I’m afraid I did it quite informally and at very small scale: first recruited mod was someone i knew well from gplus. Second recruited mod was someone who was a regular and high quality contributor. I wanted people who are calm, mature, thoughtful, and on board with the kind of content and kind of behaviour I want to see on the forum. To some extent these are qualities one can see from online behaviour. I’ve never met either of them, and the team has remained like this since 2019. Oh hang on, I met one of them last year, for the first and so far only time, when he came over the ocean for other reasons. We had a great afternoon of chat.
Edit: I see now that I DMd these two people to discuss moderation-like matters some months before I promoted them to mods.
And eventually I discovered