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Before the phone screen

Hear your candidates think

Candidates answer a real question for your role in a short video, before the first call.

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Hiring? Paste any job description. We’ll build a sample McCoy IQ challenge for that role and walk you through what it would look like. Just for you. No account required.

Paste one of your job postings below to take the tour with your own role. No signup required.

When you’re ready to try it on a real role, it’s free and no ATS integration is required.

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Looking for a job? Try the McCoy app instead

The platform

Save time
before the interview

Give candidates a real problem they’d face on the job, or your favorite open-ended interview question.

Tell McCoy about your role Start with a job description Describe the role and pick the challenge question, or start from your job posting and McCoy drafts the whole thing in one shot.
Make it yours Branding, plus a recorded or AI avatar intro McCoy drafts the page. Record a quick intro yourself or let an AI avatar deliver it, then add your branding.
Publish in minutes One link to share Your challenge page goes live, ready to share with candidates.
Candidates respond Video answers from their phone They tap the link and answer on video from their phone. Everything lands in one place to review, with a written-response accommodation available.
Challenge page preview
The problem

Some roles just
take up all your time

Why

Tons of requirements. Subjective fit. Stakeholders who can’t agree on what “good” looks like. You’ll cycle through hundreds before they find someone they actually want.

What it means

A time suck you can’t control. The only way through is to talk to every candidate yourself, and when you finally hand one off, you’re not even confident the hiring manager will say yes.

Your choice

Keep doing the screens yourself, or let McCoy IQ ask every candidate a real question they’d face on the job. You watch how they think on your time, and only call the ones worth calling.

Bots apply. $20 tools auto-apply on candidates’ behalf. AI writes the answers. None of it tells you who actually wants the job. Your recruiters burn hours before they meet someone worth calling.

McCoy IQ amplifies real candidates.

A short video after the resume gives every strong candidate a chance to be heard, so the people who actually want the role come through.

Every application is a door you have to open.

The real signal

The qualities that matter most

Thought process Judgment Taste Approach to problem solving How they use AI

A resume won’t show you any of this. One to five minutes of someone talking through a real problem will. And you can watch it before you spend an hour on a call.

Customer story CEG Solutions 7.5–10 hrs of phone screens saved on a single high‑volume role
“It’s an amplifier for the resume. You get to see how someone thinks, not just what’s on the page.”
Lisa CorteseTalent Acquisition Manager, CEG Solutions
Read the full story
Lisa’s challenge
The McCoy IQ challenge Lisa's candidates completed
Comparison

What would you rather have before the phone screen?

Four ways to run the step between the resume and the interview.

Resume alone

  • ✕Hundreds of AI-polished applications that read the same
  • ✕No way to tell who is real or genuinely interested
  • ✕Phone screens in batches, good people slip through

Resume + AI scoring

  • ✕Opaque and inconsistent scoring
  • ✕Error-prone and easily gamed
  • ✕Drawing regulation and litigation

Resume + AI interviews

  • ✕Long recordings you still have to review
  • ✕An experience that makes candidates walk out
  • ✕Open questions on where recordings go

Resume + McCoy IQ

  • ✓Short responses you review in minutes
  • ✓Candidates own their content
  • ✓An experience candidates actually finish
Try it on your role

Candidate experience

An experience that makes candidates actually want to finish

Low-pressure. AI helps the candidate prepare. Retakes are unlimited. They own the response and submit when satisfied. Recording takes about 5 minutes, plus another 15 of guided prep with McCoy AI, and respondents say it’s fast and easy.

And no, the app isn’t a hurdle. Tap the link, install, and the challenge opens straight away.

Use cases

Other ways teams use McCoy IQ

Screening candidates before the first call is the big one, and you just saw it. The same challenge earns its keep in a few other spots.

First screen

Easy apply makes it too easy. Add the challenge to your application so only motivated candidates finish.

Pipeline before the role

Let interested candidates respond to a standing challenge before you’re hiring. When a role opens, you have warm options already in hand.

Brand engagement

Be known for what you ask. A public challenge tells people what you care about and gives them more to do than tap follow.

Example challenges

Excel challenge page
Crowdline challenge page
Bumpr challenge page

As heard on

HR's Most Dangerous Podcast · May 2026

McCoy IQ featured on Chad & Cheese Podcast — episode thumbnail
▶ 29:09 · McCoy IQ feature

Candidates are saying:

Finally. I'm sick of tweaking my resume for every job I apply to. I'm sick of being ignored. You're telling me I can just record and explain how I do it, and you'll contact me if it's a fit?
Works with your ATS

Already have an ATS? Works alongside it.

No replacement, no integration. Just a URL you send from the screening email you already send. Want a native integration for yours? Tell us which one.

Try it with your roles first, without ATS integration.

Most recruiters want to see McCoy IQ work with real candidates before committing to an ATS integration. So it runs alongside your ATS from day one. Send candidates the challenge, review responses in McCoy IQ, and move the ones you like forward.

Ready for a native integration? Tell us which ATS.

Got questions?

Browse the FAQ or grab 15 minutes with us. Real humans, no hard sell.

