Technical Hiring Standards

Technical hiring standards

Criteria verified as of August 2026. Re-verify on the web before committing to anything (§8).

1. Scope and triggers

Covers the design and execution of the technical selection process as a measuring instrument: role definition, rubric, choice of assessment formats and their evidence, interview structure, interviewer calibration, decision, candidate experience, use of AI by both parties, and onboarding as the last stage of the process.

Triggers: "role definition", "job description", "rubric", "scorecard", "assessment criteria", "work sample", "technical test", "take-home", "homework exercise", "pair programming in an interview", "system design interview", "behavioural interview", "STAR", "structured interview", "interviewer calibration", "debrief", "culture fit", "culture add", "reasonable adjustments", "candidate experience", "candidate feedback", "AI in the interview", "automated CV screening", "ATS", "AEDT", "bias audit", "AI Act employment", "pay transparency", "salary range in the ad", "candidate data", "onboarding", "time to fill", "retention".

Guiding principle: a hiring process is a measuring instrument, and as such it is judged by its validity and its reliability, not by how good it feels. Validity: does it measure what predicts performance in this role? Reliability: do two different interviewers, or the same one on two different days, reach the same conclusion? A process that cannot answer those two questions is not selecting: it is recording impressions and calling them data. A falsifiable test applicable to any proposed stage: name what signal it produces, with which rubric it is scored, and what decision would change if that stage did not exist. Whatever does not pass it is removed — every stage costs team time and candidates who drop out.

Scope warning — read before applying anything in this document. Hiring carries real legal obligations: non-discrimination, protection of candidates' personal data and specific rules on the use of AI in employment decisions. This document fixes engineering and process criteria; it is not legal or HR advice. Every decision with legal effect —wording of job ads, admissible questions, legal bases for processing, deployment of an automated screening tool, pay policy— is checked with legal counsel and with the organisation's HR function before being applied, and in the specific jurisdiction. The regulatory references in §5 are a map of where to ask, not a ruling.

Not applicable:

• tech-leadership-standards (already written): reciprocal and strict. There it is decided which profile is needed, why, which gap in the team it fills and which level of the ladder it corresponds to; here, how a candidate is measured against that definition. One-sentence boundary: leadership defines the role; this process is the measuring instrument. Also theirs are subsequent development, performance evaluation and departure from the team.
• privacy-engineering-standards: candidates' personal data is theirs — legal basis, minimisation, retention periods, data subject rights, erasure and DPIA. Here only the obligation that the process respects them and the prohibition on keeping what is not going to be used (§5).
• grc-compliance-standards: the applicable regulatory framework and the formal evidence — which rule obliges, how compliance is demonstrated to an auditor, register of regulatory risks.
• ai-governance-standards: the use of AI in decisions affecting people and its risk classification are theirs — system inventory, status as provider or deployer, fundamental rights impact assessment, meaningful human oversight. Here, the concrete practice of the selection process (§5): what can be automated, what requires a person, and what the candidate is told.
• accessibility-standards (already written): conformance and adjustments are theirs — WCAG, EN 301 549, accessible formats. Here, the obligation to offer them at every stage and not to penalise anyone for asking for them (§3.7).
• identity-access-management-standards: access provisioning and deprovisioning at onboarding and at departure — provisioning, least privilege, dated revocation. Here only that the onboarding plan includes them and that revocation is verifiable (§6).
• knowledge-management-standards: the documentation that makes a fast onboarding possible — where it lives, who maintains it, how staleness is detected. Here only that the first week of a new joiner is the best auditor that documentation will ever have (§6).
• code-review-standards: the criteria for reviewing a real diff. It is reused when evaluating a candidate's code, it is not reinvented here.
• project-management-standards: hiring as a project with deadlines and stakeholders.
• ai-agent-workflow-standards (already written): the team policy on coding agents in day-to-day work. Here, what it implies for test design that the candidate uses one (§5.1).

2. Default decisions

Verify on the web the status of the sources and of the rules cited before applying them (§8).

Evidence on selection methods: the two sources, and why both are needed

This is the point most frequently miscited in all of engineering. There is a heavily cited classic meta-analysis and a later review that corrected its figures downwards. Citing only the first is citing an estimate that its own successors consider inflated; citing only the second, without the critique that motivated it, is giving a number without its history.

