I don't want to give away my secrets, because this has actually worked really well for me and I'm afraid that I'll lose my edge as an employer - however I have a very small neck of the woods and HN seems very US-centric so I think I'll be ok.

What has worked for me, honestly, is being directly involved with my hiring pipeline and having conversations.

It seems like common sense, but there's a lot of reasons not to do this and people will make good arguments to prevent it. "What about bias", "your time is more important" etc;

However, bias is an unfortunate consequence of selecting for value fit anyway and I can't think of a more important task than selecting the members that will be the future of the company.

I've had some positions that were open for a weekend where I got 400 applicants, and yes, it was daunting to go through and give each of them an honest shot, but you know: I had to do it. What's the alternative? I might miss a fantastic candidate because someone didn't understand what I actually need.

Evaluating programmers and "devops" people is just insanely hard, technologies are mostly fungible. If you can write one C-like language you can learn the others in about a month, but what can't be taught is what your values are, if you think in a systemic way, if you're easy to work with and respect others.

So, my solution is to have a conversation, challenge what they know, see how they react when challenged, see how they react when they reach the end of their knowledge and see what they're most proud of and if they get excited by it.

No gotchas, no esoteric internal handshake, just: are you defensive? Are you curious? Are you passionate? Can you communicate effectively and are you intelligent.

If you hit those, you can do anything.

"How do you even know who to interview?"

This is a hard question, for me there's not a lot of candidates that are physically located in my region, so those go through as long as they have something on the CV that looks relevant. For others it's a combination of: would it be easy for them to move, have they worked remote (and can do it in a region where I have a tax entity) and how strong of a fit to the role is the CV, lots of experience in games would be what I expect since I work in video games - but if you're going for a backend programming role then: what have you built and what do you list as your responsibility to achieve it?

With this mindset I managed to build a high performing, high trust team that executed very well on (literally) impossible demands. If the ownership of the company was better that team would have easily been world class.

We also exceeded dunbars second (clan) number with the size of the team, so it wasn't intrinsic to small teams (80+).