Read the FAQ

Free tool

See who is actually hiring

Watch hiring trends and posted compensation across novel AI jobs, the Forbes AI 50 and Cloud 100, B2B SaaS, and major law firms. Live data from company career sites, updated daily, no account needed.

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Visit the blog
The category

The World Economic Forum calls this Trace Hiring

Seeing how a candidate thinks through a real problem, before the interview. McCoy IQ is the first platform built for Trace Hiring.

Read the Trace Hiring guide

Choose your way in

Three ways to get a feel for McCoy IQ. Pick whichever suits how you like to evaluate tools.

Try it on your role Paste one of your job postings below and watch a sample challenge take shape. No signup. Read the Trace Hiring guide What trace hiring is, why it works, and how to run it on your next role in minutes.

Try McCoy IQ with your applicants

30 days free on a real role. No credit card, no ATS integration.

FAQS

You've likely got a few questions

About McCoy IQ

A short video challenge you send to candidates so you can see how they think about a real problem from the role before deciding who to interview. Candidates respond in a few minutes from their phone. You review the responses in the McCoy IQ portal. It's a screening signal, not an interview, ATS, or personality test. To see what one looks like, try generating one from a job description.
Yes. Because it's framed around a real business problem, candidates see it as a chance to demonstrate their thinking, not a hoop to jump through. The format is guided and low-pressure. Recording takes about 5 minutes, plus another 15 of guided prep with McCoy AI, and respondents say it's fast and easy. Early testing shows strong completion rates, especially among high-intent candidates who want to stand out.
No. McCoy IQ works alongside resumes. It adds a layer of signal that resumes can't provide. It shows how someone thinks, communicates, and approaches problems. It helps you make better decisions with the information you already have.
No. McCoy IQ is a screening layer, not a formal interview. It sits between resume review and your first live conversation. Think of it as a way to see how someone approaches real work before deciding who's worth interviewing, without the scheduling overhead of a live call.
A lot of async video tools were built like a cold interview: get on camera, timer running, one shot at each answer. That’s a different product for a different purpose, and it burned a lot of recruiters.

McCoy IQ isn’t that. Candidates take real time to think, prepare a script, use a teleprompter, and re-record as many times as they want before they share. You’re not measuring whether they crack under pressure. You’re seeing how they choose to communicate a story from their own experience.

The video is recorded directly through the candidate’s phone camera using our mobile app. You might reasonably wonder about privacy. Here’s the difference: the candidate owns the content they create in McCoy IQ. They can edit it or delete it after the fact, on their own terms. No other product in this space works that way.
After your initial resume review, send your "maybe" pile a McCoy IQ challenge. Their video responses will show you how they think and communicate, enough to move confidently to a yes or no. It replaces the guesswork and extra phone screens that slow things down.
Share your challenge page link directly in LinkedIn outreach messages. It gives candidates something concrete to engage with instead of a cold pitch. It's a great way to start a conversation and gauge interest before scheduling calls.
Quiet hiring is when you source and engage candidates without a formal job posting. McCoy IQ supports this by letting you lead with a real business problem rather than a job description. You can share challenges in sourcing or social to start conversations even before there's a specific role or level attached.
Every candidate sees the same challenge and has the same opportunity to respond. The format is standardized, which creates a more level playing field than unstructured resume reviews or ad-hoc phone screens. Candidates can also retake their responses, so they're showing their best work. For more on how we built McCoy IQ around authenticity, see our approach.

Bias & AI

We address this in two ways.

On the candidate side: McCoy AI probes each candidate with a series of questions about their experience, and then gives them a chance to refine their answer to make it their own, in their own voice, from their own experience. How they choose to answer, what they focus on, and how they connect it to what they’ve done is itself a signal about who they are.

On your side: The response you get back is only as good as the challenge you set. The more you tell McCoy IQ about what you’re looking for in the role, the better we can help you craft a challenge that draws out real substance, like actual examples from the candidate’s experience. We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure what you see back is a valuable data point.
Every candidate sees the same challenge and has the same opportunity to respond. The format is standardized, which creates a more level playing field than unstructured resume reviews or ad-hoc phone screens. Candidates can also retake their responses, so they’re showing their best work. For more on how we built McCoy IQ around authenticity, see our approach.
No. McCoy IQ doesn’t score, rank, or grade responses. It gives you a video to watch and lets you decide who to call. The recruiter always makes the call.

We built it this way on purpose. Automated scoring of candidate videos raises real legal and bias questions (there’s active litigation right now against tools that do it), and we think the recruiter needs to stay in the driver’s seat. McCoy IQ is a data point, not a decision.
If you want to keep your first-pass review anonymous, we recommend using McCoy IQ as a second screen. Candidates go through your blind review first, then get the challenge only after they’ve cleared it. Your first-pass anonymity stays exactly as it is.

On the McCoy IQ side, you see the candidate as they chose to present themselves in their response. How you use McCoy IQ beyond that is up to you.
Even well-trained recruiters can make snap judgments during resume review, on things like names, schools, GPAs, gaps in employment, unfamiliar company names, or unusual career paths. Those signals don’t always predict how good a candidate would be at the actual work.

