Is there any way you can think of for working around this? Some actual method of recruiting outsiders of the system in a realistic way?
I've always assumed that open source would be one of the places to go for such telemetry, but have never known where contributing would actually furnish that kind of benefit. It would be good to know if there were projects that are actually fit that criteria, instead of merely being coincidentally worked on by a lot of employees.
If you can find a student organization for Computer Science / Software Engineering students (like an ACM chapter), they might be able to help you set up a recruiting tech talk. We did this when I was an ACM officer at WUSTL. As did Engineering Council.
Even at my theoretically high-end school, our career services department was completely unfit to handle CS recruiting. They made a decent show of the annual career fair, but everything else was a disaster. With no tech knowledge and no one to answer to, they sent us a steady stream of terrible offers: work-for-experience, unethical businesses, and everything else bad you can think of.
All good CS recruiting happened through the student Computer Science association, which organized tech talks, mock interviews, and all kinds of other high-value events.
Companies that contacted the student group directly got reliable, personalized support and no charges until they showed up; companies that contacted the university got billed for the chance to be lumped in an email listing with scammers.
I've always assumed that open source would be one of the places to go for such telemetry, but have never known where contributing would actually furnish that kind of benefit. It would be good to know if there were projects that are actually fit that criteria, instead of merely being coincidentally worked on by a lot of employees.