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For talent teams
Every candidate this week, the same fair first round. Only the standouts on your calendar.
Totem screens this week's inbound on systems thinking, communication, and motivation. You wake to the cohort, ranked, with the clips that mattered.
Silent betaFully free in beta
First-round screening, Senior Eng
First-round screening. Totem ran this conversation across 8 candidates and synthesized what came back into the takeaway below.
Key findingsAI-synthesized from 8 candidates
Two stood out on systems thinking, with the clearest answers on trade-offs and debugging under load. Three more were solid technically but vague on what they wanted next. Two were off on fundamentals, one a clear no.
- Strong systems thinking
- Solid technical baseline
- Vague on motivation
- Off on fundamentals
- Worth a second round
- 60%Positive
- 20%Friction
- 20%Focus
- Responses
- 0
- Fully completed
- 0/0
- Avg. completion
- 0%
- Avg. length
- 0m
From silent-beta calls
“Every candidate gets the same first round. My calendar holds the people who earned the second round. Both halves of that sentence used to be impossible.”
— a head of talent, two weeks in
What talent teams ask first
“But candidates will hate it.”
The candidates who hate AI screening hate the unfair, opaque kind. Same five questions for every applicant, same rubric, same 15-minute window, that's the part candidates wished a human recruiter did consistently. The bar to clear here is fairness, not warmth. Cohorts in the silent beta complete at a high rate and the qualitative feedback loops back to "I felt I got a fair shot."
What talent teams start with
The talent conversations that don't scale, until they do.
30/60/90 new-hire check-ins
30/60/90 new-hire check-ins
What new hires would tell their last manager, off the record.
Reference checks
Reference checks
Honest signal from people who've actually shipped with them.
Exit interviews
Exit interviews
Why they're really leaving, on the way out.
Why talent teams pick Totem
- 01
Every candidate gets the same rigor. Same questions, same rubric, same fair shot. The first round stops being a coin-flip on whether someone got a sharp recruiter on a good day.
- 02
Bias-checked questions. Same probes across the cohort, no drift between calls. The hiring panel sees identical signal across every candidate.
- 03
Your calendar holds second rounds. Not disqualifying first ones. The interviews you run are the ones worth running.
What changes
What changes for talent teams.
- 01
Structured interviews predict performance better
Structured interviews, where every candidate gets the same questions, probes, and rubric, outperform unstructured screens at predicting on-the-job success.
- 02
Drift is the quiet source of inconsistency
Same role, same week, different probes between recruiters: the quiet variance in early-round screening. Structured async eliminates the drift entirely.
- 03
Calendar holds second rounds, not disqualifying first ones
When the first round is consistent and async, the recruiter's hour becomes the candidate's second round, the conversation worth having.
Common questions
What talent teams ask before they try Totem.
- How do talent teams run consistent first-round interviews?
- By moving the first round from a recruiter's calendar to a structured async interview. Totem hosts the same conversation with every candidate — same questions, same probes, same rubric — so the first round stops being a coin-flip on whether a candidate got a sharp recruiter on a good day.
- What's the best tool for structured async screening?
- Async screening tools split into video-question platforms (HireVue, Spark Hire) and AI-moderated conversation platforms. Totem is in the second category — a real two-way structured conversation, transcribed, scored against the rubric, with the moments worth replaying surfaced. Candidates report it feels like a recruiter call, not a video form.
- How can talent teams reduce bias in first-round interviews?
- By making the questions and probes identical across the cohort. Drift between calls — different recruiters, different days, different probes — is one of the largest unmeasured sources of inconsistency in early-round screening. Structured async interviews eliminate the drift: same protocol, same rubric, every candidate.
- How does AI-moderated screening compare to traditional phone screens?
- Phone screens cost recruiter time linearly with candidate volume; AI-moderated screens don't. Quality-wise, structured async produces more consistent rubric coverage (every candidate gets every question on every probe), at the cost of some warmth and rapport — which moves to the second round, where it belongs.
- Does Totem help with bias-free hiring?
- Totem helps with consistency, which is one input to fairness — same questions, same rubric, no drift between calls. It doesn't replace the bias work that lives upstream (job description, sourcing, rubric design) or downstream (panel debrief, decision review). It does close the gap that opens when first rounds drift on a busy week.
- How is Totem different from HireVue or BarRaiser?
- HireVue runs one-way video question-answer assessments. BarRaiser is an interview-intelligence layer for live human interviewers — recording, scoring, feedback. Totem runs a two-way structured conversation AI-moderated end-to-end, with adaptive probes and a synthesized cohort view. Different category from both.
Your turn
Describe the role. Meet only the right people.
One prompt seeds the screen. Totem hosts every first-round on the candidate's schedule. You wake to the cohort, sorted, with the moments that mattered.
Drop your promptFree during the betaNo cardYour prompt, your data