Not an answer to your question, but I have been bootstrapping a company and used domain experts as contractors, some of which I’m hoping to turn into full time offers.

I’ve approached them exclusively by looking for the exact kind of experience I need on github: this way I know they can deliver what I’m looking for.

This approach means there’s no need for an interview and the person starts getting paid from the first minute of work once they accept short cold email.

So far these have been the creators of small specific projects, under 100 github stars. Not world-class revolutionary, but of significantly higher quality than college coursework and a lot more polished and finished than any of my spare time side projects.

I wouldn’t encourage anyone to count on this for finding employment though - traditional methods are far more likely to land you a job or contracting work by many, many orders of magnitude.