Hire Every Engineer Like You'd Hire a VP
businessasusual.io
businessasusual.io
Maybe it works better with management tiers where their impact is more indirect, and there are fewer of them, which mitigates the problems.
If I have a team in pain and we need more people on it, or different people, I don't know if I can wait six months for the one person I want to hire to become available and willing. Sometimes, you gotta go with who is available.
I think the point is that you should be building your network of folks before you need them. And that you should go to your network with a specific ask rather than "who is a good engineer?".
Related, slightly: I had a business idea a few years ago when things were tighter for engineers to build a system that collected interested engineers email addresses and send them content about what the company was building. Basically a drip campaign tool for engineering talent rather than sales. I still think this would work for a company that was hiring regularly but that wasn't sexy enough to have name recognition.