Show Me Something You Made

A score is a snapshot; work is a body of evidence

A score is a snapshot. One narrow moment, one narrow rubric, taken alone on a clock. Work is a body of evidence. Given the choice, I will take the evidence every time. So our process is built around it.

How we actually look at people

Show me something you made. Code, a document, a system you designed, a bug you chased down, a side project, a thing you fixed at your last job. If it is private, walk me through it. I am not looking for a portfolio that performs. I am looking for one real thing and the thinking behind it.

Then let me hear how you think. Not trivia, not a timed puzzle. A real problem, the kind we actually face, and where you would start, and what you would be unsure about. The unsure part is the part I care about most. People who can name what they do not know are the ones you can trust with what they do.

Then, if it fits, we build something small together, and we pay for it if it is real work. Half an hour of making something side by side tells me more than thirty interviews. You cannot fake your way through a real problem, and you cannot hide a good mind in one either.

And when someone says "we" instead of "me," that is a green flag, not a red one. The person who credits the team is usually the person who makes the team work. The era we are in rewards the opposite, the loud individual narrating their own value. That signal is noise. Ignore it.

The honest catch

I will be honest about the catch. This does not scale to ten thousand applicants. It is slow, and it asks a human to actually look. That is exactly why most large companies stopped doing it. They traded looking for throughput, and the trade is what produced the monoculture and the blackball in the first place. We are small enough to still look. For now, that is an advantage, not a limitation.

If the algorithm could not read you

I say all of this as someone a timed test once screened out. What I went on to build is the evidence the score could not see. I would rather not miss that in someone else.

So if you are a builder the algorithm could not read, show your work to the humans who will look. We are some of them, and we are not the only ones. And if you are the one doing the hiring, try this with a single candidate this week. Look at the work first. You may be surprised who you almost threw away.