What we believe about hiring
Nine positions. They are the reason the product is shaped the way it is, and the reason it refuses to do some obvious things.
- 01
Presentation is not judgment
The design and product interview has always rewarded whoever narrates their work most comfortably. That trait is only loosely related to the ability to make good decisions, and the gap is widest at senior level — where the calmest presenter is often the one who was shielded from the hard calls.
- 02
The brief always arrives wrong
Nobody is handed a well-posed problem. Requests arrive as solutions, with the answer already chosen by someone who is not doing the work. The first act of the job is noticing. Any assessment that hands over a clean brief is measuring the wrong half of the role.
- 03
What happens when the plan breaks is the job
Every case study ends well, because it is written after the outcome is known. The abandoned direction gets tidied into an exploration and the constraint that ruined the quarter disappears entirely. The part that predicts seniority is exactly the part the format deletes.
- 04
An assessment owes the candidate their time back
The industry treats a candidate's hours as free. So we ask for fifteen minutes, tell them the criteria before they start, and make it once rather than once per company — if someone else asks for the same assessment, they do not sit it again.
- 05
Unpaid weekend work filters for privilege
A twelve-hour take-home selects the candidate with the fewest competing offers and the fewest caring responsibilities. That filter is invisible in your funnel — the people it removes leave no trace — so teams mistake their shortlist for the market.
- 06
Banning AI is a lie you tell yourself
Detection is unreliable and its false positives land hardest on non-native speakers. The honest response is to design tasks where a model helps less: context that exists only inside the exercise, constraints that move, and reasoning that has to be defended out loud.
- 07
A score you cannot audit should not be acted on
A percentile with nothing behind it asks you to outsource a decision about a person's career to a black box. Every score we publish carries the candidate's own sentence beside it, so you can read it and disagree with us.
- 08
Depth beats breadth, and the choice is real
We could cover forty roles tomorrow and be a worse version of something that already exists. Six roles assessed properly is more useful than four hundred assessed shallowly, and pretending otherwise would be a growth decision dressed as a product one.
- 09
Being wrong in public is part of the method
The rubric is versioned because we expect to change it, and changing it invalidates comparability — so we say so rather than quietly editing. An instrument that never admits error is not an instrument. It is a brand.
If you disagree with any of these, we would genuinely like to hear it. Several of them exist because somebody argued us out of a previous position.
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