Hire for ikigai: why passion beats the perfect resume

The last question I ask every candidate

I've interviewed a lot of developer advocates. Somewhere near the end, after we've gone through the talks they've given, the docs they've written, the communities they've grown, I stop asking about work. I lean back and ask what they're passionate about. Not "where do you see yourself in five years." Something real: tell me about a hobby, or something you're building on the side, especially with AI, that you do purely because you love it.

The answer to that question tells me more than the rest of the interview combined.

Passion equals authenticity, and you can't fake it

Here's the belief that drives how I hire: I can teach an advocate almost anything. The technical stack, the demo craft, the DevRel business side, how to read activation metrics, how to run a keynote track. All of it is learnable. I've taught it, and I've watched people pick it up fast. What I can't teach is passion. Either you have a thing you'd do whether or not anyone paid you, or you don't.

And the subject genuinely doesn't matter. Tell me you rebuild old motorbikes in your garage. Tell me you built an app to sell your homemade cupcakes to the neighborhood. Tell me you're training a model to identify birds in your backyard. I don't care what it is. I care that you do it because you love it, because passion is just authenticity with the receipts attached.

That matters for advocates specifically, because our whole job runs on trust. Developers can smell a marketing pitch from three slides away, and they can smell someone who doesn't actually care just as fast. Passion is the thing that leaks out around the edges. It shows up in the content you make, the way you answer a hard question on stage instead of dodging it, and honestly in how you show up to everything. You can't script that. You can only hire for it.

Ikigai: a reason for being

The Japanese have a word for this that I keep coming back to: ikigai. It roughly translates to "a reason for being," the thing that gets you out of bed. I like it better than "passion" because passion sounds like a spike of energy, and ikigai sounds like a direction. It's less about intensity and more about what you keep pointing yourself at.

When I'm interviewing someone, I'm listening for whether they have one. A candidate with ikigai talks differently about their side project than they do about their last job. They get faster, more specific, a little less polished. They tell me the annoying bug they fixed at midnight. A candidate who's just chasing the next title tends to give me a tidy answer and move on. Both can be good at the mechanics. Only one of them is going to make content that other developers actually want to read.

My ikigai is the trail, not the desk

I try not to ask for anything I can't answer myself, so here's mine. My ikigai is travel and adventure. Specifically slow travel, the kind where you learn a place and its culture on foot instead of from a tour bus window. Walking the Camino de Santiago, the mountains, the long routes where the point is the walking.

It permeates everything I do, and I mean everything. I build apps and AI agents about travel, like mycaminoguide.com, an AI guide that lets pilgrims ask anything so they can focus on the journey instead of the logistics. I write about it in my books. When I pick a side project, it's almost always downstream of the trail somehow. The work isn't separate from the passion. The work is how the passion shows up in public.

Walk, don't work: using AI to protect your ikigai

This is where the building comes in, and where a lot of people get me wrong. I love building and creating. But I build with a "walk, not work" mentality, which is a fancy way of saying I want to spend more hours doing the thing I love and fewer hours on the stuff I don't.

Geoffrey Moore has a useful frame for this in Dealing with Darwin: core versus context. Core is the work that actually differentiates you, the reason you exist. Context is everything else that has to get done but doesn't make you special. His example is Tiger Woods: the golf is core, the ad shoots are context. Most of us spend a shocking amount of our week on context, on the repetitive stuff that keeps the lights on but doesn't move anything.

So I use AI to automate as much of the context as I can. The repetitive, non-core work, the formatting, the first drafts, the scheduling, the summarizing. Every hour I claw back from context is an hour I get to spend on core, which for me eventually means more time on the trail. I'm not building AI agents because automation is cool. I'm building them so I can walk more. That's the whole point.

How to hire, and interview, for it

If you lead a DevRel team, steal the question. At the end of the interview, put the resume down and ask what they build or do for the love of it. Then listen to how they answer, not just what they say. Do they light up? Do they get specific? Can they not help themselves? That's the signal.

The red flag isn't an unusual hobby. The red flag is no hobby at all, or an answer that sounds workshopped. Someone with real ikigai can't give you the boring version, because the thing actually matters to them.

I've stopped optimizing for the most polished candidate. Polish is teachable. I hire for the person who has a reason for being, because that person brings it to every piece of content, every talk, and every developer they meet. You can teach the rest. You can't teach that.