Hiring for engineers is broken: noisy filters, recruiter gatekeeping, and wasted engineering time create a market where good candidates struggle and companies chase the same homogenous pool.
The core problem is that the hiring process for engineers has become an inefficient market where smart people can't easily talk to other smart people. Recruiters act as gatekeepers, adding noise and delay, while companies waste engineering time on low-yield interviews. This misalignment hurts both candidates and firms, turning hiring into a costly, frustrating experience.
From a candidate's view, the journey starts with endless job boards, generic applications, and repetitive recruiter calls that reveal little about the actual work. Even well-connected engineers face a barrage of resume requests, cover letters, and quizzes that don't test real ability. Those without networks get ignored entirely, leaving a talent pool that never gets a fair shot.
From the hiring manager's perspective, the process begins with a vague brief that gets twisted into a checklist of years and school names. Recruiters pull the same filtered candidate lists from tools like LinkedIn Recruiter, then send generic outreach that yields single-digit response rates. Engineers spend roughly 40 hours per hire while recruiters add another 15, a ratio that makes the system unsustainable.
The article argues that true improvement requires functional credentialing and disintermediating recruiters so candidates can signal competence directly. Existing solutions such as Hired, Triplebyte, and AngelList fail because they lack trusted performance data and can't convince companies to rely on them. Without reliable credentials, the market stays stuck in its inefficient, biased loop.
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