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> Is there some unspoken rule you pick up at FAANG or the Ivy League that the front door is for the unwashed and people in the know use back channels to get an

> Is there some unspoken rule you pick up at FAANG or the Ivy League that the front door is for the unwashed and people in the know use back channels to get an invitation? Err yeah kind of. I always recommend people find someone in the team they want to join and reach out to them personally or via a mutual. If you fill in the form without someone on the other end waiting to pick your application out of the firehouse it can get lost in the HR mystery machine. I think that’s a pretty common opinion? I’ve never gotten a job with a blind application. I’ve gotten every job I applied to when I did it by reaching out.

anon50118810 4y ago
At smaller places the HR mystery machine is one or two people with names and faces. If they're not passing resumes down to the tech teams then there is some problem that should be sorted out. The dynamic would have to be pretty broken for me to help some random stranger bypass the system everyone in the company has agreed to use. Plus, accepting back channel applicants could mess up relationships with external recruiters, or DEI hiring initiatives. Also the teams in smaller places are not anything spectacular, just backend, frontend, data, whatever, with a lot of overlap, so the idea that someone would be aiming for a particular team, meaning whoever is working on that part of the stack this month, is also strange. What you're saying makes sense with big, complex companies with huge HR processes and teams of varying levels of prestige and expertise. Probably a good idea if you're aiming particularly for a team at Google that works on a particular thing you like.