Duck Tales: Hiring at DuckDuckGo, and why we have a 95% employee retention rate (Episode 12)

10 Dec 2025 · 20 min

Episode Duck Tales: Hiring at DuckDuckGo, and why we have a 95% employee retention rate (Episode 12)

0:00 19:55

In this episode, Beah (SVP, Product) and Zbig (Director, Talent) discuss our approach to hiring, and how it’s designed to reflect our unique, cross-functional and mostly async ways of working.

Show notes: Check out our careers page and open positions here.

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

Beah: Hello. Hi, everyone. Welcome to DuckTales, ⁓ where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, our product updates, our approach to AI, or how we operate as a company, which is the zone that today’s episode will fall in. ⁓

Zbig: Okay.

Beah: introduce myself briefly. I’m Beah Burger-Lenahan. I lead the product team here at DuckDuckGo. And we have with me Zbig. Hey Zbig, do want to introduce yourself?

Zbig: Yeah, of course. Hi, Beah. Hi, everybody. I’m Zbig. I’m on the Talent Acquisition team. I’ve been around for almost seven years now at DuckDuckGo, and I feel very privileged to have seen this amazing journey of us scaling the team from about 50 to over 350, where we are right now and I’m super excited to be here and talk about hiring.

Beah: Awesome, thanks, the big. Yeah, so today we’re gonna talk about how we hire, what that process looks like, why, and so forth. Hopefully it’ll be interesting to everyone. ⁓ So maybe just to get started, can you kind of lay out at like the highest levels of our approach to hiring, what that process looks like?

Zbig: course. Yeah. So I think at a, at a highest level, um, there is, you know, lot of intentionality and discipline to how we hire. So we would do that only when we have like a really clear and well articulated need. So when we’re scoping roles, right? Like we would want to deeply understand what the actual tangible problems are that we want that particular role to solve for us. And then we designed the hiring process to test for the skills, the competencies that are critical to being able to do that. So in practice, that means that we base that hiring process ⁓ largely on test projects ⁓ rather than interviews. Well, there are usually a couple of interviews in every process, but we definitely attach way more weight to test projects. We also tried to design that hiring process in way that ⁓ it’s truly like a two-way street and allows Canada to discover how we work. So, you know, they can make a well-informed decision at the end about whether or not this is good place for them. And I think one other thing worth highlighting ⁓ that comes out of this intentionality and discipline is the fact that, you know, never in the company history, we were forced to do any group layoffs. And when you look at the tech market these days, that’s very rare.

Beah: Yeah, because we only hire people that we know we really need.

Zbig: that will really advance the goals of the company, right?

Beah: Yeah, got it. Okay, thanks. So let’s talk about the projects since they are, as you said, kind of the core of our process. Are these projects, do we expect people to do them for free?

Zbig: Sure. Yeah. No, we offer payment, which is kind of like average bubbly, but it’s usually like anything from 50 to 100 US dollars per an estimated hour of work required to complete a project. These are, and this is just like recognize the time candidates put into those. These projects are always role specific and designed to simulate the actual work one would be doing on the job. You can complete them async on your own time. And I truly believe that allows candidates to demonstrate the best of their abilities without the typical pressure and stress of interviews. And also like when you think of the async format, that much more closely reflects how we work on a daily basis at DuckDuck. Because I think…

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