After probing a candidate's past, 'flip the table' and present them with a current, real-world problem your company faces. This reveals their curiosity, analytical skills, and ability to engage with a new challenge on the spot, shifting from their prepared stories to raw problem-solving.

To find talent capable of managing an AI stack, traditional interviews are insufficient. A better test is to provide candidates with platform credits (e.g., Replit) and challenge them to build a functional agent that automates a real business task, proving their practical skills.

Candidates complete an exhaustive "friction logging" exercise, documenting pain points and user experience issues within a product. This practical test is a primary tool for evaluating a candidate's product sense and problem-identification skills, valued almost as much as the interview itself.

Vercel's hiring process for design leaders includes a take-home assignment, a practice typically for junior roles. This lets candidates demonstrate real-world problem-solving and buy-in strategies, which are difficult to assess from a portfolio of team-led projects, while also helping the candidate evaluate the company.

A common hiring mistake is prioritizing a conversational 'vibe check' over assessing actual skills. A much better approach is to give candidates a project that simulates the job's core responsibilities, providing a direct and clean signal of their capabilities.

To avoid hypothetical interview questions, Zipline makes its hiring process as applied as possible. This includes pair programming, collaborative design sessions, and even offering paid 1-2 week work trials. This "work together" approach quickly reveals a candidate's true fit and capabilities.

For a hiring project, Artemis didn't review code. They asked candidates to build a functional website and share the live URL, explicitly not caring how it was built. This shifted the assessment from coding proficiency to the more crucial startup skill: the ability to build and deliver a result.

Ineffective interviews try to catch candidates failing. A better approach models a collaborative rally: see how they handle challenging questions and if they can return the ball effectively. The goal is to simulate real-world problem-solving, not just grill them under pressure.

Traditional hiring assessments that ban modern tools are obsolete. A better approach is to give candidates access to AI tools and ask them to complete a complex task in an hour. This tests their ability to leverage technology for productivity, not their ability to memorize information.