Vet the client the way you vet the developer
A developer should not inherit a technology list that the team will never use. That sentence is the company.
Most staffing funnels treat the client as the buyer and the developer as the inventory. The job post is taken as true. The interview is a performance. The placement is a filled week. Six weeks later the “Kubernetes plus GraphQL plus three clouds” posting has produced a person who is writing stored procedures.
We turned the funnel around. Clients face the same scrutiny developers do. Before we examine a person, we ask which technologies will ship in the next increment. If the posting and the increment disagree, the posting loses.
The match score is for both of you
We still examine the developer. That part is ordinary, even if the examination is stricter than a résumé screen. The part most firms skip is showing the client a number and being willing to let the number be low. A low score is information. Talking past it is how duds get made.
No match is a finished outcome
If we cannot pair you, we stop. That is not a failed sale. It is the product working. The alternative is a relationship nobody should have been in, billed by the week until someone gets tired.
What this costs you
Time, up front, on a conversation about the real stack. What it saves is the quarter you would have spent managing a person hired against fiction.
The scorecard after start is how we keep that honesty once invoices begin. If the work drifts off the stack we scored, we write that down instead of pretending the original match still holds.