Hiring Events, at record speed

The problem

A few months into COVID, we knew the way out of the pandemic would bring its own problems. Snagajob had a service called ReadyHire that ran hiring events to staff new locations quickly. Scaling that service to meet a pandemic-sized rebound wasn’t realistic.

How I thought about it

So we decided to build software that followed much of the ReadyHire process: Hiring Events. Employers could run hiring events in person and online. We just had to build it, fast.

Time was the constraint. Most of the engineering department would be involved, and that much coordination costs time on its own. The fastest path was to cut the coordination as early as we could.

What I did

We started with a minimum viable architecture. Here that meant the product did the least it possibly could, so that we could connect each team’s part together. With that in place, and documented in detail, each team could iterate on its own part independently.

Results

Minimal coordination: each team could work on its part without waiting on the others.

What I’d do today with AI

This is where I would reach for the harness first. The minimum viable architecture and its documentation become the plan, and each team’s part becomes its own goal that agents can work in parallel. The verify step checks each part against the shared contract, so the coordination the architecture removed doesn’t creep back in as review meetings.