(A) The classic. Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings", Psychological Bulletin 124(2):262-274 (1998), DOI 10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262. It synthesises the validity of 19 procedures for predicting job and training performance. Most-cited values: general mental ability ≈ .51, structured interview ≈ .51, unstructured interview ≈ .38; combination of structured interview + ability ≈ .63. The method, which is what almost nobody cites: these are correlations corrected for measurement error in the criterion (usually supervisor ratings) and for range restriction. That correction is exactly what was later called into question.

(B) The review that corrected them downwards. Paul R. Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher M. Berry and Filip Lievens, "Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range", Journal of Applied Psychology 107(11):2040-2068 (2022), DOI 10.1037/apl0000994 (online 30-Dec-2021). Verbatim from the abstract, extracted from the PDF, not from a commentary: "After outlining and critiquing five approaches that have commonly been used to create and apply range restriction artifact distributions, we conclude that each has significant issues that often result in substantial overcorrection and that therefore the validity of many selection procedures for predicting job performance has been substantially overestimated. Revisiting prior meta-analytic conclusions produces revised validity estimates. Key findings are that most of the same selection procedures that ranked high in prior summaries remain high in rank, but with mean validity estimates reduced by .10–.20 points. Structured interviews emerged as the top-ranked selection procedure. […] We conclude that our selection procedures remain useful, but selection predictor–criterion relationships are considerably lower than previously thought."

Revised operational validity estimates extracted from the article itself (with their method alongside, because without it the figure means nothing):

Aggregate change, verbatim from the article: "The mean across Schmidt and Hunter's top five was .49, while the mean across our top five is .37." The reordering matters: the structured interview becomes the strongest predictor —Schmidt-Hunter placed cognitive ability as the focal predictor— and "the strongest predictors in our re-analysis (structured interviews, job knowledge tests, empirically keyed biodata, and work samples) are all job-specific measures".

Declared discrepancies, exactly as the article itself declares them:

• Integrity tests: two high-quality meta-analyses give .44 and .18. Sackett and Schmitt (2012) tried to reconcile them and failed; the raw data of one of them are not available. The .31 in the table is a weighted mean of two results nobody knows how to reconcile, not a consensus. Practical consequence: do not base a process decision on integrity tests.
• The mean does not apply to your organisation. The article insists on this: it publishes a residual standard deviation precisely as "an essential reminder that a given employer cannot count on the mean value as applicable to their organization". A mean validity of .42 does not mean that your structured interview is worth .42; it means the method can get there if it is well built.
• Validity and diversity do not go together. The article pairs validity with mean differences between subgroups: within its "top five", work samples, knowledge tests and cognitive tests show substantial differences, whereas structured interviews, biodata and integrity show much smaller ones. Related work by the same authors concludes that excluding cognitive tests barely affects validity and substantially reduces adverse impact. This is process design criteria, not a footnote.
• Work samples: they remain in the "top five" and drop relative to Schmidt-Hunter, but the exact revised value was not extracted in this verification — a declared gap in §8. No figure is written for work samples until it is confirmed in the article.
• Intermediate update: Schmidt, Oh and Shaffer (2016) already lowered work samples relative to 1998 and added new predictors. There is also Sackett et al. (2023), Industrial and Organizational Psychology 16(3):283-300, with the applied implications.

How these figures are used, and this is the only thing that matters operationally:

1. As an order of preference between methods, not as a prediction of outcome. The conclusion robust across both sources: structuring the interview is the highest-impact change available — the same format, structured or not, goes from ~.42 to ~.19 (2022) or from ~.51 to ~.38 (1998). No other cheap intervention moves the needle as much.
2. Never as a number in a job ad, a slide or a discussion with management without its year, its correction and its interval. A correlation of .42 explains a modest fraction of the variance: an excellent process still gets it wrong often, and a process that promises otherwise is lying.
3. Citing only Schmidt-Hunter 1998 is forbidden. Its own figures have been corrected downwards by the later literature (§7).

