Everyone’s CV says senior. Interview processes designed to verify it mostly measure stamina and puzzle recall instead. After 18 consecutive hires with zero offer declines and zero six-month regrets, this is the process we settled on.
Why resumes and take-homes both fail
Resumes measure narrative skill. Take-homes measure free evenings — and quietly filter out exactly the experienced people with families you claim to want. Whiteboard algorithms measure interview prep. None of these predict what we pay seniors for: judgement inside messy, half-understood systems.
The 90-minute pair
The core of our process is ninety minutes pairing on a small, realistic problem in a codebase they have never seen — a real bug, a real ambiguous requirement, an editor they choose. We pay $300 for the session regardless of outcome, which converts it from an exam into consulting.
What we watch is not whether they finish. It is what they ask before typing, what they read before changing, how they react when their first theory is wrong, and whether they leave the code better than they found it. Ninety minutes of that tells us more than any process we have run in seven years.