I trimmed first-round calls to 18 minutes with a two-question rubric (impact and depth), and pass-through to onsite moved from 22% to 37% in August. Pairing that with alumni Slack and targeted GitHub outreach has beaten LinkedIn InMails for mid-level engineers — curious what tweaks to sourcing or interview flow are working for you right now.
Trimmed our first screen to 15 minutes with one impact/depth prompt and pass-through bumped about 10 points, similar to your 18‑min cut. > LinkedIn InMails for mid-level engineers — curious what tweaks to sourcing or interview flow — we only beat it by warming outreach with a tiny issue/PR on their repo and having the hiring manager send the note. Caveat: this flops for new grads, so we swap to a 20‑min paired debugging snippet.
Piggybacking on @chris77: I ask candidates in the invite to bring one “before/after” artifact (PR link, metric screenshot, or graph) and spend 6–8 minutes walking it; signal got crisper and pass-through went up, but I offer a verbal summary option if sharing is sensitive.
I’ve had good results sending a 1‑minute pre-read — ‘share one tradeoff you made and what you’d do differently now’ — then booking a 12‑minute call to dig only into that; our next-step rate ticked up and the signal’s cleaner than InMails. Small caveat: it favors strong writers, so I also accept a 60‑sec voice note, @tevans69.
Switched to a 10‑minute “show me one thing you deleted and why” screen paired with a 6‑minute live code review; way stronger signal than our old 25‑min chit‑chat. On sourcing, your GitHub > InMail tracks — we leave a thoughtful comment on a recent PR, wait 24h, then DM; reply rate beat LI by about 2x. Small caveat: it skews to OSS‑visible folks, so I offer a private redacted diff option.