My experience has been that solving a very technical problem and solving a social one are very different skill sets and very few people have both skills and are capable of using both of those skills at the same time.
Why you did this?, why this way? , why you joined this company?
This gives good understanding of both Personality and Hard skills.
But if they can't strongly advocate for an idea or against an idea they don't like and just give up, you don't get their full 'utility'. Which, tbh, is not a big issue with juniors with not a lot of experience, but still.
'low ego', but not too low. You want passionate debates.
In the beginning, you need the person who knows how to solve the problem. They are harder to find.
If you are pressured to grow quickly, you might be tempted to lower the bar. You can, as long as you understand that the person who knows how to solve the problem is still critically important, because they will be telling people which algo to use.
I think every company that uses tech needs at least one of these people to start with.
Your first hires need to be people who make the company faster, not slower. A single bad hire can sink the ship. Someone who is great in a large corporation can ruin an early start-up.
Personally, I'm hoping for low-ego high achievers. But that's up to you. This is where you get to define what the company culture will be.
They don't need fancy credentials or to be super smart or have a great internet presence; what you should look for is a track-record of shipping, and evidence of independent work; and when you interview them, find out if they have good judgement, if they have a sense of when to trade off perfect for good enough, if they're able to diagnose and fix things when they're broken.
As you grow, you can add more traditional engineers to build a more conventional, well-rounded team. But most companies don't get to 20 employees if their first 5-10 aren't able to work quickly & make good decisions without getting side-tracked on all the myriad little distractions of designing the perfect framework for the framework, office politics, dev environment isn't quite right, etc, etc.
Give me 10 of those and you can kiss anyone goodbye.
A verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed.
As I said before at least 2 of the following:
1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open with core maintainers). No hello world / demo projects.
2. Production-grade shipped projects / side-projects with paying customers or high-profile companies using it and is bringing in recurring revenue.
3. Given several presentations at conferences discussing anything from your project as a library author, maintainer or at a company showcasing your engineering expertise.
All are extremely difficult to fake and easy to verify and requires a level of effort on the applicant to qualify which filters 90% of noise out there. Years of experience is not a requirement but a bonus.
The rest of the other methods like leetcode, hackerrank, take home projects or quiz trivia, wastes time on both the interviewer and the candidate and both can be cheated easily using AI.
It is that simple.
What sort of positive signal is this supposed to be? Why would presenting point towards a productive employee?
In my experience, this correlates more with soft skills and “one man band” founder/maker companies that tend to sell training products or (if they do exist in a company environment at all) invariably work in DevRel and aren’t pushing code.
This can be found all the time, from many tech talks or conferences large or small and 99% of the time, the person presenting already covers most of the requirements and makes the selection process easier, not harder.
One part I did miss in my post was to require at least 2 out of 3 of them so, I added that in. But I'd rather optimize for hiring candidates who are builders and know what they are talking and what to build even with AI and can easily answer deep technical questions (because they have experience and have done it), than those studying for the interview and need constant hand-holding and are over-reliant on AI.
Remember, this is for recruiting founding engineers and the bar has to be high way above the noise.
Your criteria heavily biases towards very performative and obvious signs of hard work in a commercial setting, completely oblivious to hard work and character outside of it.
Hiring people based on knowing what should be built, how to build and especially knowing how to make the business money is not performative. I'd rather optimizing the hiring process for builders instead of rest-and-vest day-care slackers or leetcode grinders just for passing the interview.
There is nothing more performative than anyone doing these puzzles and answering quiz trivia, which doesn't make you or anyone money and it is only a waste of everyone's time.