
A developer's dominant problem-solving style, derived from patterns in their work history. Not a personality test — it reflects how they approach technical challenges.
Ontology
DevCard's structured knowledge graph of technologies, skills, and their relationships. It enables matching beyond keywords by understanding how skills connect and transfer.

More applicants than ever.
Less signal than ever.

65% of hiring managers say AI resumes are making hiring harder. Applications are up 239%. And 91% of recruiters have caught candidates faking credentials. The tools were supposed to help. They made it worse.

DevCard is structured evidence of what candidates actually did — transparent, traceable, and built to recover the signal you've lost. So you don't miss the right person. And you don't waste time on the wrong one.

See it in action.

One job. Three candidates. Can you pick the best fit?

Senior Backend Engineer
NovaPay · Series B FinTech · 40-person eng team
Python Go PostgreSQL K8s AWS Payments SOC 2

What they need:

  • - Design, build, and own backend services for payment processing infrastructure
  • - Work with distributed systems handling real-time financial transactions
  • - Maintain SOC 2 compliance and security standards across services
  • - On-call rotation for production payment systems (shared with 6-person team)

Team context:

  • - Series B ($45M raised), 40 engineers, growing fast
  • - Looking for someone who can grow into a tech lead within 18 months
  • - Cares more about ownership mentality than perfect stack match
MC
Marcus Chen
Backend Engineer · 6 yrs
Python Go PostgreSQL K8s AWS Microservices

Full-stack backend at large tech company. Microservices, cloud infra, strong keyword match.

  • - TechScale Inc. (10,000+ employees) · 2020–present — backend engineer on internal developer platform team
  • - Built microservice orchestration layer used by 200+ internal teams. Maintains CI/CD pipelines and K8s configs.
  • - Nexus Consulting · 2018–2020 — API integrations across various client projects
  • - CS degree from UC Davis (2018). Active on tech Twitter, speaks at local Python meetups.
DR
Direct Readiness:

TC
Transferable Capability:

DS
Delivery Strength:

MA
Motivation Alignment:

/100
Rank

Interview focus:

PR
Priya Ramirez
Software Engineer · 8 yrs
C# .NET SQL Server Azure Event-Driven

Enterprise backend at insurance company. Different stack, no obvious keyword match.

  • - Meridian Insurance · 2018–present — started as junior dev, now senior engineer leading a 4-person backend team
  • - Built their real-time premium calculation engine from scratch (2021). Processes $200M/month in policy transactions.
  • - Led database migration from on-prem SQL Server to Azure under SOC 2 audit (2024) — zero downtime, 3-month project
  • - MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech (2017, distributed systems focus). No public tech presence.
DR
Direct Readiness:

TC
Transferable Capability:

DS
Delivery Strength:

MA
Motivation Alignment:

/100
Rank

Interview focus:

JO
Jordan Okafor
Backend Developer · 4 yrs
Python Go PostgreSQL Docker SaaS

Mid-level backend at SaaS startup. Solid Python, some Go. Consistent shipper.

  • - CloudPulse (Series A SaaS, ~60 employees) · 2022–present — backend engineer on the core product team
  • - Shipped 12+ features in the last year including webhook system and async job processing pipeline
  • - Learning Go on the side, contributed to one internal service rewrite (2025). Mostly Python day-to-day.
  • - Hack Reactor bootcamp (2021), self-taught before that. Strong work ethic, looking for senior-level challenge.
DR
Direct Readiness:

TC
Transferable Capability:

DS
Delivery Strength:

MA
Motivation Alignment:

/100
Rank

Interview focus:

Click candidates to rank them #1, #2, #3. Click again to remove.

Change the hiring stance. Watch the rankings shift.

Different priorities, different outcomes. Same candidates, same evidence.

DR
TC
DS
MA

Growth Oriented weights transferability and delivery strength equally — surfacing candidates who can ramp and own outcomes long-term.

Immediate Impact puts 45% weight on Direct Readiness. Stack match matters most — but delivery and motivation gaps still show.

Motivation Priority puts 40% weight on alignment — does this person actually want this work? Priya's explicit fintech direction dominates.

These are presets. In DevCard, hiring teams can customize every weight to match their specific priorities.

The resume is cooked. And more AI won't fix it.

A thousand applicants for one role and they all read like the same person. Recruiters are handling 93% more applications than in 2021. Only 21% are confident they're not rejecting good people.

