THE HIRING LOOP

Five stages, no more: sourcing, application screen, technical screen, paid trial, offer. Most agency hiring breaks down because there are too many stages, the criteria shift between rounds, or the trial step is skipped. Five focused stages with consistent criteria across them is the version that works.

Total elapsed time from application to offer: 14 to 21 days for a senior role. Faster than the loop most candidates have experienced from larger companies, which is itself a competitive advantage in hiring.

I have stopped relying on job boards for senior hires. The best applicants come from referrals (current or past Seahawk people), targeted outreach (people whose work I have read or who have shipped public projects I admire), and inbound from the public writing on this site and elsewhere.

Job board postings are still useful as a credibility signal and a way to surface candidates who are actively looking. They produce roughly 20 percent of the senior hires we eventually make. The other 80 percent come from sourcing channels that did not exist in our first three years.

Single page, ten questions, mostly free-text. Examples: "Describe a technical decision you regret and what you would do differently". "What is the most useful thing you have shipped in the last 12 months and why". "Read this 200-word brief and write the first technical question you would ask the client".

I read every response. The signal is in how candidates write more than what they write. Concrete, specific, opinionated answers from candidates who have done the work; vague, formulaic answers from candidates who have not.

Pass rate at this stage: roughly 30 percent. Most rejections are obvious within 90 seconds of reading the response.

60 minutes, video call, two-thirds technical discussion of a real problem (no whiteboard puzzles), one-third the candidate's questions about the role. We talk through a recent Seahawk technical decision, hear the candidate's framing, and probe their reasoning rather than test specific knowledge.

Pass criteria: did the candidate ask the questions a senior person would ask? Did they offer a defensible alternative to the decision we actually made? Did they update their position when given new information?

Pass rate: roughly 50 percent of those who reached this stage.

Two weeks, paid at senior trial rates (usually 4,000 to 8,000 USD for the period), real client engagement, scoped to a specific deliverable. The trial is not a test; it is a small real engagement with a real client where we both decide if the working relationship clicks.

Pass criteria: did the deliverable ship at the quality we expected? Was the working style compatible with how the rest of the team works? Did the candidate identify and surface issues we had not seen?

Pass rate: roughly 70 percent. The screen-out at this stage is rare because both technical screen and application screen are doing real work upstream.

Standard offer letter, fixed salary at our published grid for the role and seniority, no negotiation drama. Healthcare benefits explicit, equity if applicable, time-off policy clear. Sign or do not sign within 7 days.

Negotiating salary at the offer stage means the grid is broken. We periodically review the grid against market data; we do not adjust it candidate-by-candidate. This eliminates the negotiation tax that kills team morale.

Acceptance rate: roughly 80 percent of offers. The 20 percent who decline mostly do so for reasons unrelated to compensation (location, timing, alternative offer with better fit).

Roughly 25 hours of senior time per hired role across screening, calls, and trial review. The paid trial costs 4 to 8K USD. Total fully-loaded cost per senior hire: roughly 12 to 18K USD before they earn their first paycheck.

That is real money. It is also dramatically cheaper than the cost of a bad hire who stays for nine months before the relationship ends. The loop's job is to surface mismatches earlier; the trial is the highest-signal stage and the cost there is the most-justified line item.