Hire slow, win fast: Why Linear's expensive and time-consuming hiring strategy actually works.
Linear's hiring approach is the same as their product philosophy. It’s only one sentence: Hire the best people and empower them to do their best work.
And it’s clearly effective. The team raised a $35M Series B last year from VCs including Accel and Sequoia. They’ve been profitable since 2021. They also boast a negative lifetime burn rate, meaning the company has more cash in the bank than they’ve raised from investors.
Linear is highly intentional with hiring, bringing on mostly ICs and keeping the team relatively small. How does Linear evaluate top talent and consistently hire excellent people? And of those few-and-far-between folks, how do they know who’s well-suited to working within the context of Linear’s team?
Real work for real insights
Standard interviews are like speed dating — they can feel superficial and be misleading. Linear believes the process doesn’t work if you want to find people with the right skills and judgment before you start working together.
So they do paid work trials.
Over the past 4 years, Linear has hired 50+ people with work trials, with a 96% retention rate.
Everyone from engineers to C-level candidates goes through one.
And it’s been happening since the company’s earliest days. Linear’s Head of Product, Nan Yu, actually did a 3-4 month paid contract, helping Linear craft their analytics product before joining the team full-time.
Work trials are expensive, for both the candidate and the team. It’s a big time commitment on both sides, before either has certainty over the outcome.
So they still conduct several interviews before the trial stage to de-risk the process, looking for multiple “strong yes” votes before moving a candidate forward. They want the trial to work out — it’s not only a chance for the company to evaluate the candidate, but also for potential employees to see if Linear’s way of working is the right fit for them.
Both parties have the opportunity to learn about each other, with much greater context than in a normal interview series. For example, strong candidates will prepare for typical interview questions ahead of time, so hiring managers can feel they’re just getting rehearsed answers. But the trials closely mimic a real project; candidates get access to tools like Figma, Slack, and GitHub to work on real problems.
Engineers might build a small feature. Content marketers might write a blog post and go-to-market plan. Designers might design a way to resolve comments. This reveals far more about judgment, skills, and taste than any pre-rehearsed answer.
After the trial, multiple “strong yes” votes are required from project team members before an offer is extended. And Linear hopes candidates will accept offers with not only a more informed perspective, but also a greater enthusiasm and conviction about the team they’re joining.
When you should do work trials, according to Linear
If it were up to Linear’s co-founders, all companies would be doing work trials. They help companies and candidates gain a clear understanding of fit, reducing hiring risks and improving long-term retention. But they’re especially important if your team has distinct hiring requirements and a unique way of working.
1. Do you have a unique team environment?
The Linear team is fully remote, across multiple time zones. People are used to working asynchronously; teams are fairly independent, assembling around a project and dispersing once the project is complete. Candidates need to have high self-motivation and agency to complete the trial, and to communicate effectively with the team online.
Adapting to a remote workplace can be difficult for people more used to in-person work. Doing a remote work trial gives candidates a taste of what that’s like before they commit.
2. Are you looking for highly opinionated decision-makers?
Linear doesn’t do A/B tests; co-founder Karri Saarinen believes it’s just a way to delay decision-making.
During his time as Principal Designer at Airbnb, Saarinen recalls A/B testing Airbnb’s new font (Airbnb Cereal). Does he remember what the results were? No, but they didn’t matter. The team spent weeks de-bugging the experiments before launching the new typeface anyway.
Decisions at Linear are driven by taste and opinions, not tests. Teams will validate and iterate on their ideas and assumptions but ultimately release new features and changes based on their convictions. They’ll see how these decisions perform at scale, and make adjustments as needed.
Sometimes, candidates may seem perfect on paper but struggle to form and execute their own ideas, because not every company encourages sticking to your own beliefs. Saarinen thinks having opinions is like having values: it’s hard to choose them, and even harder to defend them.
3. Do you have an extremely high bar for talent?
Technical skills are not enough to get hired at Linear. They look for critical thinking, taste, communication, and judgment in all roles. Their ideal candidate will be able to push the role forward and execute at an extremely high level — this quality is hard to screen for in interviews alone.
The work trials are an opportunity to see whether candidates have “good taste” in addition to technical skills — after all, Linear is (and always has been) a design-led product.
High risk, higher reward
Linear's approach can seem like a huge commitment. It's expensive, time-consuming, and demands vulnerability from both sides. It’s the opposite of the “fill seats fast” mentality of many companies in hyper-growth mode.
But while most companies hire based on assumptions, Linear hires based on tested hypotheses. For a company crafting a world-class product, it's the price of admission for assembling a world-class team. They know everyone they bring on is someone who will thrive in Linear’s unique environment.
Consider this: your next hire could change the trajectory of your company. How much effort are you willing to put in to get it right?
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