Hiring software engineers
Small applicant pools, enormous variance in real capability, and a CV format that rewards listing tools over having used them properly.
What every engineering hire has in common
Technical CVs converge. The tools are a small, well-known set, listing them is free, and the format gives more space to breadth than to depth — so the strongest candidate and the most adjacent one often produce the same document. Every guide in this sector therefore does the same structural thing: it stops scoring the technology list, and starts scoring what someone did inside it. That single move changes the ranking more than any keyword filter ever will.
And where they diverge completely
After that, the sector splits hard. A backend hire turns on trade-off reasoning; a frontend hire on whether there is a designer; a platform hire on what happened at 3am; a QA hire on whether your problem is regressions or surprises. IT support is the outlier and the most consequential: it is the one role here where the obvious filter — a certification — removes a large share of the best candidates, and the page argues against it explicitly.
Pick the one you are hiring
Six engineering roles, six different guides. None of them ranks on the stack list.
Not on this list?
Describe the role in a sentence. Selene works from your conversation, not from a library — the guide comes back shaped around what you actually said.