A 20-year-old with no experience and no polished resume sent a direct message to the CEO of WisprFlow.ai, a California-based tech startup, saying he loved the product and wanted to work there. The CEO replied: "Come by in two hours."
On a Saturday afternoon, they talked for 45 minutes. The candidate was given a project that would normally take a day and a half. When asked if he wanted to start Monday, he said, "I'll start now." He pulled an all-nighter, delivered thousands of lines of code as a fully functioning feature by Sunday morning, and became one of the company's highest-performing engineers.
The CEO later posted on X: "The best hires aren't the ones with the perfect resume. They're the ones who do more than what's asked." A hiring process that took two hours. No take-home. No seven rounds. Just a conversation, a project, and a decision.