> My sense of it is that the valley believes recruiting to be a "top of the funnel" problem. My experience says that it isn't. My hypothesis is that the ineffic

> My sense of it is that the valley believes recruiting to be a "top of the funnel" problem. My experience says that it isn't. My hypothesis is that the inefficiency is in qualifying candidates (deeper in the funnel), and that if you can fix that problem, the top of the funnel can sort itself out without much effort. My sense is, in addition, that Valley conventional wisdom sees missing the left-field successes you mentioned at Matasano as acceptable collateral damage in the name of preventing "bad hires"[1] and finding people who will "hit the ground running"[2]. I think both of those are myopic and misguided, and contributing to the "talent shortage" these companies so frequently complain about. [1] Quoted because, when pressed, hiring managers almost always define them in terms of their worst-case incarnations. [2] Again, the definition of this phrase is rather nebulous, but seems to conflate having experience with a laundry list of technologies that overlaps with the set of technologies used by the company's current products with having a reduced learning curve on said products.