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Tech Hiring

Made Crystal Clear

A practical, visual guide to finding, verifying, and keeping technical talent in the AI era

Hiring engineers used to be a filtering problem: find the good ones in the pile. In the AI era it is a verification problem: the pile itself is fake, from AI-polished CVs to deepfake interview candidates. This guide is the complete playbook for companies without recruiters: decide whether to hire at all, source real talent with no budget and no brand, verify that the person on the call exists, assess judgment instead of memorization, pay fairly across borders, and keep people through the first 90 days and far beyond. Built on the Full Stack Hiring Funnel: hiring as a loop you can debug, where happy employees become your best sourcing channel.

Pages
192
Level
Beginner to advanced
Status
Available
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Inside the book

  1. 01Welcome to the Verification Era
  2. 02The Full Stack Hiring Funnel
  3. 03Do You Really Need to Hire?
  4. 04Your First Hire, End to End
  5. 05The Roles You Actually Hire For
  6. 06The Seven Candidate Archetypes
  7. 07Sourcing Real Humans: Outbound, Guerilla, and Content
  8. 08Verify the Human: Beating Hiring Fraud
  9. 09Assessment That Predicts
  10. 10The Offer: Money, Equity, and Winning Without a Bidding War
  11. 11Speed, Dignity, and the Law
  12. 12Onboarding and the First 90 Days
  13. 13The Ownership Endgame: Retention and the Incubator Company
  14. 14Learning Path, Cheat Sheet, and Resources

You'll leave with

  • Decide if you even need the hire: automate it, contract it, or hire it
  • Spot AI-faked candidates, from polished CVs to deepfake video calls
  • Source real engineers with no budget: guerilla tactics and content that attracts

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Sources

Every source cited in Tech Hiring Made Crystal Clear. Each number matches the [n] marker next to that link in the book's "Go deeper" lists, so you can trace any claim back to its origin.

