In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.

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WorldMaker 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Some of that is easily explainable as just the ancient corporate mistake of seeing and paying recruiters as a commission-based sales force. They have vacations to pay for and sales quotas to meet and the easiest way to do that is volume over substance.

But yeah, anecdotally, I also came away with the impression that FAANG/GAFAM/whatever has certainly had some incredible years where their recruiters went above and beyond "this seems like a volume play in their personal rolodex" to "this company seems thirsty for headcount with no real idea what it needs the headcount for and no time to get to know the actual skills of the person being recruited".

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Aurornis 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind.

Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.

At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.

It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.

	▲	castwide 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.

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quantumsequoia 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's called pooled hiring, and it makes sense when a company is hiring lots of people for lots of teams. Most large companies do this when hiring rates are high. You end up with better employee-team match when you interview a candidate first and then match them based on their skills/interest, rather than contacting them for a specific role they may or may not be interested in.

Has nothing to do with whether hiring is for headcount or other reasons