The 50:1 is before any filtering of résumés or anything. We don't have any unreasonable expectations around working hours or overtime, we aren't a company that has limited runway, and we aren't a bro-grammer company, so I don't think we are being "unattractive" or anything like that. What we ''do'' have are specific technical requirements - experience with computer vision or computational geometry or GIS data or some related field, modern C++, git, bonus for experience with TDD/CI. We get a lot more female applicants for the C++ generalist positions, although still like 10:1. Oh, and this is in Europe. Not sure if that changes anything.
And I'm not a hiring manager, I'm a senior engineer who at the moment is wearing a different hat half the time. I'm not sure I'd trust any point of the funnel to non-technical people when it comes to hiring technical people. There are too many potentially interesting things that could be mentioned that someone who doesn't have a deep understanding of the field would discard good candidates out of ignorance.
And I'm not a hiring manager, I'm a senior engineer who at the moment is wearing a different hat half the time. I'm not sure I'd trust any point of the funnel to non-technical people when it comes to hiring technical people. There are too many potentially interesting things that could be mentioned that someone who doesn't have a deep understanding of the field would discard good candidates out of ignorance.