  1. [1]GoodTime 2026 Hiring Insights Report
  2. [2]Talent Board CandE reports (Survale)
  3. [3]RecruitBPM: candidate experience statistics
  4. [4]SHRM on the Talent Board findings
  5. [5]Ashby 2026 Talent Trends: recruiting operations benchmarks
  6. [6]Dan Luu: how good corporate engineering blogs are written
  7. [7]BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2025
  8. [8]Apollo Technical: cost of a bad hire, the citation audit
  9. [9]Forma: employee replacement costs
  10. [10]EOR pricing guides (Deel and peers)
  11. [11]Buffer, State of Remote Work 2023
  12. [12]Rice Business Wisdom: the hidden cost of working across time zones
  13. [13]Homerun pricing
  14. [14]Calendly pricing
  15. [15]Pin: Recruiting Outreach Benchmarks 2026
  16. [16]Gem: recruiting email benchmarks
  17. [17]Hacker News: "Has anyone ever been hired from Who wants to be hired threads?"
  18. [18]GovDocs: US pay transparency laws
  19. [19]CNBC: Google's rule of four
  20. [20]Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025: developer roles
  21. [21]Dice: AI jobs top LinkedIn's fastest-growing roles for 2026
  22. [22]HackerRank 2025 Developer Skills Report
  23. [23]Google SRE Book, chapter 1
  24. [24]swyx: The Rise of the AI Engineer
  25. [25]Exponent: data scientist vs machine learning engineer
  26. [26]NIST: software errors cost the US economy $59.5B a year (2002)
  27. [27]Budget Overrun: the cost-of-change curve, history and folklore
  28. [28]Nomtek: Flutter vs React Native
  29. [29]Camille Fournier: The Manager's Path
  30. [30]Gergely Orosz: The Tech Resume Inside Out
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  32. [32]Deci, Olafsen & Ryan: Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations (2017)
  33. [33]McKinsey: Great Attrition or Great Attraction (2021)
  34. [34]Gallup: 42% of turnover is preventable (2024)
  35. [35]Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, Work section
  36. [36]eWeek: 11,000 applications a minute on LinkedIn
  37. [37]The Interview Guys: the average opening gets 242 applications
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  39. [39]Starfolio: the Green Square Effect
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  42. [42]Archive.com: micro-influencer engagement statistics
  43. [43]Fabric: We Analyzed 19,368 Interviews
  44. [44]GetReal Security: the 41% survey
  45. [45]Gartner press release, July 2025
  46. [46]Unit 42: synthetic identity in 70 minutes
  47. [47]FBI IC3 PSA on North Korean IT workers
  48. [48]KnowBe4: the first-person infiltration story
  49. [49]iProov: native virtual-camera attacks
  50. [50]Meta-analysis: human deepfake detection
  51. [51]Huntress: the three-finger test
  52. [52]Computerworld: the in-person return
  53. [53]SHRM: HireVue drops facial analysis
  54. [54]Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens (2022): Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection
  55. [55]Schmidt and Hunter (1998): The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods
  56. [56]Quartz: Google is over brainteasers
  57. [57]Canva Engineering: Yes, You Can Use AI in Our Interviews
  58. [58]Hello Interview: Meta's AI-enabled coding interview
  59. [59]Smart and Street: Who, The A Method for Hiring (excerpt)
  60. [60]SHRM: FCRA 101
  61. [61]Levels.fyi 2025 End of Year Pay Report
  62. [62]Carta: State of Startup Compensation
  63. [63]Carta learn
  64. [64]Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation
  65. [65]Index Ventures: Rewarding Talent
  66. [66]Index Ventures OptionPlan
  67. [67]Ravio: European salary trends
  68. [68]Arc.dev remote salary explorer
  69. [69]Terminal 2026 Salary Insights
  70. [70]Morgan Lewis: the EU directive after the deadline
  71. [71]Deel: misclassification penalties
  72. [72]EEOC: prohibited employment policies and practices
  73. [73]HR Dive: salary history ban tracker
  74. [74]Caspers Mock: the German right to lie
  75. [75]Singapore TAFEP tripartite guidelines
  76. [76]EU AI Act, Annex III
  77. [77]Gibson Dunn: the Digital Omnibus deferral
  78. [78]NYC Local Law 144 rules
  79. [79]Illinois AI Video Interview Act (820 ILCS 42)
  80. [80]EEOC: the iTutorGroup settlement
  81. [81]BambooHR: 2023 onboarding statistics
  82. [82]Michael Watkins: The First 90 Days (HBR Press)
  83. [83]Netflix: the culture page
  84. [84]StrongDM: employee onboarding statistics
  85. [85]LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2022
  86. [86]TechCrunch: Area 120 wound down
  87. [87]Gompers, Lerner and Scharfstein: Entrepreneurial Spawning
  88. [88]INSEAD Knowledge: Haier's RenDanHeYi
  89. [89]terms.law: employee side projects, who really owns what
  90. [90]CNBC: YC's fastest-growing batch, because of AI
  91. [91]HR Dive on the Gartner release
  92. [92]business.com deepfake preparedness study
  93. [93]Axios: "Companies embrace in-person interviews to dodge the chatbots"
  94. [94]Interview Guys: The State of Hiring Fraud 2026
  95. [95]EEOC: Background checks, what employers need to know
  96. [96]Indeed Hiring Lab: advertised salary ranges
  97. [97]Index.dev: developer salaries in Eastern Europe
  98. [98]ASA timezone overlap calculator
  99. [99]Indeed Hiring Lab: software development postings
  100. [100]BLS Occupational Outlook: software developers, QA analysts, testers
  101. [101]DORA Accelerate State of DevOps 2024
  102. [102]tryexponent: data scientist vs ML engineer
  103. [103]Quartz: Google's 20% time is as good as dead
  104. [104]Future Blind: Fumbling the Future at Xerox PARC
  105. [105]Daniel Scrivner: Valve Handbook summary
  106. [106]W.L. Gore: working at Gore

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