Famous figures: what is NOT used as data

• ❌ "The cost of a bad hire is 1.5 times the salary" (and its variants: 30 % of first-year compensation "according to the US Department of Labor", 213 %, $240,000). There is no locatable primary study. What there is, is citation drift: SBA data on the cost of hiring (1.25-1.4× base) turned into the cost of a bad hire; SHRM ranges cited inconsistently with each other (½-2×, 50-200 %, bands by level); a 30 % attributed to the DOL with no report title, year or methodology; the 213 % that actually comes from a Center for American Progress (2012) meta-analysis on turnover, not on bad hires; a self-reported CareerBuilder survey (2011); and a $240,000 figure that is one recruiter's estimate. Add that almost all the sources spreading it sell hiring services. It is not written. If a number is needed to decide, it is built bottom-up with your own data: recruitment spend, salary paid, ramp-up time and the cost of repeating the process.
• ❌ Turnover percentages attributed to "a bad boss" and "people leave managers, not companies": discarded with their refutation in tech-leadership-standards §2.
• ❌ Any "the best engineers are 10x" figure used to justify a salary band or a hiring bar: the foundational figure is dismantled (tech-leadership-standards §2, Prechelt 1999).
• ❌ Conversion and "candidates per opening" statistics from ATS vendors without a published sample or method.

General rule: a figure with a primary source, year, sample and method, or it is not written.

3. Structure and conventions

3.1 Define the role before interviewing

No process is opened without this document. Three questions, answered in writing by whoever leads technically (tech-leadership-standards):

1. What problem does this person solve over the next 12 months? Concrete and verifiable. "Make the billing service safe to change: today it accounts for 3 out of every 7 incidents", not "strengthen the backend team".
2. What evidence would demonstrate that they can do it? The stages of the process come out of this. If a proposed stage does not produce evidence from this list, it is surplus.
3. Which level of the published ladder is it, and in which pay band? Decided before meeting candidates. Adjusting the level to the candidate who turned up is how internal grievances and pay inequities get built — the ones you then have to audit.

Rules:

• Separate requirements from wishes. A requirement is something without which the person cannot do the job from the first month. Everything else is desirable and does not filter. Inflated requirement lists shrink the candidate pool asymmetrically and without gaining signal.
• Asking for years of experience as a substitute for competence is forbidden (§7). "5 years of X" is not a skill; it is a datum that correlates poorly and that excludes non-linear trajectories. You ask for the capability and you measure it.
• Asking for experience in a technology for longer than that technology has existed is forbidden — the classic mistake, and a reliable indicator that nobody read the ad.
• The ad declares: pay band (§5.3), working arrangement, the process stages with their duration, and who decides. The absence of a band is a signal to the candidate, and it is the correct one.

3.2 The rubric: written before the first candidate

If there is no written rubric before seeing the first candidate, you are not measuring competence: you are measuring personal impression, and justification will be sought afterwards. This is not an opinion about style: it is the difference between a structured and an unstructured interview, which is the factor with the largest documented effect on validity (§2).

Minimum format per competency:

competency: Systems design under real constraints
why_it_matters: "The role defines interfaces between 3 teams; a bad contract costs quarters"
assessed_in: [design exercise, walkthrough of own code]
scale:
  1_does_not_meet: "Proposes a solution without asking about constraints or volume"
  2_partial:       "Asks about constraints; does not reason about failure or evolution"
  3_meets:         "States assumptions, reasons about failure and cost, proposes an alternative and rejects it with a reason"
  4_exceeds:       "Also identifies the trade-off the brief was hiding and proposes how to validate it cheaply"
evidence_required: "Verbatim quote or description of what the person did or said. Without a quote, the score does not count"

• Behavioural anchors, not adjectives. "Good communication" is not an anchor. "Explained a technical decision to someone without context and checked that it had been understood" is.
• Even scale (1-4) to force a decision; the midpoint of an odd scale absorbs half the scores and destroys the signal.
• The rubric is the same for every candidate for the role, and it is archived with the process.
• Changing the rubric mid-process invalidates the previous comparisons. If it has to be changed, it is declared, and the candidates already assessed are re-assessed or dropped from the comparison set — they are not mixed.
• Every interviewer knows which competencies are theirs and which are not. Two interviewers measuring the same thing is a wasted stage; a competency with no owner is a gap that will be filled with intuition.

