You start looking at what people have done, not their credentials. Drop the still implicit requirement for college degrees. People who have untraditional backgrounds have often gone through stuff that makes the standard path far more difficult or impossible. Make interviews be about how people think. Give them problems to solve, see how they approach them, not checks on whether they completed Algorithms courses.

You also don't want to go off of follower count - all that signals is you can get attention, not that you can work with others.