> 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.
Do you have actual data showing this? Or is this just your intuition?
Because if it's the latter, my intuition is pretty different.
No one is an "excellent candidate" for every position, and many people who are "excellent candidates" for a given position might not even recognize that excellence in themselves. Therefore, they're not going to be only applying for positions at the very best companies; they're going to be applying for any position they think they have a chance at, assuming they think they can actually be OK with the job (eg, they might not want to apply for a job in adtech if they are personally repulsed by the ethics of surveillance capitalism).
Additionally, your scenario sounds like it paints the candidate pool for jobs in general as a bimodal distribution, with one peak of "terrible candidates" and one peak of "excellent candidates", with very little in the middle. My intuition says that it's much more likely to resemble a normal distribution.
No; what's much, much more likely is that most people are decent candidates for many jobs in their field, and excellent candidates for a few, but their chances of actually getting the opportunity to apply to those few (between the position being open and them searching at the same time, and them finding out that it's open) are slim, so they have to apply for a great many of the positions that they're only decent candidates for. That means that they'll try many times before finding something. This can lead to a lot of frustration and even desperation, creating a willingness to engage in some shady techniques to actually get a human to talk to you and recognize your value.
Then there are a few people who are, indeed, nothing but shady techniques, and they are likely to flood all channels with as many AI-generated or otherwise low-quality applications as they can manage.
So no; even if most applications any position sees are terrible applications, most interviews are likely to be with decent-but-not-excellent candidates, and most people are still going to have to interview with a few or even tens of companies before they are actually offered a position.