This is a manifestly absurd claim. It is possible to improve the outcome of a hire, and almost everyone is using those kinds of processes. The firm I work for does an excellent job filtering people for skill and compatibility. The trick is that if you want to capture the top e.g. 10% of applicants, you're going to have to pay them several times more than the median applicant. Most companies are too cheap to attract distinguished talent.

I can say with confidence that certain resume features are incredibly strong predictors of interview performance (at least in the related measures, in the field and/or team I'm working in). I'm not HR, but your statement seems to also deny the possibility of this empirical observation.

> Given this, why not hire lightly and fire lightly?

Because it would be a complete dick move to have someone relocate (possibly involving change of country) and then fire them 2 weeks later? That's not even looking at the formal, bureaucratic or training overhead, or any of the other factors in this industry that make hiring and firing a bit more complicated than handing someone (and later taking away) a hardhat and a shovel.

I think it is true, but only if you don't identify it quickly and/or don't reassign or fire them as necessary. I'm a firm believer of a holistic and lightweight interview process followed by a trial period. The only way to really understand if someone will work well in the position is to let them give it a try.

Of course there is. At a basic level, that's what hiring is.

With this now-popular attitude that "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" or something like that, how could it be anything else?

Imagine the pressure that puts on the hiring teams.

so.... how do you suggest companies hire candidates? purely through referrals, without any further screening?

I've hired hundreds of people and this is just not true. A first impression matters a bit, sure - but it has hardly any effect on the decision.

> There is also the reality that when companies need to fill a role, and when first start interviewing they will set the bar way too high and reject some perfectly qualified candidates

This is a very poor hiring practice. You should what you're looking for and what you are willing to pay for it. And then you should recruit a candidate pool that meets this criteria and go from there.

Hiring is literally the most important job a manager has in any fast growing company. It should be taken very seriously and systematically.

100% this

been offered 4 interviews (after a 1h screening) for a senior position

what were they thinking, lol

if you want somebody to work with you, then you have to actually hire someone... interviewing is not hiring

Nepotism. It gets a lot of bad rap but the reason this is effective is because you're essentially comparing hiring via a piece of paper vs via intimate knowledge of a candidate's actual knowledge and work habits. The latter clearly has more information than you could get from any screening process. Of course this doesn't mean you should just hire someone because they're a relative or friend because that's not actually using the information gain. But we should recognize why the process is successful. If we want to make a fair system that doesn't rely on nepotism then we have to also recognize why it works in the first place. I don't see these complicated hiring processes doing this.

Of course, you can also just use a noisy process. But if you're going to use a noisy process maybe don't make it so expensive (for company and candidate; money and time). If this is the method, then the process should be about minimizing the complexity and costs of hiring.

Wow, that is seriously fked up. While I got pressure to hire (one role I hired for was very specific so it took a long time to find a candidate), as long as I was actively sourcing/interviewing people, I never got too much flak. You've got to keep a hiring bar high... and not screw people over!

I think it is necessarily so. Hiring fast is effectively hiring randomly and that is way riskier.

Would you read random books? Watch random movies? Maybe, but probably not.

Would you buy a random car? Of course not. Would you buy a random home? Etc etc

You can logistically reduce the number of days by maybe doing multiple interviews into a single day, but that’s still hours.

I’ve worked back in the dot com days where you were hired on the spot and that was fun until they fired on the spot.

Having a well-designed process that takes a while is not perfect, but is better than the other options. “Slow to hire, slow to fire” is a good maxim.

I'm not convinced that this is true. Poor hiring doesn't mean that the company does other things wrong, but hiring determines what kind of people work at the company. Running into a hiring process that you believe won't select good coworkers can be a major problem.

This is absolutely correct.

I mean, sure, hiring great people is hard enough that I hate to miss out on somebody great, but not nearly as much as I hate making a bad hire.

Bad hires cost a lot, and not just directly (cost of hiring, salary, etc.), but in time, stress, and motivation of the people they work with.

No, it's just the companies using it keep that data to themselves. Their hiring process is then a competitive advantage.

People have come right out and said they’d rather miss out on a good hire than get a bad one. There’s no “sounds”. It is.

Rather than more and more convoluted interview processes maybe we should work on better weed out techniques? I mean, what’s the overall cost really of picking the best person you saw in two weeks, getting back to the process of building new functionality (and your new hire training materials) and just kicking the dense ones with a little reflection on what we’re the objective warning signs this was going to happen?

I really think the thing is that people want to believe that training for their team is arduous, and so the cost of every person is huge. I’ve known more than a few people who philosophized about how much they learn about their craft by teaching. And it always seems like the people who create the biggest messes are the ones who can’t explain themselves.

Which we have known forever. In fact during the dot com era it was quite common to hire the most articulate people you interviewed. At least of they were wrong about something you’d know it right away, instead of them obfuscating their bad ideas.

Not that hard. Talk to people like human beings and examine their previous work and employment history.

Well, they might have claimed that but based on your account I'm having my doubts.

On a more serious note, I do find the attitude towards hiring in many companies perverse. I realise it can be time-consuming, frustrating, and draining, but at the same time it's hugely important.

Of all my responsibilities, Literally the most important is building a strong team: hiring is a critical component of that. We're always looking for ways to improve the experience for candidates, and I'm still involved in interviewing fairly regularly. I feel like it's important for me to set that example.

As with many things, if you're hiring and want to enjoy the results of making great hires, you have to learn to love the process somewhat.

>> What do you mean? Why do companies hire then?

Sadly this is very common -- the bigger and more profitable the company the more common it is. Companies often hire for non-business related reasons for several major reasons:

1. Bench strength -- Hire top talent before you need it so you are ready to fire when you have a strategic project. Ideally, hire away talent your competitors might hire. In many ways, this is a good thing.

2. "Burn the Budget" - Divisions will often lose budget if they dont spend it, and they may lose it in future years when they need it ("well you got it last year and you didnt use it, so this year you dont get it...") -- so many divisions will hire to burn the budget and use it just so they dont lose budget when they really really need it.

3. HR - It is common for HR to institute Crazy-8s policies or some variant of it -- where you only get promoted if you have 8 (or N) people working for you. Naturally all sorts of non business related tasks suddenly pop up and people hire just enough to get promoted. This is very common in organizations where promotion and pay is linked to non business metrics (how much budget you control, how many people report to you) rather than business metrics (revenue delivered, revenue enabled, churn reduced, traffic increased, etc.) Often your boss themselves wants to be promoted and needs 8 middle-managers 8 under them to get promoted. And so on up the chain. Almost half the HR departments in my ~20yr career institute such a policy, whether it is internally known or not. It is of course more common in organizations which are not metrics driven.

If you keep hiring duds, you shouldn't be allowed to hire people. In spite of what the headhunter firms and cookie-cutter websites would have you believe, interviewing and hiring is a skill, not a punchlist.

>If a 10 hour project-specific coding task reduces mis-hires by 50%+, isn't it better for both parties?

Only if you pay me for my ten hours. Otherwise, you've already indicated that you and your company don't value me or my time.

Sure, but the really bad hires usually aren't bad because they lack technical skills. They're bad for reasons that end up in HR. You can always reassign someone with people skills but short on algorithms.