The Best Hires Rarely Come From Job Boards | Experts Circle

For most of my career, I wasn’t formally responsible for hiring.

I was a software engineer, working closely with hiring managers and regularly involved in interviews—often helping assess technical depth and real-world fit. Sitting in that position gave me a clear view of how hiring decisions were actually made, and where the process quietly broke down.

What struck me most wasn’t a lack of effort. Everyone involved genuinely wanted to make good hires. The problem was something else.

Hiring doesn’t fail because of a lack of talent

There is no shortage of capable people.

What’s missing is signal.

Most hiring systems optimise for volume: more applications, more CVs, more outreach. On paper, that looks efficient. In practice, it creates noise. When too many candidates look “qualified,” decision-making slows down, risk increases, and genuinely strong people get filtered out for reasons that have little to do with their ability.

I saw excellent engineers struggle to surface through generic processes, while others advanced simply because they knew how to perform well within the system.

Where the strongest hires actually come from

Over time, a pattern became impossible to ignore.

The hires that worked best usually came through people who already understood the role—engineers, team leads, or specialists who knew what good looked like because they were doing the work themselves.

These weren’t polished referrals. They were contextual judgments.

Someone would say, “I’ve worked with this person. I know how they think. They’d fit here.” And more often than not, they were right.

That kind of judgment isn’t based on keywords or CV structure. It’s based on lived experience.

Informal referrals already run hiring—quietly

Every experienced hiring manager knows this, even if they don’t always say it out loud.

The most valuable hires tend to happen quietly:

• through conversations
• through trusted introductions
• through people vouching for people they respect

But these referrals are fragmented and informal. There’s usually no structure, no accountability, and no clear way to recognise or reward the expertise behind them.

As a result, the people creating the most value in hiring often remain invisible.

What hiring systems usually get wrong

Most platforms are designed around efficiency at scale. That makes sense—but it comes with a trade-off.

They optimise for speed, volume, and automation, while treating human judgment as an optional extra. Expertise becomes secondary to process.

But hiring is not a purely transactional problem. It’s a judgment problem.

The more senior or specialised a role becomes, the more damaging it is to remove context from the equation.

A different belief about hiring

Experts Circle was built around a simple belief:

The people best placed to identify great talent are those who already understand the work.

Not recruiters chasing volume.
Not platforms optimising for clicks.
But experienced professionals who can recognise quality early and confidently.

Technology should support that judgment—not replace it.

Closing thought

At its best, hiring has always been human.

It works when trust, experience, and context lead the way—and when the people applying that judgment are visible, accountable, and fairly rewarded.

We’re not trying to invent a new idea.
We’re giving structure to something that has quietly worked all along.