[johan_larson]

Maybe the answer then is to push the decision down to someone for whom the hiring is a big decision, and who does not have to work at scale. An individual group manager has a lot of incentive to make a good hiring decision if the person being hired will be working in his group. And the manager does not have to hire so many people that he needs to consider it a large-scale project and adopt corresponding expediencies. Things can remain personal.

And if the organization for some reason needs to work at scale, add an initial lightweight sanity-checking and routing to the correct group. But keep the main hiring decision with the group the engineer would be working in.