Insights August 12, 2026
Why SWE recruiting is broken
Keyword filters, spray-and-pray outreach, and JDs that read like a wishlist. The process was built for a different kind of work.
Software engineering hiring still runs on a stack from the last decade: a job description that lists every technology the company has ever touched, a Boolean search, and a pile of résumés ranked by whoever said “Kubernetes” the most.
That process fails in a specific way. It is good at finding people who are good at looking hireable. It is bad at finding people who can take an ambiguous problem and ship.
The JD is not a spec
Most software job descriptions are not specs. They are a committee document. Backend and frontend and ML and on-call and “culture fit.” A senior engineer reading it cannot tell what they would actually do in month one.
If you cannot write the role like a design doc — constraints, success, the systems involved — you will not evaluate candidates against it either. You will interview for vibes and a leetcode score.
Spray is not sourcing
Agency outreach that CCs twelve people “to see who bites” is not recruiting. It burns the only resource that matters: trust from engineers who already ignore recruiters by default.
Engineers talk. If your process treats them like inventory, the good ones stop answering.
Matching is the actual product
The hard part is not scheduling. It is scoring fit: this person, this codebase, this team, this stage of company. That is a retrieval and ranking problem with a human in the loop.
Most “AI recruiting” tools autocomplete emails. That is not matching. It is faster spray.
Advant exists because we think the product is the short list — and that you should be able to tell, from the first conversation, that the people in the middle have actually done the work.
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