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56 points mooreds | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.243s | source
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MontyCarloHall ◴[] No.45413429[source]
Why?

Because the vast majority of job interviews are with terrible candidates, even if the majority of candidates are excellent. This apparent paradox has a simple explanation: excellent candidates selectively apply to a few companies and get interviews/offers at almost all of them. On the other hand, terrible candidates are rejected at every step of the hiring process, and have to constantly reenter the interview pool.

Suppose 90% of candidates are excellent and 10% are terrible. If the excellent 90% only need to interview at one company, whereas the bad 10% need to interview at 20 companies, then only 0.9/(0.1*20+0.9)=31% of interviews will be with qualified candidates. To retierate: almost 70% of interviews will be with terrible candidates, even though 90% of people applying for jobs are excellent.

Because the cost of a bad hire is so consequential, the interview process is not designed to efficiently handle a minority of qualified candidates, but rather efficiently weed out a majority of horrible candidates. It is therefore a terrible process for the people actually qualified to pass it.

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1. kace91 ◴[] No.45413803[source]
Your point is interesting but I don’t see how it answers the question.

“The majority of interviews being statistically rejections “is not obviously related to a need to make the interview process more demanding than the actual job - Testing for the role would also weed out bad candidates.

Here’s some alternatives:

- engineers testing for the idealized version of their job, rather than the realities of it - “a true engineer must know how to balance a binary tree! Nevermind that I spend my time dealing with support tickets regarding a null pointer that slipped by in a code review”.

- companies using long processes as negotiation tactics - “you went through two months of trials so you’re less likely to reject our offer now and start over”

- design by committee - “every interested party and team must give an approval in their own step”

- interview as marketing - “see? We deal with tough challenges, this is an interesting place to work at”.