I've spent countless hours interviewing prospects and industry pros about hiring engineers and I have a pretty good idea of how it is done at companies across full spectrum of size, funding, locations, etc.

A few interesting things I've learned:

Why so many candidates get ghosted these days. How and why people cheat on interviews. (#cheatTech) What strategies work best for attracting best talent based on market. When recruiters add value - and when they don’t. I have a hypothesis that my product would be most useful to companies that are reluctant to spend large sums on recruiter fees or HR tools. My goal is to help them delay this step for as long as possible.

If you are hiring engineers at a company like this, I would love to talk to you! In exchange for your insight, I will share what I know about building robust hiring pipelines.

Drop me a line here: thisis4privacy@proton.me and I will share my calendly.

I can't get over your calendar provider naming themselves "calendly".

Anyway, in my experience, the best approach to hiring is to acknowledge that HR is effectively a branch of the legal department, and that it exists for compliance reasons. They will figure out which applicants are complaint with whichever hiring practices they have determined have the lowest legal risk, but aren't really capable of figuring out how well qualified any applicant is to perform or learn the duties of the job. You're going to have to do that on your own, from the pool of approved applicants.

I've found working with applicants to make a design decision can be extremely insightful. Chose something that's at the edge of the applicants experience, either from a project the applicant is working on, or something you are working on that the applicant finds interesting, and see how well the applicant can ask you questions and perform general research. Look for applicants that don't just seek the answer to the specific question at hand, but those who want to figure out how to answer that type of question in general.