Every resume looks great now. That's the problem.
Sam Baber runs people operations at a 100-person distributed company, and somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the applications hitting his team's inbox are machine-generated noise.
Then it got worse. One candidate made it to a second-round interview wearing what looked like two headsets, sitting in front of a fake background, and refused to show his hands on camera. Another group forged signed offer letters with real titles and salaries and emailed the company asking where their laptops were. That one ended with a call to the FBI.
So Sam's team gave up blind phone screens, a bias safeguard they'd defended for years, and now runs video from the very first call.
Josh and Sam get into what this means for engineering leaders who are hiring right now: how you verify a person is a person, why they rewrote every single job description in the company from scratch, whether Meta's 1-to-50 manager ratio experiment holds up, and what great hiring managers do that average ones don't.
Sam's answer on that last one is blunt. Invest in the front end. Block your calendars. And stop dragging candidates through your own indecision.
About Our Guest:
Sam Baber leads people operations at Kalkomey, a 30-year-old outdoor safety education company with roughly 100 employees spread across two dozen US states and two Canadian provinces. His team covers talent acquisition, learning and development, and the operational side of the people function.
He's spent 30 years in HR and talent, including stretches at a Fortune 100 company and 25 years across tech. He taught college English before that, which shows up in how he thinks about job descriptions, prompt writing, and why the words a leader chooses in a hiring debrief matter more than they think.
About Tech Teams Today:
Tech Teams Today is a podcast by Revelo where we sit down with engineering leaders to talk about how they build, scale, and lead high-performing tech teams. Real conversations. No fluff.
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- Josh Anderson (Field CTO): https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadavidanderson/
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