>PS: It’s odd, but I suspect a random process may actually work better because the great people actively looking for jobs are likely to be bad at getting them.
Somebody should almost build a toy startup around that random process eg Chatroulette for hiring. that might make sense.
However you would either need a great process for quickly terminating bad hires or keep this strategy very secret. Otherwise word spreads and your hiring pool quickly turns from "random" to "every freeloader in the industry".
'open-source contributions' might be what job postings are trying to capture with this ... presumably the longer a good developer is unemployed the more likely they are to contribute to open source
Somebody should almost build a toy startup around that random process eg Chatroulette for hiring. that might make sense.