Would you hire a stadia employee or a search employee?

Stadia was an incredibly impressive technical product. It failed because of terrible product and business vision, not its engineering.

I'd hire whichever one did better on the interview. Stadia had excellent engineers working on it and the product itself was technically amazing.

Yes? I'm not sure how that's even a question. Passing on someone that seems like a good hire because they worked on a technically impressive thing which had some major non-technical problems would be really stupid. Both of those are things which would make me more interested in bringing them in for an interview, not less.

I suppose I should have worded it differently to follow up on the "unconscious bias of recruiters" angle

At least in the SF Bay Area, I'd be careful with this assumption: "Interviewers don't know whether your projects were successful or not ..."

The number of degrees of freedom between any two people is remarkably small. As someone who has interviewed and hired perhaps two or three hundred people over my career, it was rare that as an interviewer I didn't know more about the interviewer than their resume stated. Later in my career, the depth of information in "ATS" (Applicant Tracking Systems) applications at companies has only gotten deeper. Social media posts, comments on HN :-), peer analysis from others hired from the same company, Etc.

What is more, from Google's perspective, a lot of their hiring teams who used these systems to screen candidates were contractors and have often been laid off when Google needed to make better numbers. They didn't just "forget" everything they knew, a number of them with whom I worked, contacted me post Google employment after setting up their own business as recruiters.

Not saying its good or bad, just that it is important that a lot of information exists that "follows you" around. The longer you work, the more senior you become, the more it fills with a ratio of "haters/meh/supporters" info.

The thing that always annoyed me and I had to ASK recruiters to send me candidates that matched but their "whisper network" suggested they were problems/losers. Sometimes just getting past that screen is really tough for someone.

EDIT: sometimes the wording is tricky.

I think I only ever interviewed and worked in big tech companies that recruits candidates at global scale. When interviewing a candidate, we try to avoid bias and pick objective signals. Whether their past projects got canceled is the type of things we actively don't want to know about. But now I suppose that in companies with smaller pools of local candidates, this type of information can make a difference.

That is great. Does your company ever use third party recruiters (aka "head hunters")? If so, how do you structure your recruiting contract with them so that you avoid bias and use objective signals? I'm wondering what language one could put in such a contract. I'm imagining something like this:

"Recruiter will supply all sources of information consulted prior to offering candidate for consideration, if it is discovered that undisclosed sources were used, recruiter agrees to forfeit their fee."

I don't think we do. The modus operandi is to cast a wide net, interview any potential candidate that have at least some chance to pass the technical interviews (based on resume or referral, recruiters don't dig very deep). Pre-screener is 1-2 coding interviews, then if ok, on-site interviews. I believe lots of big tech companies, including FAANGs, proceed this way.

Fair enough. My experience is that contract recruiters will not even pass pre-screen candidates that they "hear negative scuttlebutt about". I understand it, they want to send candidates with what they think are the most likely to be hired, and my experience is that the recruiters understanding of "likely" may unconsciously bias them.

Employed on site recruiters you can have a good conversation with and say "Even if you hear they are not good, if they check the boxes on where we're looking I would like to review." Which, given they are evaluated by candidates delivered rather than candidates hired, works out.

Did you just say Google is indexing HN comments with applicants? Can you provide more info?

Google uses all available information in its hiring and screening tools.