“Diamond in the Rough” Based Tech Recruiting

What startups and tech companies miss about finding talent

I’d encourage you to go on LinkedIn and take a few minutes to look at the profiles of people in product management, finance, tech sales, and development at the top tech companies and startups — the FAANGs, the trendy newcomers like Stripe and Flexport, or even the older giants like IBM and Oracle.

What are the common themes you see in these profiles? For the most part, it comes down to three things:

1. Elite College Background (top 50 or top 25)
2. Right Major or Masters for the job (finance in finance, computer science in development, etc.)
3. Right Experience (did you do this job before?)

At first glance that makes a lot of sense. If I was a recruiter and I had 5000 applications for 50 spots, I’d start by figuring out easy ways to whittle down the application pool.

You have a pool of 5000 applicants for a data science position, might as well only look at the people with a degree in data analytics.

Now that pool of 5000 has become 1000. But that is still too many to fully look through.

Let’s just look at applicants from elite schools with 2 years of experience.

With that last pass, the pool becomes 100 of which one recruiter can more easily sort and interview accordingly.