When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
While the definition of senior engineer is a bit squishy, I agree completely that as some one gets more senior they increasingly choose the company rather than the other way around.<p>I&#x27;m soft-launching a product to help companies recruit and I&#x27;ve done about a dozen customer development interviews with hiring managers (5 person companies through FAANGs) in the last two weeks. One thing I heard constantly was that referrals are their best source of candidates and that for roles with 7+ years of relevant experience they actually don&#x27;t believe good candidates will come in by just randomly applying on their website&#x2F;LinkedIn&#x2F;etc. I had an engineering manager tell me &quot;a senior engineer actively searching for a job is a negative signal of candidate quality&quot; as opposed to going through somebody in their network or connecting with somebody at the company first. I had another manager tell me for the senior roles he&#x27;s hiring for he only considers candidates explicitly sourced by his internal recruiter who searches LinkedIn for the specific skillset or people who are referrals for the specific job. This isn&#x27;t some CTO level position; this is just a role for a ~10 years of experience individual contributor. Applications from the website go straight to the trash can. The implication was people with those skills aren&#x27;t looking for jobs.