Can telemetry hack your hiring?
Everything is a signal, at least to some extent. So what if your SDLC telemetry told you who to hire next? Emphasis on the maybe.
Can you use metrics (and the SDLC) to hack your hiring process?
I mean, maybe? I had this weird idea that you could improve hiring with telemetry.
Emphasis on the maybe.
Everything is a signal
The entire analytics space has been flipped on its head, from the way we’ve turned the ROI conversation into a leaderboard to the five-plus frameworks for measuring it. But it got me wondering about hiring, and how that’s changed.
Hiring the right talent is difficult. You usually match to the problem, or at least try to. So what if you let the telemetry guide that first decision? Everything is a signal, at least to some extent.
Spec starvation
Who: Product managersDesignersForward deployed engineers
Agent teams sit idle, or execute low-impact work, because the team can’t validate user value and business viability fast enough. Hiring more engineers will only generate tech debt faster. The telemetry points to a product discovery deficit.
Agent churn
Who: Principal architectStaff architect
High churn on agents and CLAUDE.md files, lots of agent rollbacks, or failing evals. That signals a lack of human architectural expertise.
Verification bottlenecks
Who: Supervisory capacity?
Work piling up at the verification gates. Anthropic has some great new approaches here with Code Review, but it may point to a supervisory gap. Maybe. This one is a bit of a stretch.
A seat at the SDLC table?
So is the future of hiring a seat at the SDLC table? I’m not sure yet, but I’ll definitely take a crack at the agentic workflows around it.