At Duolingo, job interviews start the moment a candidate steps into a car.
Luis von Ahn, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of the language-learning app, revealed on Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni’s The Burnouts podcast how a job candidate treats their driver from the airport to the office can make or break their chances of getting hired—regardless of how impressive their résumé looks or how much they like the candidate in the interview process.
Entrepreneur von Ahn, who cofounded Duolingo in 2011 with Severin Hacker, recalled a time when the company had been seeking a chief financial officer “for like a year.” The candidate had a strong résumé, and the entire hiring committee “really liked” the applicant, he told The Burnouts in a February interview.
But “it turned out that they were pretty mean to their driver from the airport to the office,” von Ahn said. “And that made us not hire them.”
The CEO of Duolingo, which has a market cap of $4.65 billion, knew this because he pays taxi drivers to evaluate whether candidates are worth hiring.
“Our belief is if they’re going to be mean to the driver, they’re probably going to be mean to other people, particularly people under them,” he said.
It’s important to Duolingo to hire the right person because of how much the company and von Ahn have leaned into AI. Last April, von Ahn said he was getting rid of contract employees and replacing them with AI.
“We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” von Ahn wrote in a memo posted to LinkedIn in April 2025. “We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”
While von Ahn’s taxi driver test is an unconventional one, candidates in today’s brutal job market are being evaluated in ways they may not even realize.
A job market where every detail counts
His approach comes at a time when landing a job has never felt more grueling. Hiring in tech has slowed drastically, with job postings down an estimated 36% from pre-2020 levels, according to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent Report. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 people working in tech have been laid off so far this year, Layoffs.fyi data shows.
Plus, interview processes have become much longer and more involved. Candidates routinely face five to eight interview rounds, panel presentations, case studies, and personality assessments before receiving an offer. The average time-to-hire in the U.S. is approximately 36 days from job posting to offer, according to research by Alex Benjamin, vice president of talent acquisition at OnPoint Consulting Services.
And on top of that, culture and character evaluations have quietly become a standard part of the process—even when candidates don’t know they’re being assessed.
Other CEOs with unorthodox hiring tactics
Duolingo’s CEO isn’t alone in looking beyond a résumé and interview for character signals.
Trent Innes, former managing director of accounting platform Xero and now chief growth officer at SiteMinder, told The Ventures podcast in an episode published in September 2024 he uses a coffee cup test to evaluate candidates.
When a job candidate arrives for an interview, the interviewer walks them to the kitchen for a beverage.
“Then we take that back, have our interview, and one of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?” Innes said.
For anyone who leaves their dirty cup behind after the interview and doesn’t offer to take it back to the kitchen, it’s a no-go.
“You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience, but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup,’” he said.
Even without odd tests, several big-name CEOs are vocal about how important street smarts and attitude are to securing a job. Amazon built its hiring process around its core Leadership Principles, with interviewers trained to probe for red flags, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been outspoken about valuing street smarts and intellectual curiosity over pedigree alone.
“I care how you deal with our tellers, our guards, and our receptionists as much as I care how you deal with CEOs,” Dimon said in a July 2024 interview with LinkedIn. “It’s those 300,000 people that matter, and we have to set up right for everybody.”