3.3 Formats: what each one is for

Cross-cutting rules:

• The brief resembles the work. The further the test is from the real task, the more it measures something else — and that something else usually correlates with access, free time and cultural familiarity with the format.
• Consulting documentation is allowed, as in real work. Forbidding search measures memory, which is not the skill of the role.
• The same test for every candidate for the role. Changing the difficulty "depending on how the candidate looks" destroys comparability and is the silent route by which bias enters.
• Nobody interviews without having done the test they are going to set. Discovering that the "45 minute" test takes two hours must happen to the interviewer, not to the candidate.
• Algorithm puzzles are not forbidden for being hard, but because they mostly measure specific preparation: the same candidate scores very differently before and after two months practising a format they will never use again. That is exactly the opposite of a valid instrument for the role.

3.4 Take-home exercises: the time limit is an ethical question

A take-home exercise shifts the cost of the process onto the candidate, who is already working somewhere else. It is admissible with hard conditions:

1. A declared and real time limit (by default 2-3 hours), verified by someone on the team who has done it. If the team takes three hours, the candidate will take longer.
2. The limit is respected when assessing. Rewarding whoever went over the limit is forbidden: doing so turns the limit into a trap and selects by availability of free time, which discriminates by caring responsibilities, health, a second job and financial situation.
3. Bounded scope and a closed brief. "Do what you can" cannot be scored and guarantees that every candidate delivers something incomparable.
4. An alternative always available: a guided session of the same duration with the team, or a walkthrough of their own code (§3.3). Never a single route.
5. If the exercise exceeds a few hours, it is paid at market rate, with a contract or an invoice. There is no third option: either it is short, or it is paid. A long unpaid exercise is free work for a stranger.
6. FORBIDDEN to use candidates' work in production, even if they are not hired. If the brief solves a real product problem, it is no longer a test: it is a commission.
7. Feedback is returned on the exercise. Whoever has invested three hours has the right to know what went wrong, even if in three lines.

3.5 Structure, calibration and decision

Structured versus unstructured interview: the highest-impact change available (§2). And it is cheap — it requires no tool, no budget and no consultancy, just writing the questions beforehand.

• Structured means all four things at once: same questions, same order, same scale with anchors, and written notes with evidence. If one is missing, it is not structured.
• Bounded follow-up questions: probing is allowed, but from a prepared list. Free follow-up is the door through which the interview becomes unstructured without anyone noticing.

Interviewer calibration — without this the rubric is a document, not an instrument:

• Nobody interviews alone before having shadowed several interviews and having been shadowed scoring in parallel.
• Periodic calibration exercise: two or three interviewers score the same recording or the same exercise and compare. Systematic divergence by one interviewer = they are recalibrated or leave the panel. It is literally the inter-rater reliability of the instrument.
• A panel as diverse as possible, and always more than one person per decision.

Decision — the rule that changes the most outcomes and the most broken one:

Each interviewer writes their evidence and their score BEFORE the discussion meeting and without seeing anyone else's.

Without this, the discussion does not aggregate information: the first opinion stated drags the rest along and the result is an opinion in the shape of a consensus. Rules of the discussion:

• Disagreements are discussed, not everything is walked through. A disagreement forces the citation of the specific evidence supporting each score.
• A "no" with evidence against the rubric weighs more than three "yes" without it. And the other way round: a "no" without evidence does not block.
• A tie or reasonable doubt → no hire, and which stage failed to produce signal is reviewed. Hiring in doubt is how you get to the difficult and expensive separation six months later.
• The decision is recorded with the evidence cited: it is what allows it to be defended, reviewed and — if one day it is needed — to demonstrate that the criteria were the same for everyone.
• Reopening the decision under calendar pressure is forbidden ("we have been searching for three months"). The urgency of filling a role is not evidence about the candidate.

