I Used to Hire for Polish. Now I Look for Scars.

A few years ago, I asked a candidate how many parameters GPT-3 had.
They gave me the answer, cited two papers, and mentioned compute costs like they were casually talking about the weather.

Impressive? Sure.
Useful? Not really.

When I asked, “What would you build with it?”
They gave me a beautiful, well-articulated… TEDx hallucination.

It sounded smart.
It just didn’t say anything.

And I remember thinking: Wow, this would make a great blog post—but a terrible hire.

See, I wasn’t screening for intelligence. I was screening for noise.

These Days, I Don’t Care If You’re Polished. I Care If You’ve Bled a Little.

I used to be hypnotized by resumes.
Clean layout, fancy logos, bullet points written like press releases.

Now?
If your resume makes me yawn, we’re already off to a bad start.

I look for signs of real curiosity.
Not the “I took a course on Coursera once” type.
The kind that looks like this:

• “Tell me about the last time something broke and you were obsessed over fixing it.”
• “When was the last time you argued with an AI model—and won?”
• “What’s something you built that was completely unnecessary… but you’re secretly proud of it?”

These are not icebreakers.
They’re my hiring cheat codes.

You can memorize frameworks.
You can’t fake obsession.

We Hired Someone Once Because of a One-Liner at the Bottom of Their CV

No keywords. No capital letters. Just this:

“Created an app to track my dad’s daily rants about inflation. It peaked during grocery runs.”

It was messy.
It would definitely not scale.
And it told me more than any certification ever could.

That line had intent.
And in AI, that’s everything.

In AI, Compliance Gets You Left Behind

I don’t want people waiting for a brief.
I want people who write the prompt themselves.
Who prototype before they pitch.
Who delete their own code without crying.

People who explain things like they’re trying to help a teammate—not sell to an investor.

These aren’t “culture fit” questions.
They’re survival instincts.

Final Thought

The best people I’ve hired weren’t the smoothest talkers.
They were the ones who couldn’t shut up about something they built at 2 a.m. because it just wouldn’t leave them alone.

So no—I don’t care if you can quote the GPT family tree.
I care if you’ve ever built something that made your life easier.
I care if you’ve ever questioned your own code, your own assumptions, or your own boss.

Because the future won’t be built by people who waited for permission.

It’ll be built by those who Googled it, tried it, broke it—and then made it better.

Regards,
Rupesh

P.S.
What’s something weird, personal, or just plain specific that you look for in interviews? Drop it in the comments—I’ll share a few of the best ones on my profile.
Let’s help more people hire for substance, not sparkle.