Hiring a mobile app developer
A small pile of applicants, all with a portfolio link, and no way to tell from a CV which of them has ever owned an app after launch day. This is a role where the résumé is the least useful artefact in the application.
Anyone can ship version one. Almost every mobile CV carries an App Store or Play link, and the link is close to worthless as a signal: it can't tell you whether they built it or joined afterwards, whether it has been updated since launch, or whether it has eleven users. The things that actually separate a strong mobile hire — crash-free rate, release cadence, what they did when an OS update broke production for everyone — are invisible on paper and rarely volunteered. Meanwhile a beautifully designed solo project with twelve downloads reads better than three years of unglamorous maintenance on an app a hundred thousand people depend on.
From a job title to a guide, in one conversation
Selene asks the things a mobile role actually turns on. Not "how many years of Swift" — which platform, who owns release, and what happens to this app after it ships.
Platform, ownership, and what happens after launch
For an engineering role Selene goes after the stack and the scale it runs at. For a mobile role specifically that means native versus cross-platform, who holds the signing keys and the release process, and whether this person inherits an existing codebase or starts one — because those answers change which candidates are even plausible.
One sentence changes the guide
The answer is usually something you already believed but had never had to write down. Here it inverts the whole guide: it moves the bar from what have you built to what have you kept alive, and those two questions rank the same pile of CVs in almost opposite orders.
Exceptional, not just good —
“Someone who's owned an app after launch. Shipping v1 is the easy half.”
→ Post-launch ownership became the top-weighted criterion; portfolio breadth stopped being scored at all.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria, typed and weighted, every one of them editable. Note the shape: two must-haves rather than six, because a guide where everything is critical ranks nobody — and the top weight sits on the thing the manager said mattered, not on the longest line of the job description.
No licences, no registration, no eligibility questions
Worth saying plainly, because it's the opposite of a care or driving role: there is nothing here to gate on before scoring. No certification a candidate either holds or doesn't, no shift pattern to confirm. Every applicant goes straight to being read properly, and the whole job is separating depth from surface — which is exactly the case where a consistent, evidence-backed guide earns its keep.
Scored on evidence, not on the portfolio link
Selene never receives the candidate's name or the raw CV — she scores a blind, structured profile. What comes back is a score per criterion with what she found, what she couldn't, and how sure she is.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Asking what this mobile role actually turns on, and building the requirements from your answers
- Reading every applicant against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- Ranking them and telling you who to advance and who to decline
- Prepping an interview brief that probes the gaps she found — like that release-process question
Yours
- Getting developers to apply — Selene doesn't post to job boards or source people
- Any technical exercise or code review; she reads what candidates wrote about their work, not their repos
- The interview itself, with her brief in hand
- The offer, and every call that matters
See what she builds for your mobile role
Native or cross-platform, greenfield or a codebase someone left behind — describe it in a sentence and watch the guide come out different.