I've been asking hiring managers to try something: Think about your last three great hires. The ones who exceeded expectations. Now pull up their LinkedIn profiles.
Would their profile alone have given you conviction they'd be the best fit?
Nine times out of ten, the answer is no.
Why? Because you needed at least one conversation to uncover their real experience and results. More likely, you needed two calls to understand the metrics around their success.
The problem: LinkedIn profiles don't answer the questions you actually need to fast-track evaluating fit. And there's a massive hidden cost in the time and resources required to bridge that gap.
Hiring managers are spending 80% of their time extracting context and 20% evaluating fit. Those numbers need to be flipped.
What LinkedIn shows vs. what hiring managers need to understand
For many talented professionals, maintaining a robust LinkedIn presence isn't a priority. What we typically see is:
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Company names (the pedigree signal)
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Generic product mentions ("Led payments team at company X")
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Keyword-stuffed bullets: "Led cross-functional teams to deliver customer-centric solutions" or "Scaled engineering organization through periods of high growth"
What hiring managers actually want to know:
Did they manage 3 people or 30? What growth metrics did they drive and what were the actual numbers? Did they own an entire product or contribute to a feature? Were they solving greenfield problems or executing a turnaround? How do they build teams, make decisions, and handle conflict? Were they there during the company's 10-to-100-person scale?
LinkedIn optimizes for keywords and logos. You need context and ownership.
At Qwestly, we're making impact visible upfront, so hiring managers get conviction fast, without resume piles or multiple phone screens.
There's a better way with Qwestly
What if you had that context in five seconds instead of two phone calls?
At Qwestly, we're building profiles around what actually matters: what candidates owned, what they built, when they did it, what challenges they faced, and how they work. You understand their impact immediately instead of after two+ conversations. You spend your time on "Do I want to work with this person?" instead of "What did they actually do?"
The time savings and quality are profound: You shift from spending 10 hours screening 10 candidates to extract basic context, to 10 hours actually evaluating the 3-5 candidates who've clearly done the job before. You discover talented people who've built exactly what you need, regardless of company logo.
Pedigree is a lossy signal. Context is what gives you conviction.
The cost of this gap
The time tax: You spend 30 minutes on a first screen just to decode the LinkedIn speak, then another 30 minutes to assess actual fit. Multiply that by 10 candidates, and you've burned 10 hours of screening time before the real evaluation even begins. You're spending 80% of your time extracting context and only 20% evaluating fit.
The miss: Great candidates without the "right" logos get filtered out before you ever talk to them. Meanwhile, candidates with impressive company names sail through -- even if they were just along for the ride.
The waste: Your pool gets limited by company pedigree because there isn't time to extract context on everyone. You end up competing with 10 other companies for the same "safe" candidates while missing hidden gems who've built exactly what you need at companies you've never heard of.
What Actually Gives You Conviction
The "aha" moments in hiring happen when you finally uncover statements like:
"I built the billing system from scratch that went from zero to processing $50M ARR."
"I scaled the backend team from 3 to 15 engineers while maintaining two-week sprint cycles."
"I joined at Series A with 12 people and helped scale to Series C with 120 people."
"My biggest challenge was rebuilding trust with the product team after a failed launch. Here's how I did it."
These are the moments where you get conviction, and Qwestly unearths these insights immediately, so your "screening call" is focused on evaluating fit.
The ask
How many great hires have you missed because their five-second LinkedIn scan didn't pass the logo test?
We built Qwestly to solve this -- a talent marketplace where impact is visible upfront. Where the engineer who scaled billing from $0 to $50M at a startup you've never heard of is just as discoverable as the one from Stripe.
If you're ready to spend less time extracting context and more time evaluating the people who've actually done the job, let's talk about what we're building.