McCoy IQ gives you a different signal to weigh: how the candidate thinks and communicates about a real problem, in their own voice. When you’re deciding who’s worth a call, you’re not working from the resume alone.

Use cases

Yes. About 40% of candidates respond to a McCoy IQ challenge, and recruiters use those responders as their phone-screen shortlist rather than working through the whole applicant pile. Because it’s framed around a real business problem, candidates see it as a chance to demonstrate their thinking, not a hoop to jump through. Recording takes about 5 minutes, plus another 15 of guided prep with McCoy AI, and respondents say it’s fast and easy.
Yes, in a few ways. First, you call fewer people: instead of running phone screens on everyone who cleared your resume review, you call the candidates who responded to the challenge. Second, the calls you do run are shorter and sharper, because you’ve already seen how the candidate thinks and communicates about a real problem. And when it’s time to bring in a hiring manager or other stakeholder, you can copy the response link and send. They can watch it on their own time.
After your initial resume review, send your "maybe" pile a McCoy IQ challenge. Their video responses will show you how they think and communicate, enough to move confidently to a yes or no. It replaces the guesswork and extra phone screens that slow things down.
Share your challenge page link directly in LinkedIn outreach messages. It gives candidates something concrete to engage with instead of a cold pitch. It’s a great way to start a conversation and gauge interest before scheduling calls.
Quiet hiring is when you source and engage candidates without a formal job posting. McCoy IQ supports this by letting you lead with a real business problem rather than a job description. You can share challenges in sourcing or social to start conversations even before there’s a specific role or level attached.

Using McCoy IQ

Minutes. Start with a job description, answer a few guided questions, and McCoy IQ helps draft the challenge, key highlights, and video script. Your branded challenge page is ready to share almost immediately.
No. You and your team work entirely in the McCoy IQ web portal. Create challenges, review responses, and manage your roster, all in the browser. The mobile app is for candidates: they tap your challenge link, install once, and respond from their phone camera.
No. McCoy IQ runs alongside your applicant tracking system (ATS). You create the challenge in McCoy IQ, paste the link into your ATS’s standard candidate email, and review responses in the McCoy portal. Nothing connects to your ATS, so the workflow is the same whether you’re on Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, or a spreadsheet.
Whoever owns the candidate pipeline. Most teams have a recruiter or hiring manager set up the challenge once, then share the link from wherever they normally communicate with candidates. Reviewing responses is also flexible. You can invite teammates to rate and comment in the portal.
Yes. The challenge page is fully branded with your colors, logo, and fonts (pulled automatically from your website), so it looks like part of your hiring flow, not a third-party tool. Candidates land on what looks like your page, not McCoy’s.

Getting set up

Minutes. Start with a job description, answer a few guided questions, and McCoy IQ helps draft the challenge, key highlights, and video script. Your branded challenge page is ready to share almost immediately.
No. You and your team work entirely in the McCoy IQ web portal. Create challenges, review responses, and manage your roster, all in the browser. The mobile app is for candidates: they tap your challenge link, install once, and respond from their phone camera.
No. McCoy IQ runs alongside your applicant tracking system (ATS). You create the challenge in McCoy IQ, paste the link into your ATS’s standard candidate email, and review responses in the McCoy portal. Nothing connects to your ATS, so the workflow is the same whether you’re on Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, or a spreadsheet.
Whoever owns the candidate pipeline. Most teams have a recruiter or hiring manager set up the challenge once, then share the link from wherever they normally communicate with candidates. Reviewing responses is also flexible. You can invite teammates to rate and comment in the portal.
Yes. The challenge page is fully branded with your colors, logo, and fonts (pulled automatically from your website), so it looks like part of your hiring flow, not a third-party tool. Candidates land on what looks like your page, not McCoy’s.
Your boss or team will probably ask the same questions any team asks: how easy is McCoy IQ to get started with, does it need an ATS integration, what happens to candidate data, how does it affect the existing hiring flow. We’ve answered most of those questions elsewhere in this FAQ.

If it helps to send something over, we can put together a one-pager tailored to your team so you don’t have to translate it yourself. And we’re happy to meet with your boss, your team, or whoever else needs to weigh in and answer questions directly. Email us at contact@mccoy.io.

For candidates

McCoy IQ offers a written-response accommodation. Candidates who can't or prefer not to record video can submit written answers instead. The goal is to see how someone thinks. The format is flexible.
No. AI avatars are only available to hiring teams, and only for the challenge intro video. All candidate responses are recorded live from their device camera in the McCoy mobile app. There's no way to upload pre-recorded or AI-generated video. That's what makes the signal real.
Yes. Alongside their video response, candidates can supplement with work samples, images, audio, PDFs, and links, anything that helps show their thinking. The main video is the core signal; the supporting materials add depth where useful.
Yes. Candidates can review, redo, and choose when to submit their response. They own their content and can retake recordings until they're satisfied. This ensures you're seeing their best effort, not a nervous first take.

Privacy & data

See our Privacy Policy for full details on what we collect, how it's used, retention, and candidate rights.