Bring him in to chat.
That was the decision after a short recruiting thread and a resume.
The candidate had been introduced through somebody I knew. We arranged a phone call, moved the time once, and talked about Shutterstock. He sent the resume afterward. I forwarded it with one line asking the team to meet him.
Hiring was becoming a larger part of the job.
The infrastructure problems were growing, but so was the number of people needed to own them. I could still go deep on a network rebuild, a data-center migration, or a performance test. I also had to find engineers who could take whole parts of the system and make them better.
The first conversation did not need to be complicated. Could the person do the work? Did they want to work in this kind of environment? Would the current team learn something useful from meeting them?
If the answer looked promising, bring them in.
I preferred direct recruiting. Tell somebody what the company was actually doing. Explain the messy parts along with the interesting ones. Give them a chance to ask questions before turning the process into a series of formal interviews.
Shutterstock was a good technical story by then. The public saw a marketplace for images. Underneath it was search, ecommerce, storage, global delivery, contributor uploads, and infrastructure that had to stay available while all of it grew.
That gave us real problems to offer engineers.
The email chain included scheduling changes, apologies, phone numbers, and a resume attachment. Most hiring records do. The useful part was the final line.
We had talked.
The next step was obvious.