Duolingo CEO’s taxi driver test decides who gets hired—before the interview even starts

At Duolingo, job interviews start the moment a candidate steps into a car.

Luis von Ahn, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of the language-learning app, revealed on Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni’s The Burnouts podcast how a job candidate treats their driver from the airport to the office can make or break their chances of getting hired—regardless of how impressive their résumé looks or how much they like the candidate in the interview process.

Entrepreneur von Ahn, who cofounded Duolingo in 2011 with Severin Hacker, recalled a time when the company had been seeking a chief financial officer “for like a year.” The candidate had a strong résumé, and the entire hiring committee “really liked” the applicant, he told The Burnouts in a February interview. 

But “it turned out that they were pretty mean to their driver from the airport to the office,” von Ahn said. “And that made us not hire them.” 

The CEO of Duolingo, which has a market cap of $4.65 billion, knew this because he pays taxi drivers to evaluate whether candidates are worth hiring. 

“Our belief is if they’re going to be mean to the driver, they’re probably going to be mean to other people, particularly people under them,” he said. 

It’s important to Duolingo to hire the right person because of how much the company and von Ah...