Almost every company that sends you engineers uses the word vetted. Almost none of them will tell you what the word covers. In practice it usually means somebody read the CV, had a friendly call, and formed an opinion. That is screening. It is not nothing, but it is not verification either, and the gap between the two is where most bad remote hires are made.
Screening produces an opinion. Verification produces a record
A screen ends with a person saying they think the candidate is strong. You cannot inspect that. You cannot compare it against the last four candidates the same vendor sent you. You cannot tell whether the assessment was thirty minutes or three hours, whether anyone tested the claims on the CV, or whether the conclusion came from evidence or from wanting the placement to happen. Verification ends with something you can read: what was assessed, under what conditions, what the engineer actually did during the assessment, and where the evidence ran out.
The three claims that need checking, and almost never get checked
Every senior CV makes three claims that matter and are hard to confirm from paper. The first is that the person did the work they describe rather than sat near it. The second is that they can hold a technical conversation in English at the speed a US team actually moves. The third is that their judgment scales past the code to architecture, incidents, trade-offs and the decisions nobody writes down. A CV asserts all three. A coding test measures none of them. A pleasant call confirms only that the person is pleasant.
What a verification record should actually contain
It should say how long the assessment ran and in what format. It should name the role it assessed against, because senior backend and senior platform are not the same claim. It should show which parts of the engineer's own history were probed and what the answers were, not summarised into adjectives. It should separate what was demonstrated from what was asserted. It should include a judgment on technical English as it applies to working with your team, not a certificate level. And it should be honest about its limits: which areas still need your own technical interview, and where the assessment could not reach a conclusion.
Uncertainty is a feature, not a weakness
Any vendor who tells you every engineer they send is exceptional is telling you their assessment has no resolution. A real evaluation produces a range. Some people come through strongly supported for a specific kind of work and unproven for another. Some come through with a clear caveat attached. Saying so out loud is what makes the strong recommendations mean anything. A conclusion that cannot come back negative is not a conclusion, it is a sales line.
Why this matters more when nobody is in the room
When you hire locally you get a hundred small signals for free: how someone handles a whiteboard, how they treat the person who brought coffee, how they think out loud when they are wrong. Hire across a border and every one of those disappears. The informal layer is gone, so the formal layer has to carry more weight than it does domestically. That is exactly the moment most companies accept less evidence rather than more, because the vendor sounds confident and the req has been open for five months.
Every engineer we introduce comes with a written assessment record, including what we could not conclude. See how the assessment works.