3.6 Bias, and the "culture fit" trap

• "Culture fit" is the best-documented and most socially accepted route for bias to enter, because it does not sound like discrimination: it sounds like criteria. In practice similarity is scored —background, class, hobbies, way of speaking, school— and labelled as culture. Effect: it homogenises the team and reduces exactly the cognitive diversity it claims to seek. It is forbidden as a criterion (§7).
• It is replaced by observable values and behaviours, with anchors and with evidence, just like any other competency. Usable examples: "describe a time you changed your mind because of a piece of data" (evidence: cite the datum and what they did next); "tell me about a technical disagreement and how it ended" (evidence: the procedure, not a favourable outcome). What is measured is behaviour, not affinity.
• If the team wants to measure "brings something we do not have", that is called culture add and it also needs a written anchor, or it is the same bias with a new name.
• Other bias entry points with a concrete countermeasure:
  • Halo effect from a company or university name on the CV → screening without those fields when the process allows it, and a rubric that does not score them.
  • Anchoring from the first impression → scoring written before the discussion (§3.5).
  • Similarity bias → a diverse panel and behavioural anchors.
  • Unequal test → the same brief and the same time for everyone.
• Illegal or irrelevant questions: age, origin, family situation, pregnancy, health, disability, religion, orientation, trade union membership, and previous salary (§5.3). Forbidden, including "as informal conversation" and including in the coffee beforehand (§7). If an interviewer does not know what they may ask, they do not interview until they do: training is the responsibility of whoever assembles the panel, in coordination with HR.

3.7 Accessibility and inclusion of the process

The conformance criteria belong to accessibility-standards. Here, the obligations of the process:

• Offer reasonable adjustments proactively and at every stage, in the invitation message, not only if the candidate asks. Operational wording: "If you need any adjustment to format, timing or tooling, tell us and we will arrange it; it does not affect the assessment."
• FORBIDDEN for asking for an adjustment to influence the assessment, and forbidden to record it in the assessment record: it is health data (§5.4, privacy-engineering-standards).
• Alternative formats by default, not as an exception: take-home ↔ guided session; own code ↔ exercise; video interview ↔ voice or written.
• The assessment platform is also assessed. An online code editor that does not work with a screen reader, or a timed test with no possibility of extra time, excludes candidates before measuring anything. It is checked before adopting it.
• Neurodivergence: the signals many interviewers score without declaring them —eye contact, social fluency, quick response under pressure— are not in the rubric and are not the job. Scoring them is measuring something else. Sending the questions or the brief in advance improves the signal for everybody and is not an unfair advantage: it is reducing noise.

3.8 Candidate experience

A candidate is a professional in the sector who will talk about the process with their colleagues. The cost of an interminable process is reputational and is paid in the next hires, not in this one.

• Stages and duration published in the ad, and respected. If they change, notice is given.
• Committed timelines: a reply after each stage within a declared window (by default ≤ 5 working days). Exceeding it without notice is breaking a commitment, not an administrative slip.
• Nobody is left without a reply. Silence after a three-hour test is the process failure most cited by candidates and the cheapest to fix.
• Specific feedback to whoever completed a test, even if brief. The "we have decided to proceed with other profiles" to someone who invested hours is forbidden.
• Bounded number of stages. Each additional stage must produce distinct signal (§1); if not, it only produces drop-out, and drop-out is not random: those with alternatives leave first.
• The person who decides appears in the process. A candidate who never speaks with their future manager cannot assess the offer, and the assessment is mutual.

4. Instrument quality: verifiable controls

(This section replaces the canonical §4 on testing: here what is subjected to control is the selection process itself.)

Auditable controls over the process, with a fixed cadence. Their failure stops the process or opens work with an owner; it does not generate a report.

Instrument reliability test, literally executable: give the same material (recording, submitted exercise) to two independent interviewers. If their scores do not agree within one point of the scale, the problem is not the candidate: it is the rubric or the calibration.

5. AI in hiring, legal regime and candidate data

A mandatory section with a short expiry date. The legal framework moves; §8 requires re-verifying it before applying it.

5.1 Candidates who use AI assistants in the technical test

Realistic starting point: forbidding it is neither enforceable nor desirable. It cannot be verified reliably without intrusive surveillance —which has its own legal and data problem— and it also forbids the tool the person will use on their first day of work.

Consequences for the design of the test, which is what you actually control:

• If the test is solved by a general-purpose model in two minutes, the test was measuring what no longer needs measuring. It is not a cheating problem: it is a validity problem of the instrument, and it is fixed by changing the test.
• The signal shifts towards what the assistant does not provide: judgement (why this option and not the other), critique of the output (given this code, what is wrong and what is missing), constraints of the real domain (the brief that requires asking), debugging a non-obvious failure, and the ability to explain and defend what was delivered.
• Robust format by default: submission + a conversation about the submission. Whoever cannot explain a decision in their own code did not make it. It is the cheapest test and it requires no surveillance of anything.
• A policy declared to the candidate, in writing and in advance: if assistants are allowed (recommended), it is said; if at some specific stage they are not —and there must be a reason—, it is said beforehand. FORBIDDEN to assess in secret whether the candidate used AI, and forbidden to reject on suspicion without evidence (§7).
• ❌ FORBIDDEN intrusive remote surveillance of the candidate (desktop monitoring, continuous screen capture, eye tracking, biometric analysis). Beyond its legal regime, it measures anxiety and equipment, not competence.

