Hiring Multipliers

Most technical interviews optimize for individual brilliance. Algorithmic puzzles. System design under pressure. Can this person, alone in a room, produce the right answer? These signals matter, but they measure the wrong unit. You're not hiring an individual — you're hiring someone who will work inside a system of people, and the health of that system depends on how each person affects the ones around them.

The tell is often in how candidates talk about past work. A Rockstar describes their own contributions — what they built, what they fixed, what they solved. A Multiplier describes the team's contributions and happens to mention their own role in enabling them. "We shipped X" followed by an unprompted explanation of how they helped others get there is a different signal than "I built X while everyone else was still figuring it out."

Code review philosophy reveals the same divide. Ask how they approach reviewing someone else's code and listen for whether the answer is about correctness alone or about the person on the other end. Engineers who understand that a harsh review can close someone off rather than improve them tend to make the people around them better over time. Engineers who don't tend to be right about the code and wrong about everything else.

The question worth asking directly: tell me about a time you made someone else on your team more effective. A Rockstar will struggle with this one. A Multiplier will have three answers before you finish the sentence.