Post a job description for a senior software engineer, make it remote-friendly, and within hours you may find yourself staring at a thousand applications. You run them through AI tools, screen a few, and come away underwhelmed. Nobody blows you away. Hiring is broken.
What went wrong? How did we get here?
The Application Flood
Much like the Common Application in U.S. college admissions created an explosion of applicants, one-click job application features have overwhelmed employers. Add AI-powered tools that let job seekers auto-apply to hundreds of openings, and it’s no wonder hiring managers are buried under resumes.
On the employer side, AI tools now help winnow giant lists quickly. But here’s the catch: the first filter is almost always a checklist of skills and years of experience. For engineers in particular, that leaves out the hardest thing to measure on a resume: true talent.
The result? You interview people who look perfect on paper for your stack and seniority level—but the spark isn’t there. You’re left sifting through volume without finding stars.
Fishing in the Wrong Pond
If you only post jobs to capture active seekers, you’re fishing in the wrong pond. The best engineers—many of them—have never actively applied for a job in their careers. They rely on trusted peers and networks to surface opportunities worth their time. They ignore inbound spam. They aren’t blasting résumés across job boards.
For startups especially, this creates a structural disadvantage. Until you’re a household name, you’re invisible to these engineers. You’re left with two weak options: filtering the flood of active applicants or paying recruiters to spam outbound messages. Neither consistently brings in the best talent.
The Missing Signal
That’s why developing a talent signal that goes beyond résumés is so critical. Skills and experience may tell you what someone can do—but not who will become a standout on your team.
The strongest signal in engineering is a peer recommendation. Who do great engineers trust? Who would they vouch for? And how enthusiastically? These answers tell you more about potential than any keyword-stuffed résumé.
At Telescoped, we built our entire network around this principle. Our peer-driven graph network surfaces talent that traditional hiring screens miss—engineers validated by the people who know their work best. Because engineers in our network control the outreach they receive, we attract the passive job seekers you’ll never find in résumé floods.
(And if you want to experiment with this yourself, we even created a free Chrome plugin to layer peer signals onto LinkedIn job searches.)
The Road Ahead
Hiring isn’t going to get easier in the short term. The application firehose will only get stronger as tools for job seekers proliferate. The companies that win will be the ones who fish in the right pond and read the right signals.
That’s what we’re building at Telescoped: a hiring process where you don’t just find people who look right on paper—you find the engineers who can change the trajectory of your company.
If you agree hiring is broken, drop us a line—or better yet, try the Telescoped network yourself. The future of engineering hiring can be so much better.
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