"Let us take time out of your day to interview with us before we even have the work/a stated price to pay you" is a tough sell. Your role as the dev shop owner is to bring in clients and find contracts that give your devs stable work/income while up-charging enough such that you yield a profit off of their labor. If you believe in your ability to market and sell enough to make a preemptive job positing before you have said project, then you should be confident enough to give someone a price range for said position that will still make you profit. If you can't give a price, this implies that you might accept a low price for a project and try to coerce a dev into accepting shitty terms. I'm 100% positive that there are devs reading this exact exchange who have experienced something like this. People will make promises like "well I'll pay you more for future projects, I just need you to accept this low pay now". Then later, such an offer never materializes. Even if you mean well when you tell a dev that at the time, you'll often find yourself in a situation where you overestimated your abilities, or misread the market, etc. etc. that ends up with the dev getting fucked over. When people call this offer a "scam", this is the exact kind of thing they're referring to, it's based in experience. So if you believe in your ability to sell such contracts where everyone will be happy, commit to a minimum price of labor from the get go. This is what a good faith offer looks like, you will have a better relationship and you will get better output as well. Tell someone "I won't sell your labor below X price, the (reasonable) max opportunity is Y price, do an interview with us and I'll put your name on our shortlist once work comes up" <-- that's something that I think (if prices are reasonable) some devs would be willing to do. Then when you deliver on your word, you will have a currency much more valuable than money: trust & respect.