Hiring IP-safe engineers when you can’t use traditional recruiters
7 min read
AI labs and deep-tech startups face a hiring trap: they need world-class engineers but can’t hand their roadmap, or their unreleased models, to an external recruiter. Traditional agencies want job descriptions, salary bands, and org charts. You want clean-room vetting: candidates who can be evaluated without ever seeing your proprietary stack. That’s not a nice-to-have; it’s a requirement for many founders.
The clean-room idea is simple: assess candidates on stand-alone proxy problems instead of your codebase, so you get signal on skill without exposing what you’re building. Navigait’s IP-Guardian is being built around this idea; it is not available yet. You can apply the principle today by writing self-contained take-home tasks that share nothing confidential.
Pay-on-hire pricing aligns incentives with outcomes: no retainer for a role that never closes. Navigait has a planned Success Bounty (£5,000 per hire) for this, pending legal review before launch. Until then, the principle stands: protect your IP in assessment, and pay for results rather than activity.