The industry's answer has been more AI on top — faster screening, smarter filters, black-box scoring. The result? Secret scores, hidden reports, and candidates who have no idea why they were filtered out. 70% of hiring managers say AI helps them decide faster. Only 8% of job seekers call it fair.

More AI on a broken process doesn't fix the process. It makes the brokenness faster.

DevCard starts from the other end.

Instead of screening faster, we make the evidence worth reading. Developers build a structured career record — real projects, real responsibility, peer-verified. When you post a role, DevCard scores every candidate across four dimensions. Not a single mystery number. Four distinct answers — each backed by traceable evidence you can inspect.

Direct Readiness

Can this person do this job with minimal ramp? How much have they already practiced, in production, recently? The "day one impact" dimension.

Transferable Capability

What transfers even when the tools don't match? A payments engineer might score 38% on Direct Readiness but 71% on Transferable Capability. This is the person you would have missed.

Delivery Strength

Can they finish things? Ship under real constraints? Own the outcome when it gets ambiguous? This separates the person who starts projects from the person who lands them safely.

Motivation Alignment

Do they actually want this kind of work? Ability without motivation is a bad hire waiting to happen. Based entirely on what candidates tell us — nothing inferred, nothing scraped.

Each dimension carries its own confidence score — how much evidence backs the assessment. High ability with low confidence means "promising but verify." You always know where the uncertainty is.

This isn't another hoop for candidates to jump through.

Developers build their DevCard once and reuse it across every opportunity. Starting is as simple as a resume upload. Because DevCard is reusable, the motivation signals are genuine — they represent what the candidate actually wants, not what they think you want to hear for this specific role. That makes the data more trustworthy, not less.

DevCard tells you what to ask in the interview.

Every scorecard identifies the dimensions where confidence is lowest and evidence is thinnest. Instead of guessing what to probe, you know exactly which claims matter most for your role — and which ones need verification before you make a decision. It's a due diligence guide, not just a ranking.

The resume had a good run.

It worked when there were 50 applicants, not 500. When people wrote them by hand, not generated them by prompt. What replaces it has to be built on evidence, not narrative. On transparency, not black boxes. On trust that compounds — not profiles that perform.

Post your first role

Free during early access. No credit card required.

Questions

Most AI screening tools score candidates behind closed doors using opaque algorithms. DevCard is transparent to you — every score traces to specific evidence, and the scoring is deterministic, not a black box. You can always ask "why did this person score this?" and get a real answer. No hidden reports. No mystery rankings.

DevCard verification is specific and scoped. Colleagues confirm bounded factual claims — not "great team player," but "owned the failure handling for the payments migration." Each verification strengthens the confidence score for affected dimensions. Candidates control who gets asked and when — no one is contacted without explicit permission. In a market where 91% of recruiters have caught deception, scoped peer verification is the difference between trusting a claim and knowing it's real.

Could someone lie about unverified claims? Technically, yes — just like on a resume. But peer verification hedges strongly against this: unverified claims carry very little scoring weight, and the more peers confirm, the more trustworthy the profile becomes.

More importantly, DevCard understands your specific role requirements and shows you exactly which claims matter most for your hire. So even if something is unverified, you know precisely what to probe in the interview. It's a due diligence guide — you go in knowing the right questions to ask.

Yes. DevCard offers hiring stance presets — Growth Oriented, Immediate Impact, Motivation Priority — that shift the scoring weights to match your philosophy. You can also customize the weights directly. Same candidates, different rankings, because you told the system what you actually care about.

That's the point. Most tools optimize for filter-out. DevCard is built for filter-in. The transferability engine surfaces candidates whose underlying capability matches your requirements even when the keywords don't. An embedded systems engineer who scores well for your backend role. A game developer whose real-time experience maps to your infrastructure needs. 70% of employers use skills-based hiring, but most tools still match on keywords. DevCard delivers what skills-based hiring actually promises.

Developers build their own profiles — starting with a simple resume upload. Every profile is opt-in, built deliberately. That's fundamentally different from a scraped database. When a candidate shares their DevCard with you, they chose to. The data is trustworthy because people built it on purpose.

DevCard turns your real work into proof that speaks for itself. Explore privately, test how you'd score for any role, and share on your terms when you're ready.

See how DevCard works for developers →

Transparent scoring. No black box. Methodology is public.