Lenny Distilled

Work samples beat interviews for assessing talent

Leadership → Team Building

I always make people do work. I think we've gone back and forth on Twitter about this. And it's funny, it's definitely something that it's just in the last, I don't know, five or six years, I feel like people are really pushing back on doing what they I think unfairly characterize as free work for a company.

Merci GraceMaking an impact through authenticity and curiosity
Supporting

Why we do this is that we just seeing that it's a very good way to see for both of us, both for the company and the candidates to see how we work together.

Karri SaarinenInside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus
Supporting

We have people onsite for two days, and do a project with us, a work test project. And that has worked really well, that increasingly you're finding that.

Michael TruellThe rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can't stop using
Supporting

What are you going to learn from let's say even eight hours of interviews that you're not going to have learned from four months of real work experience?

Farhan ThawarHow Shopify builds a high-intensity culture
Supporting

I think the people that can leverage AI to do whatever their day-to-day workflows are... We'll give people interviews where we say, 'Use ChatGPT and Kodak. Use Claude code. Use whatever tool cursor and whatever tools are available to build a website and let's see what product you're able to build in an hour.'

Brendan FoodyWhy experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history
Supporting

We do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on, because this company is not for everybody.

Elena VernaThe new AI growth playbook for 2026 | How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year