I was not on the dev team. I built the tool anyway.
Adopted by hundreds of screeners as the standard tool, with 2,500+ calls completed
I spotted a problem in how screening calls were run, designed a fix, and shipped it to hundreds of screeners. It became the standard tool the team uses.
The problem
I joined Toptal by passing into its top 3% talent network, a five round process that is not easy to get through, and later came on board directly as a screener. I have now run more than 2,500 screening calls, and somewhere in the first stretch of those I saw how rough the process was underneath. There was no single tool for preparing a call, running it, and writing it up. Screeners juggled several websites, multiple monitors, and a pile of scattered notes they had to make sense of afterward. It worked, but it was chaos, and I thought it could be a great deal better.
What I built
I designed a solution, drew up wireframes, and presented it to my manager. That presentation got me the green light to build it alongside my regular calls. The first prototype was working in four weeks. I built it for one team to start, and other teams quickly asked to be added.
Getting it done was its own challenge, because I was not part of the engineering org and did not have the access that came with that seat. One manager cleared the organizational blockers and another helped on the technical side. When access to internal systems was slow to arrive, I found ways around the gaps so the tool could still pull together the information screeners had been gathering by hand. I designed a clean second version that fit everything onto a single laptop screen, partly out of necessity, since I wanted to run a call from a hotel room or a café instead of a fixed multi-monitor desk. When the company moved to standardize screening, the tool became the place those standards lived, which is what turned it into something every screener relies on.
The result
What started as a side build became the standard screening tool across hundreds of screeners. I kept improving it for a year after launch, adding features as the team's needs grew. I also worked on an internal tool that uses AI to read client requirements and surface the strongest matches from the network, where I built the backend and the matching logic on top of a retrieval system and an LLM. Day to day, I am still a senior screener. I help catch candidates who try to cheat, I have shaped screening policy and content, and I mentor the screeners coming up behind me.