Picture this: You're Adam Wathan. You created Tailwind CSS. Your bank account is healthy. Your reputation? Stellar. You're offering $275,000 salaries. Remote work. The kind of job posting that should make LinkedIn's servers catch fire. 

You post the job…You wait…Then the avalanche begins.
1,600 applications

That's not a typo. That's sixteen hundred humans who clicked "apply." Sixteen hundred half of them with cover letters starting with "I'm passionate about TailwindCSS" (sure you are). Sixteen hundred résumés to review. For two positions.

Let's do the math that Adam had to live through. Five minutes per application; and that's being stingy, barely enough time to skim and judge. That's 133 hours. Three and a half work weeks of doing nothing but reading applications. No shipping features. No fixing bugs. No building the actual company that needs these hires.

For a 6-person startup? That's not a hiring process. That's a hostage situation. I feel sorry for Adam.

Here's where the story gets interesting and no body saw it coming. Not even Adam. After two months of résumé purgatory, after his eyes glazed over from reading the 847th "passionate about scalable solutions" cover letter, after all that... He hired zero people from those 1,600 applications.

The two people he actually hired? They never even applied. They came through the unexpected side door; through his network, through recommendations, through people saying "Hey, you should talk to this person."

As Adam himself put it: "We hired two people, and neither of them actually applied. Not how I expected it to go."

That's the polite version. The real version probably involved more colourful language and a strong drink. 

This wasn't even Adam's first dance with the hiring hunger games. Earlier, he'd weathered 900 applications for a single role. Nine hundred! That's a small town's worth of developers all wanting one job.

That time, he got lucky. Found Robin Malfait hiding in plain sight, not in the résumé pile, but in the Tailwind Discord, actually helping people, actually contributing, actually doing the work instead of just claiming he could.

Robin wasn't selling his potential. He was demonstrating his value. Every. Single. Day. But here's the thing about lightning, it's notoriously reluctant to strike the same place twice.

Let's talk about what Adam actually found in that digital mountain of applications:

But here's the tragedy, when you're drowning in 800 other "good" applications, how do you spot the great one? How do you find the Robin in the rough? You don't. You can't. The system doesn't let you.
"It's impossible to give everyone's application the attention that it deserves" Adam admitted. And he's right. By application #437, your brain has checked out. You're not evaluating talent anymore. You're playing résumé roulette and with no winner.

I like how Justin Jackson put it perfectly: "There are divisions at Microsoft that don't get 1600 applications. And they have all sorts of infrastructure, hiring departments and recruiters and process," A 6-person team versus 1,600 applications. It's like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Look closer at Adam's eventual hires. Robin Malfait, found in Discord, helping strangers debug their Tailwind problems at 2AM. Brad Cornes, built the Tailwind IntelliSense extension that millions use daily.

Notice the pattern?

They weren't applying for jobs. They were solving problems. 
They weren't sending résumés. They were shipping code. 
They weren't talking about their expertise. They were demonstrating them.

They had something more valuable than a perfect résumé, proven reputation in the actual community.

This isn't just Adam's problem. This is the problem.

"The best hires that we've made have been people who we've either known about their work or, someone that we know and trust has vouched for them." Adam sums it all 

Every founder, client and business owner has lived this nightmare; drowning in applications, knowing the perfect developer is in there somewhere, but having no realistic way to find them. It's like looking for a specific grain of sand on a beach. While blindfolded. During a hurricane. Any one found it!?

Every talented developer has lived the flip side; sending carefully crafted applications into the void, knowing they're probably application #1,247 in someone's inbox. Your years of experience, your late-night open source contributions, your elegant solutions to complex problems, all reduced to keyword matches in an ATS that might reject you because you wrote "Ruby on Rails" instead of "RoR." Isn't painful!

The traditional hiring system isn't just inefficient. It's actively hostile to both sides.

This is exactly why Rails Expert exists for Rails developers. Not to be another job board where résumés go to die. Not to be another platform that treats developers like commodities and founders like ATMs.

Rails Expert is built on a simple, radical idea: What if we started with reputation instead of résumés?

What if, like Robin and Brad, developers were already proven before any job or gig was posted? What if their contributions, their community standing, their actual shipped code spoke louder than any cover letter ever could?

Here's the deal:

For developers: Your GitHub commits are your résumé. Your gem contributions are your portfolio. Your blog is speaking out loud. The community already knows you're good. We just make that visible.

For founders/clients: No more 1,600 applications. No more résumé roulette. No more wondering if someone can actually do what they claim. Every Rails expert is pre-vetted, proven, and ready to ship from day one.

Meet Ali. She's been building Rails applications for nine years, solving authentication challenges that would make most developers weep. But she's never been Twitter-famous. Never given a conference talk. Just shipped solid code, day after day.

Ali joins Rails Expert. Over the next week, our vetting team goes deep. We review her profile against her actual digital footprint. That project she claims she led? We verify it. Those technical skills she lists? We check her GitHub to confirm. We talk to her former teammates and clients. Does she deliver? Can she communicate? Is she someone people want to work with again?

We even look for the red flags that kill projects: the ego problems, the communication breakdowns, the difference between what someone claims and what they've actually done. We reject 70% of applicants because we're not building another resume database. We're building a trust network.

Once approved, Ali creates her offering: "Rails 8 Authentication Architecture - From Zero to Production." She describes her approach, sets her rate, showcases her expertise. The heavy verification is already done—behind the scenes, by us.

Now here's Jason, a founder building a fintech startup. He needs authentication expertise. On LinkedIn, he'd get 500 applications from people who once watched a Rails tutorial. On Rails Expert? He sees 12 pre-vetted authentication experts.

Here's what Jason doesn't see but benefits from: We've already checked if Ali's claimed contributions are real. We've verified her work history. We've confirmed through references that she's not just technically capable but actually pleasant to work with. No ego disasters waiting to happen.

Jason reads Ali's offering, sees her approach to authentication challenges, sends her an inquiry. They connect, discuss the project, and they're ready to work. No gambling on strangers. No 133-hour vetting process. The detective work is already done.

That's the difference. We don't just collect profiles. We verify reputations.

Because if Adam Wathan, with all his success, reputation, and quarter-million-dollar salaries - can't make traditional hiring work, the system isn't difficult. It's dead. Time to build something better for Rails developer.

Join Rails Expert today. Where reputation beats résumés. Where community beats committees. Where shipping beats shopping for talent.

Ahmed Nadar