For many technology companies, hiring still begins with a familiar stack of signals: education, previous employers, years of experience, and a carefully polished resume.
Vitalii Dodonov believes those signals often obscure the thing that matters most—what someone can actually build.
As a self-taught coder and co-founder of creator platform Stan, Dodonov has helped shape a hiring process that largely disregards conventional credentials in favour of judgment, speed, ownership, and demonstrated output. Instead of relying on traditional internship programs and lengthy interview cycles, Stan uses hackathons to watch candidates work through ambiguity, make trade-offs, recover when things break, and turn an idea into something useful.
That approach has helped Stan assemble a team of roughly 30 people while reaching $30 million in annual recurring revenue. It has also led the company to talent that a conventional screening process might have overlooked, including a developer Dodonov hired at 17 after seeing what he built during a Stan hackathon.
In this Q+A with Techtalent.ca, Dodonov explains what separates the “top 1%” of builders, why resumes reveal so little about future performance, and how candidates can make themselves impossible to overlook in a crowded technology job market.
You’ve built Stan’s hiring process around finding “the top 1%.” How do you define that?
VD: The top 1% aren’t the people with the best resumes, they’re the people who can build something remarkable in a short amount of time, with almost no direction.
The way I see it, top 1% people aren’t incrementally better, they’re exponentially better. It’s obsession, judgment, and the ability to turn ambiguity into shipped work. Once you get enough 1% people in a room, you can build things companies 100 times your size can’t compete with.
Stan largely ignores resumes, cover letters, and credentials. What convinced you those signals weren’t the best way to identify exceptional talent?
VD: Resumes and cover letters don’t tell me what I need to know. What matters to me is how someone builds, so I trust real work over credentials. I’d rather watch someone build for two days than read a resume. That’s why Stan hosts events like hackathons, to see how people actually work before we bring them on.
A resume tells you where someone has been, and perhaps a bit of what they’ve done. But it says nothing about how they think under pressure, how fast they learn, or how they solve problems, and those are the only things I actually care about.
Some of the best builders I’ve ever met wouldn’t have made it past a normal screening. That’s why we stopped looking at credentials and started looking at what people can actually build.
You’re self-taught as a coder. How much did your own path shape the way you think about hiring people who may not look qualified on paper?
VD: A lot. I learned by building things, getting tangible, not theoretical experience. I tried more conventional paths early on and they didn’t fit how I think or build. With that in mind, we’ve built Stan’s hiring process to find the best builders, which aren’t always ones with the paperwork to prove it.
Stan uses hackathons instead of hiring from traditional internship programs. What does a hackathon reveal about a candidate that a resume or interview usually misses?
VD: During a hackathon, you see how candidates make decisions on what to build first when they can’t build everything, and how they react when something breaks, because something always breaks. I learn more in 48 hours of watching someone build than I would in ten interviews. Constraints spark creativity, cut the time down and you find out fast what someone’s really capable of.
Can you walk me through what happens when someone creates real value during one of these hackathons? How do you decide whether that person should become a full-time hire?
VD: I look at why they made it, not just what they made. Did they chase the thing that mattered, or the easiest thing? That tells me how they’ll work a year from now.
When one person understands the scope of a problem, we don’t need approval. Individual contributors here routinely change what’s possible for the business. If someone can build something valuable without being managed into it, we hire them.
Your youngest hire was 17 and straight out of high school. What did he build, and what did that experience teach you about the limits of credential-based hiring?
VD: Jason was seventeen when I hired him. I met him at a hackathon Stan hosted. His team built a monetization tool that analyzed Creators’ videos, identified featured products, generated affiliate links, and helped them earn their first dollar online.
Later I noticed his GitHub pulled up: an all-green commit history, code shipped every single day, even though he was still in high school. That kind of consistency outperforms most candidates with better resumes. His parents co-signed his contract, and he’s been with us since.
On paper, Jason was just a high school kid. A credential-based process would have filtered him out, and we would have missed one of our best hires.
Stan reached $30 million in ARR with a team of about 30 people. How does hiring for exceptional ownership and output change the way a company scales?
VD: Most founders think growth means headcount, it doesn’t. Growth is product speed, customer value, and a great team executing on the right idea.
Hire for real ownership and make sure the output stays high. A-players and top talent don’t need managing. That’s how thirty people get to $30 million in ARR. Most companies scale hiring long before they’ve maximized the output from a small, excellent team. And that’s a costly mistake.
Many Canadian tech companies say they cannot find the right talent, while many qualified candidates say they cannot get past the filter. What do you think the industry is getting wrong about talent discovery?
VD: The best people are still hard to find because most hiring systems aren’t built to identify them. The fix is a process that tests for judgment, speed, and output. Not one that assumes credentials tell the whole story.
The fix on the candidate side is to build in public. Ship projects, post about the process, share how you think. Your personal brand is your resume now. Building has never been easier, but getting attention for what you’re building is harder than ever. The people who understand that and put their work out there are the ones getting found, regardless of what school they went to or who they’ve worked for.