Thanks Aline, for yet another well researched article.
I have to say though, that in my experience, these experiments in sourcing work quite well when your hiring is small. The moment you hit some sort of scale, it becomes very very difficult, if not impossible to run and rely on such experiments.
E.g. in the first growth phase at Box, we were tasked with hiring 25 engineers a quarter. At that scale, the company deals with too many resumes and too many stakeholders in the hiring process. And at that point, you also have a group of people explicitly looking at resumes, less involvement from actual hiring managers, deadlines to meet, land to grab etc. Not saying one thing is better than the other, just that hiring at scale is an entirely different game.
The other thing, which is implied in the article, but may get lost if the reader isn't careful: regardless of how a candidate is sourced, the interview bar still remains the same. i.e. AJ also must have had to clear same or similar technical interviews like other engineers that got hired there.
Yeah, scaling this stuff is hard. I do think there's a big danger in scaling it by offloading filtering powers to non-technical people because then you have to rely on proxies. Proxies aren't inherently bad, of course, but the ones we have now (school and past employment) are pretty bad, and if ultimately, we're getting things wrong more than we're getting them right, it outweighs the temptation to cut costs and time.
For a company like Box with a super strong engineering brand, it's OK to have a pretty high false negative rate, of course. You can reject a lot of good people and still have a revolving door of others who want to work there. However, smaller companies often take their cues from big ones and adopt the same processes without realizing that they may not work the same way.
And yes, thank you so much for calling that out. AJ had to meet the same bar as everyone else. Fortunately, he killed it.
I have to say though, that in my experience, these experiments in sourcing work quite well when your hiring is small. The moment you hit some sort of scale, it becomes very very difficult, if not impossible to run and rely on such experiments.
E.g. in the first growth phase at Box, we were tasked with hiring 25 engineers a quarter. At that scale, the company deals with too many resumes and too many stakeholders in the hiring process. And at that point, you also have a group of people explicitly looking at resumes, less involvement from actual hiring managers, deadlines to meet, land to grab etc. Not saying one thing is better than the other, just that hiring at scale is an entirely different game.
The other thing, which is implied in the article, but may get lost if the reader isn't careful: regardless of how a candidate is sourced, the interview bar still remains the same. i.e. AJ also must have had to clear same or similar technical interviews like other engineers that got hired there.