At Duolingo, job interviews begin the moment the candidate gets into the car. Luis von Ahn, billionaire co-founder and CEO of the language learning app, revealed on the podcast The Burnouts, by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, that how a candidate treats the driver on the way from the airport to the office can determine whether they are hired or not — regardless of how impressive their resume is or how much they please interviewers during the process.
Entrepreneur von Ahn, who co-founded Duolingo in 2011 with Severin Hacker, recalled an occasion when the company had been looking for a chief financial officer for about a year. The candidate had a strong resume, and the entire hiring committee “really liked” him, he told The Burnouts in a February interview.
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But “it turned out he was quite rude to the driver on the way from the airport to the office,” von Ahn said. “And that made us not hire him.”
The CEO of Duolingo, which has a market value of $4.65 billion, learned about this because he pays taxi drivers to evaluate whether candidates are worth hiring.
“We believe that if a person is rude to the driver, they will probably be rude to other people, especially those below them,” he said.
It’s important for Duolingo to hire the right person because of how much the company and von Ahn have invested in artificial intelligence. In April last year, von Ahn said he was eliminating contract employees and replacing them with AI.
“We cannot wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” von Ahn wrote in a memo posted on LinkedIn in April 2025. “We would rather act urgently and accept occasional small losses in quality than move slowly and miss the momentum.”
Although von Ahn’s taxi driver test is unconventional, candidates in today’s extremely competitive job market are being evaluated in ways they may not even realize.
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A job market where every detail counts
His approach comes at a time when getting a job has never felt so overwhelming.
Tech hiring has slowed dramatically, with posted jobs dropping about 36% from pre-2020 levels, according to Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent Report.
At the same time, more than 40,000 people working in technology have already been laid off this year, data from Layoffs.fyi shows.
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Furthermore, selection processes have become much longer and more complex. Candidates often face five to eight rounds of interviews, panel presentations, case studies and personality assessments before receiving an offer.
The average time to hire in the United States 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 all this, culture and behavior assessments have quietly become a standard part of the process — even when candidates don’t know they are being evaluated.
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Duolingo’s CEO isn’t the only one looking beyond the resume and interview for signs of character.
Trent Innes, former managing director of accounting platform Xero and currently director of growth at SiteMinder, told The Ventures podcast — in an episode published in September 2024 — that he uses a “coffee cup test” to evaluate candidates.
When a candidate arrives for the interview, the interviewer takes him to the kitchen to get a drink.
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“Then we come back with the drink, we do the interview and one of the things I always observe at the end is: is the person willing to take the empty cup back to the kitchen?”, said Innes.
Anyone who leaves a dirty cup behind after the interview and doesn’t offer to take it back to the kitchen is automatically discarded.
“You can develop skills, gain knowledge and experience, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to attitude — and the attitude we talk about a lot is the idea of ’wash your coffee cup,’” he said.
Even without unusual tests, several CEOs of large companies publicly highlight the importance of flexibility and attitude to get a job.
Amazon has structured its hiring process around its Leadership Principles, with interviewers trained to identify red flags, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has openly advocated valuing discretion and intellectual curiosity over formal credentials.
“I care as much about how you treat our cashiers, security guards, and receptionists as I do about how you deal with CEOs,” Dimon said in a July 2024 LinkedIn interview. “It’s those 300,000 people who matter, and we need to do right by everyone.”
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