The archetype is a description of comfort.

I wrote a sourcing guide for a team once, built it around a profile I admired, and then had to write the correction into the same document.

This was at Grammarly, on a design team of several dozen. I was hiring across growth, systems, ops, writing and research at once. At that volume you cannot personally source every role, so you teach the team to do it, and teaching means giving them something concrete to hold. Everybody reaches for an archetype. Here is a profile that would be perfect for this role, here is why.

## What I put in the guide

I used a former colleague's profile, because it was the clearest example I had. A strong mix of large companies and startups. Long tenure in each. A couple of co-founded side projects. Work sitting at the intersection of product, marketing and brand.

Every one of those is a defensible signal and I stand behind the list. Long tenure suggests someone stayed long enough to see their own decisions play out. Founding something suggests they can operate without a system around them. The intersection work suggests range. Nothing in the list is arbitrary.

He was also a white man who had enjoyed a long run of environments that treated him well. And several of the signals I was praising are downstream of that.

## Tenure is a measurement of the employer

Long tenure reads as depth and commitment. It is also, in large part, a measure of whether the places you worked were tolerable.

A designer who left three roles in four years because each one involved a steady supply of micro-aggressions produces a résumé our shorthand calls job-hopping. That shorthand is describing the employers, not her. The signal is real, it's just pointing at something other than what we think.

The same goes down the list. Co-founded side projects need free evenings, which says something about someone's home life before it says anything about their ambition. Range across product, marketing and brand requires having been given three different kinds of work, which is a fact about who was handing out assignments. Each signal is genuine. Each one is also partly a record of how much friction someone was spared.

What makes a profile look great is often a privilege in itself. A sourcing guide that does not say so is teaching people to pattern-match on comfort.

## Why the correction has to go in the same document

The obvious fix is a paragraph about diversity at the end of the guide. I have written that paragraph. It does not work, and the reason is practical rather than a matter of anyone's attitude.

A sourcing guide gets used in fragments. Someone opens it before a screening call, scans the archetype, and closes it. The considered paragraph at the end is read once, at onboarding, by someone who is not yet sourcing. By the time they are, the only part still operating is the list.

So the correction has to be attached to the signal it corrects, in the same sentence, where it cannot be skipped. Not *look for long tenure*, and then a caution eight hundred words later. *Look for long tenure, and read a short one as a question rather than an answer, because tenure measures the employer as much as the candidate.*

That makes for a worse-looking document. It reads as hedged and it is harder to skim, which is exactly why most guides don't do it. But a list of clean signals with the caveats quarantined at the end is not a neutral instrument that someone failed to read carefully. It is an instrument that produces a predictable result, and the result is that you hire people whose careers have gone smoothly.

## What I would write now

Name the archetype as an archetype. It is a starting point for search, not a spec, and saying that out loud costs nothing and changes how people use it.

Attach the reading to every signal. What is this actually measuring, and what else could produce it? Two clauses per line. The guide gets longer and it stops teaching a single shape.

And give the team a second archetype that looks nothing like the first. One profile in a sourcing guide is a template. Two profiles that disagree with each other force a judgment, which is what you wanted from the reader in the first place.

None of this fixes the real problem. A hiring team reading a résumé is reading, at second hand, what ten years of working conditions did to someone. It does make the processing visible, and visible bias is the only kind anyone ever corrects.

I've built design and product organizations from first hire to dozens later, at Honor, Lyft, Grammarly and Pitch. This expands a section that previously sat inside [Against the take-home assignment](https://www.renatovaldes.com/essays/against-the-take-home/).