This is very true, and if you find that for your use case, you really need that bigger fire hose, then by all means go for it. But you have to agree you're shifting different costs around.

If you go with the fire hose, you have to pay the weed-through-tons-of-resumes costs, often including build outs of application systems, standardized portals and application/interview pipelines, third-party recruiter overhead, etc.

I would argue that even if the fire hose is allowing you more access to the tail of some candidate distribution, it is not worth that cost, and in all likelihood the best candidates would be reachable through other means anyway.

In reality, many of the companies that use these big recruiting platforms designed to wrangle an internet fire hose of resumes fall into two camps (yes, an oversimplification, but often useful):

- big corps who want a large pool of resumes solely to put downward pressure on salary -- these are the same companies that will ask you to do a 20 minute song and dance interview with someone from HR right at the start, which is nothing but pretense to ask about your salary requirements, and immediately reject you if you either won't say or say something too high. This kind of place right away communicates that engineering managers don't have the power to hire good people, only people who were cheap enough to pass the initial HR filter.

- Places that cargo-cult copy the hiring process of other, uncommonly successful places.

When you focus on cultivating a smaller network of places to request resumes, you do pay a cost. You do immediately prevent yourself from good candidates who wouldn't just happen to be in your targeted applicant communities. But this is life. Trade-offs. Do you know that this cost is worse than all the costs associated with the huge big-box applicant pipelines? I mean, people using those pipelines are still often heard griping about how hard it is to find candidates and how long it takes. My experience has been that the benefits of narrow, specialty / community focused requests for applicants work out to be a lot better overall, even if I have to endure some unpleasant costs to do it that way. No method is perfect, so you have to look at the trade-offs. And as always, your mileage may vary.

> "The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low-quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as high-quality for individual benefit."

I actually really disagree with this, and I think it just perpetuates the myths about tech hiring. In reality, very few applicants are "masquerading" (and, by the way, all applicants are in it for individual benefit). People seriously overestimate how many applicants are "fakers" -- especially because they will ask some asinine hazing trivia, like some useless question about esoteric data structure internals, and then when someone can't answer it perfectly in 20 minutes, they'll be declared a "faker" and the interviewer will jump on Hacker News and write some comment embellishing the situation, as if the candidate ran away in terms when asked to solve FizzBuzz, despite having 10 Ivy League degrees on their resume. It's nuts.

Few people are fakers. It's safe to assume applicants are sincere, and then technically probe them. If they can't speak with you in good technical detail about their experience or studies, it doesn't meant they are a faker, but it might mean they aren't the match for your role. Be nice to them, give them useful feedback, and move on.

But I can't even imagine how awful it must be to harbor such a cynical attitude that you need to be significantly worries about people "masquerading" during interviews. It really, truly just isn't true, not even when you do use a fire hose stream of resumes.