We don't have jobs.

Belong has never posted a role we were happy with. Every job description we've written described the work we needed last quarter — a React Native engineer here, a partnerships lead there — and then the work moved, because the work always moves.

What we were really doing was writing down a shape and hoping a person turned up who matched it. Everyone does this. It's a strange way to build a company.

So we stopped. There are no openings on this page. There's one description of the kind of person who does well here, it doesn't change, and it's available to anyone who wants to test themselves against it. If you clear it, we'll find the work. That order — person first, work second — is the whole idea.

Two things, and they're related.

The first is that the floor moved. A person who knows how to direct a set of agents does work this year that a team of five did last year. That's not a prediction, it's what our own week looks like. Which means the question worth asking about someone is no longer how many years have you done this — it's what can you build, and what have you already built. Years are a proxy that stopped predicting anything. We removed it.

The second follows from the first. If a piece of work can be fully specified, done alone, and handed back without a conversation, that work is increasingly not a job. It's a task, and tasks are getting handled. What's left — the part that's actually scarce — is judgment, taste, knowing which problem matters, and the ability to think it through out loud with other people who care as much as you do.

That happens in a room. It genuinely does not happen as well on a call, and we've stopped pretending otherwise. So we hire in person, in Stockholm or New York, and we hire for the part of the work that no agent is close to doing.

Where you studied, whether you finished, what year, or how long you've been doing this.

None of it is on the form. We look at what you make and how you are in a room, and it turns out that's a much better test.

We're building a company on the belief that devotion should count for something — that showing up, over and over, for something you love ought to leave a record and ought to come back to you.

So we look for devotion, we look for what people have actually made, and we don't much care what path they took to get here. Same idea, pointed inward.