> If you want people to join you for your intangibles, make sure that they hear it from your employees, not from you. In a sense yes, it's hit or miss. I agree

> If you want people to join you for your intangibles, make sure that they hear it from your employees, not from you. In a sense yes, it's hit or miss. I agree with you that knowing people who work in a place is very important, as you're going to get a far more fair picture out of them (e.g., they're more likely to give a truthful picture of the hours worked, legacy technologies used, etc...). Generally, it's also a lot easier to get an interview (for a core position) if you're going through a referral rather than by sending out your resume or responding to a recruiter. You can also judge the quality of the team and interesting-ness of their work by talking to the engineers, discussing the projects they work on and if there's open source work, reading their code. Yes, it's hard to get a complete picture of the intangibles, but it's still a bad idea to base the entire decision solely on a single number.