This is something I always liked about the IMVU hiring process. I wish I understood all the ingredients of the recipe, but somehow we managed to hire a diverse engineering team. Creative folks who just got stuff done, people who could find bugs deep in third-party dependencies, people who could design and build high-performance technology at scale.
I no longer work at IMVU, but the lessons I'd take away are:
- Hire based on passion and innate problem solving ability, not which specific technologies they know. (Except when you need to bring in specific expertise.)
- Have a fuzzy hiring process where people don't necessarily need to quantify a candidate.
- Take risks on people. We've had candidates who were a "no" but one person stuck their neck out and said "You know, I saw something special that none of you did, and I'd like to take a chance." Many times the candidates ended up being amazing, and it took that one person to see it.
I no longer work at IMVU, but the lessons I'd take away are:
- Hire based on passion and innate problem solving ability, not which specific technologies they know. (Except when you need to bring in specific expertise.)
- Have a fuzzy hiring process where people don't necessarily need to quantify a candidate.
- Take risks on people. We've had candidates who were a "no" but one person stuck their neck out and said "You know, I saw something special that none of you did, and I'd like to take a chance." Many times the candidates ended up being amazing, and it took that one person to see it.