Technical Skills Are Table Stakes. Here's What We Actually Screen For.

By the time a candidate reaches your interview, they've cleared a technical bar. That's a given. What's harder to evaluate — and what causes most bad hires — is everything else.

Communication Under Pressure

The single biggest predictor of long-term success we've observed is how a developer communicates when something goes wrong. Do they go quiet? Blame tooling? Or do they surface blockers early, document what they tried, and ask for help without being asked? This is difficult to screen for in a standard technical interview — which is part of why we invest in extended conversations rather than coding puzzles alone.

Ownership vs. Execution Mindset

Some developers are great at executing well-defined tickets. Others take genuine ownership of outcomes — they push back on bad requirements, flag downstream consequences, and think about the user. Neither is universally better; it depends entirely on the role. What matters is that we match the mindset to the position, not just the tech stack.