5.2 Use of AI to screen candidates, and its legal regime

A process rule, which is independent of jurisdiction: a model may rank or label; it does not reject. Every rejection is confirmed by a named person, against the rubric and with a record. Without local validation and without effective human oversight, a screening tool is historical bias automated and scaled.

European Union — AI Regulation (AI Act). Employment is a high-risk case: Annex III, point 4 covers AI systems intended for recruitment or selection (among others, targeted job advertising, analysing and filtering applications and evaluating candidates), as well as decisions on promotion, termination, task allocation and performance monitoring.

Application dates — verified and with the correction almost nobody has taken on board:

• Original timetable: high-risk obligations of Annex III from 2-Aug-2026; Annex I (AI embedded in regulated products) from 2-Aug-2027.
• That timetable has been postponed. After the Commission's proposal of 19-Nov-2025 (Digital Omnibus on AI), there was a political agreement between Council and Parliament on 7-May-2026 and confirmation by the Council on 29-Jun-2026: Annex III (including employment) moves to 2-Dec-2027 (a 16-month extension) and Annex I to 2-Aug-2028 (12 months).
• What has NOT moved: the prohibited practices of Article 5 and the duty of AI literacy of Article 4, applicable from 2-Feb-2025; the obligations for general-purpose models from 2-Aug-2025; and the transparency obligations of Article 50.
• A prohibition directly relevant to selection: Article 5 prohibits emotion recognition systems in the workplace and in educational institutions, except for medical or safety reasons. Practical consequence: the analysis of facial expression, tone of voice or "engagement" in a video interview is in forbidden territory or on its immediate boundary, and the exact delimitation with respect to an external candidate is a legal question that is consulted with legal counsel before contracting the tool, not afterwards.
• Status warning — this is not a settled datum: the postponement requires formal adoption and publication in the OJEU to take effect. ai-governance-standards references it as Regulation (EU) 2026/1744. Before planning against the Dec-2027 date, confirm the publication in the OJEU and the regulation number (§8): if it was not published before 2-Aug-2026, the original timetable applies exactly as written.
• Engineering stance, regardless of the date: 16 more months are headroom, not cancellation. The obligations —risk management, technical documentation, event logging, human oversight, conformity assessment and system registration— arrive all the same, with less time if they are parked.

United States — local rules already in force, relevant if you hire there:

• New York, Local Law 144 (in force 1-Jan-2023, enforcement from 5-Jul-2023): a bias audit of the AEDT carried out no more than one year before its use, publication of the summary of the audit on the website, and notice to the candidate at least 10 business days in advance stating that it will be used, how and what data are collected. Penalties of $500 to $1,500 per day. An uncomfortable and verified datum: an audit by the State Comptroller of 2-Dec-2025 concluded that enforcement of the law by the DCWP was ineffective; and a published study (Null Compliance, arXiv) found that out of 391 employers examined only 18 published the audit report and 13 the transparency notice. The correct reading: a low probability of a penalty is not compliance, and scrutiny is going to increase.
• Illinois, HB 3773 (an amendment to the Human Rights Act), signed 9-Aug-2024, in force 1-Jan-2026: notice to the candidate when AI is used in employment decisions, a prohibition on using the ZIP code as a proxy for a protected characteristic, and a prohibition on uses with a discriminatory outcome. The implementing regulation is unstable: the IDHR published a proposal on 15-May-2026 and temporarily withdrew it, cancelling the hearing of 10-Jun-2026. The legal obligations remain in force notwithstanding.
• Colorado: the original law (SB 24-205) had its application suspended by court order (27-Apr-2026) and has been replaced by SB 26-189, signed on 14-May-2026, effective 1-Jan-2027 and with trimmed requirements. Employment remains covered in both. It is the most volatile framework of the three: **do not plan against i

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