You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title

I found the article’s premise intriguing. As I read through it, I noticed the author wrote:

> Hiring committees fear false negatives more than false positives.

If positive = a strong candidate, then a false positive = incorrectly labelling a candidate strong.

Conversely then I would think that a false negative = incorrectly labelling a candidate weak (when they were actually strong).

In my experience, hiring committees are more clear about who they don’t want than who they do. But there’s only so much insight you can gather from interviews. So when lacking more data, they are happy to pass over great candidates if that means their process avoids some bad ones.

It’s an imperfect system that optimizes for the employers’ convenience at the expense of the interviewer. So ‘auditioning’ under the circumstances is a great analogy.

The way it was explained to me many years ago is that a bad hire can cause tremendous damage that goes above and beyond the harm of inadvertently missing out on a good hire. I've never really thought about whether that is true, but it is undoubtedly the reason why so many companies are risk-averse in hiring decisions.