Trust Based Hiring
How I hired 6 developers without any technical interview
Background
6 Months ago my partner and I started working on a new company.
After the fund raising part that was quite short we started thinking about building a team.
It was clear that we would need developers in a market starving for developers, so my initial plan was to talk to people I know and try to hire them.
Sourcing
My linkedin contains ~700 people - and I know all of them, I just started and iterated, creating a list of talented developers who I’d like to work with.
Clarifying it for myself a little more I decided on 2 criteria for hiring a person
Mastery - is this person a strong independent developer, able to build a complex project from scratch?
Culture - are this person’s strengths and behaviors right for our company?
Both questions are easy to answer for people I worked with and know, so I started there.
The list I came up with was >100 entries of people I knew and fit the two criteria, I started with the ones that I had the closest relations with and went from there down the list.
Over the 3 months after the funding round I had above 10 coffee chats a week with my past colleagues and friends.
I told them about the company and product, I explained why I came to them and said that joining as one of the first developers is an incredible and rare opportunity hoping they would say yes.
One of them joined, some of them considered, most of them didn’t. Early stage startup isn’t for everyone and my friends already work in a good company.
After the discussion I followed up and upon receiving a “No” I asked them to connect me to their friends who would consider joining.
This was the source of 5/6 of our hires, friends of friends FTW!
Trust Based Hiring
Now for the core question of the post - how do I know if the friend of my friend meets the 2 criteria from above?
I can gather signal in both mastery and culture in a chat, but for mastery that’s not the same as doing a real in-depth technical interview.
What I decided to do is just trust people and my friends that referred them. I told the candidates that I’m not going to interview them, but rather give them an offer after they speak to us co-founders.
What do I gain from being so trusting?
The candidates I trust get a mostly frictionless and quick process
The candidates feel like they can trust me because I trust them. Even more than that, because I trusted them as a default - they feel that they should act in a trustworthy way
But what if they are not as strong as I trust they are?
I have thought about it, my eternal optimism says that if they are not as strong then they can become stronger.
We are still very early into discovering how will those hires work together - we will figure out in a few months, but initial signs are that all the people we hired are stronger than expected, so it looks promising.