Your Minecraft obsession could get you a job.
Ramp co-CEO Eric Glyman shared how his fintech company finds its talent. He told David Senra that he looks for candidates with “spikes,” or specific areas where they excel.
For one group of Ramp employees, that spike was their ability to wield a digital pickaxe. When the employees were 15 years old, Glyman said they would spend 80 to 100 hours a week playing Minecraft.
The group operated lucrative private Minecraft servers — a growing side hustle for Gen Zers. The first gamer that Ramp hired paid his way through college on the server’s profits, the co-CEO said.
“He became a small-businessperson when he was, quite literally, very small,” Glyman said.
That employee then referred other Minecraft developers. “You find these people who you would have missed,” he added.
These are the kind of spikes Glyman looks for, from video games to sports. A candidate’s spike can also be their grades, or some “incredible work” that they’ve put out. It’s about “drive,” he said.
Glyman said he wasn’t very interested in résumés. Rather, he was looking for “proof of work” — the awards and projects that a candidate can rack up.
“Part of the hiring process is actually going and trying to look for people who are very active on GitHub,” he said. “We’re trying to meet people who were leaders in different bizarre fringe communities.”
Other executives are scouring GitHub for talent. Leaders from Cognition, Base44, and Replit previously told Business Insider that they search the coding platform for good candidates.
If you don’t have a Minecraft side hustle or a deep GitHub repository, it always helps to know someone. Glyman said that a “really intensive interview process” — as in, 15 hours and multiple rounds — still won’t teach him everything about a candidate.
“In two business days of working with someone, you’re going to have more information about working with that person,” he said. “So, we rely a lot on referrals.”
