How Coinbase hires the top 0.1% talent
Most companies say they only hire the best. Coinbase actually means it, and they've structured their talent strategy to live up to it.
When they first started out, Coinbase couldn’t get enough applicants. They were pioneers revolutionizing a new industry, unable to rely on industry hype or employer brand to draw top talent. They turned to unconventional hiring methods, like posting quizzes about crypto on Reddit to hire skilled Customer Support and Account Executive teams.
Now, as an industry-leading, post-IPO company with a strong employer and public brand, pipeline is the least of their problems. If you want a long-term career in the crypto space, chances are you’ve thought about applying there.
Last year, Coinbase employees earned an average of $424k each (including stock options). Their focus is no longer on finding enough highly-qualified people — it’s on bringing on only the best bar-raisers.
They're building what might be Silicon Valley's most uncompromising hiring system. Here are the talent principles they’re using to do it:
1. It’s either "hell yes" or “no”
Like for Notion, candidates are screened for both skills and values, and having a match on just one is not enough to be hired. When evaluating candidates, interviewers ask six specific questions:
- Will this person raise the average on my team? Does them starting Monday make me want to work here more or less?
- Did I leave my interview more inspired and engaged than when I went in?
- Is this person much better than me in at least one area?
- Did I learn something from this candidate?
- Could this person start adding value right away?
- Did I leave the interview with more energy than when I went in?
If the answer to any of those questions is “no” or even a “maybe, they default to rounding down to “no.” At some companies, no red flags is a good enough reason to hire someone. But candidates don’t make the cut at Coinbase unless they’re a resounding yes.
Coinbase wants each hire to raise the bar. If you agree, adopting these questions are a great place to start.
2. Executive approval of all hires
All new hires have to be approved by CEO Brian Armstrong and COO Emilie Choi. While this may be a given for small startups, it’s less common for organizations that have 3k+ employees. Coinbase is doing this despite the inefficiencies of scale to create and maintain a culture of top talent, starting from the top-down.
Coinbase’s Chief People Officer, LJ Brock, shared:
“We don’t ascribe to the notion that [recruiting] is a low value use of our executive’s time. In our world view, top talent is our #1 operating priority – and Brian Armstrong and Emilie Choi have prioritized it accordingly.”
Brock believes direct exec engagement doesn’t disempower hiring managers and recruiters. Rather, it allows everyone to recalibrate company-wide standards on talent.
This move isn't just symbolic. Executives at Coinbase are held accountable for maintaining a high talent bar (hiring top talent; retaining them; taking an intentional approach to underperformance) through their performance ratings, which include a measure of talent density in their org. The message is clear: If you want to lead at Coinbase, you need to build exceptional teams.
3. Extraordinary IRL impact or bust
Coinbase doesn’t care about college or career pedigree. They care about proof. Specifically, evidence of ‘extraordinary ability’. Every hiring manager must submit a one-paragraph summary to the CEO/COO of how a candidate has demonstrated extraordinary ability to move a potential hire forward. This can look like (but isn’t limited to):
- Shipping open source projects with high adoption
- Being an ex-founder
- Winning chess, coding, video game, sports, or other tournaments
- Developing an engaged online audience
- Conducting interesting scientific or technical research
- Having elite armed forces experience
- Leading a crypto forward project (NFTs, defi, a new protocol...) that gained traction
Coinbase is “looking for candidates with a trail of real world results, not a collection of accolades.” The fastest way in as a junior hire? Their internship program. But don't mistake this for an easy route. With 30,000+ applicants this year, the program is highly competitive, and the “interview process is as rigorous for Coinbase interns as it is for all [full-time] hires.”
4. Negotiation is off the table
Coinbase's approach to salary negotiation is simple: They don't do it. At all.It’s common for equally-qualified hires to get wildly different offers at some companies based solely on their knowledge of negotiation.
Over time, the salary divergence compounds, leading to millions of dollars left on the table for someone less adept at negotiating with recruiters. Coinbase doesn’t think that makes sense, so they offer the same competitive starting package to candidates with the same title and location. The no-negotiation policy saves the team time, and while they might miss out on a few candidates due to this policy, it leads to a more equitable offer for folks.
5. Moving closer to meritocracy
Coinbase has been transparent about their attempts to make their talent org a true meritocracy. Some of their efforts this year include:
- Developing internal tools to collect meaningful peer feedback. Most performance metrics rely heavily on manager feedback; a well-rounded measure of performance would also take other stakeholder opinions into account.
- More structured assessments with cognitive testing. The team validated that structural assessment for cultural alignment and technical skills were predictive of performance at Coinbase. These assessments are meant to complement, not replace, live interviews and work trials to reduce hiring bias and drive consistency in evaluation.
- The company recognizes that they’ve historically been under-prioritized emerging, high potential talent. They’re correcting that by expanding their internship program and increasing the intern-to-full-time pipeline. The goal is to get ~20% of Product, Engineering, and Design talent hired from the intern program over the next few years. Plus, because there’s no better way to for candidates showcase potential impact at Coinbase than, well, by making impact at Coinbase.
Coinbase knows not everyone will approve of their hiring approach. And they’re okay with that. They’ve introduced deliberate friction, non-negotiable standards, and executive attention as a blocker on every hire. It's not the easiest way to grow a company. But they think it’s the best way to grow extraordinary teams. In a market where every company wants to hire only the best, Coinbase has decided to build robust, top-down practices to ensure it.
Four tactics you can implement to hire bar-raising talent:
Not every company can replicate Coinbase's internal recruiting engine. Think of their system as a playbook you can take inspiration from rather than a blueprint. Whether you're a founder hiring your first employees without an in-house recruiting function, or a team lead scaling beyond a hundred, here's how to implement their philosophy while working with external recruiters:
1. Standardize your screening questions
Create a non-negotiable set of screening questions all candidates must answer upfront. Give each recruiter access to these questions. This isn't just about consistency - it's about creating an objective baseline that helps recruiters probe for must-have attributes, so they can move beyond general questions and "gut feel". If you’re hiring with Paraform, you can set this up seamlessly on the platform, and even use screening questions for similar successful roles. You can also easily see each candidate’s answers to quickly calibrate potential hires.
2. Make talent an executive priority
Even if you can’t afford the CEO reviewing every hire like Coinbase does, you should set up clear, documented standards that flow from the top. Document exactly what "great" looks like for each role type, and make sure hiring managers are equipped (and empowered) to maintain those standards.Remember, how you approach talent as a founder or team lead trickles down to the rest of the org.
3. Pick your non-negotiable
Every exceptional company has one thing they won't compromise on. For Shopify, it’s a growth mindset; for Notion, it’s an almost obsessive approach to craft; for Coinbase, it's proof of extraordinary real-world impact.What’s the one thing you care about over everything else? This trait/standard has a huge impact on culture because it influences who gets past the screening process. So make sure everyone agrees on it, and is willing to ruthlessly filter against it.
4. Over-communicate role requirements
This may sound obvious, but it's also where most hiring processes break down. Every stakeholder - internal teams, external recruiters, hiring managers - needs to be operating with the same detailed role information. Update it religiously as the role evolves. The time you spend here pays off exponentially in better-qualified candidates and faster decisions.
Paraform makes information-sharing & role setup fast and easy — you can communicate requirements and updated information with many external recruiters at once. You can also choose to share specific role requirements for similar successful roles with recruiters.
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