Thirty-four panelists came from Harvard and other Ivy talent networks supporting startups and funds. Their constraint was not sourcing - it was separating polished campus applicants from people who could execute without a semester of onboarding.
They scored tools harshly when mobile apply broke or when assessments felt like generic quizzes disconnected from the role. Students abandon friction; operators abandon tools that create false positives.
The products that won their respect kept apply simple and still collected a short, role-tied artifact - a written scenario or a brief spoken answer - before a partner call.
Campus hiring is a stress test for candidate experience and signal quality at once. Enterprise ATS familiarity did not help when the first screen was still a resume pile.