I’ve had to change my thinking about this to adapt to modern times. I used to think like this about internal recruiting however there is a bias — to avoid anything they do not know. There are recent grads and outsider devs that are really good actually. Top engineers are not immune to saying somebody is bad and lying about it because what they believe is good only means “never question tribal judgement”. They aren’t immune to creating networks across various companies to take hiring managers for the proverbial ride either. Dig deeper because what you may believe is hand-holding is an unwillingness by the team to disclose basic info to get the job done. It happens way more than we want to admit but people are still just people despite the fancy job titles.
