Running a 3-person startup means every engineering hire is high-stakes. Here's the assessment framework we landed on after several failed attempts.

What didn't work

Live coding in a video call — candidates froze up, output didn't reflect their actual ability. Senior devs especially hated being watched.

Full take-home projects (3–5 hours) — good candidates dropped out because their time is valuable and they had options.

Just asking about past projects in an interview — too easy to embellish, no signal on actual implementation thinking.

What worked: a focused 90-minute async task

The format we converged on:

A real, scoped problem from our actual codebase context (not a LeetCode puzzle)

90-minute time limit , explicitly communicated upfront

Asynchronous — they pick a 2-hour window, we review async

Evaluated on reasoning, not perfection

We send a single file: a TypeScript module with a bug, a missing feature, and some intentionally messy code.…