Recruiting Costs

• Pair program with candidate on an actual issue from your ticket queue (let the candidate drive)
• Code samples / OSS contributions
• PAID Sample project assignment (err on the side of paying fairly — say $100+/hour for estimated completion time — if the problem should require 2 h...

Due to talent shortage, tech salaries have grown quickly. Great for coders, but for startups, this cuts both ways. To attract new talent, we pay more money, but the growing trend in salary increases means that it’s easy for your competition to poach your best talent — just wait a year for the mar...

Startups are miserable at interviewing candidates. To assess skills, founders rely on their existing engineers, but most engineers are terrible at interviewing candidates.

Instead of assessing a candidate’s abilities, engineers often pick stock puzzles (puzzle performance h...

The best resumes are just a way to aggregate an overview and evidence of things the candidate actually produced.

Great candidates highlight accomplishments & products they built. Mediocre candidates list a bunch of ...

• Stress skill buzzwords over accomplishments and evidence
• No portfolio URL, blog links, or links to products they contributed to
• Don’t provide details of accomplishments and problems solved in previous jobs.

These don’t work:

• Puzzles and riddles
• Whiteboard code tests
• Big O notation quizzes
• Detailed quizzes about the mystery corners of the language

Pre-Interview:

• Look at their portfolio and accomplishments
• Look at their GitHub profile
• Look at their StackOverflow profile
• Glance at their resume (distant last place)