I couldn't agree more. I think the illusion that hiring is a deterministic and rational process, combined with the fear of firing, leads to adding more and more filters, which just makes things worse.
It's a really expensive and inefficient system, and tends to worsen as companies grow. It would be much better to hire fast and fire fast.
As I recently blogged about this issue:
You may be one of those companies that makes much of hiring only the top 1% of the top 1% of applicants. This can be good for morale (“We are the best of the best”) but a too-selective hiring process is quite hazardous. If you find a way to effectively measure your false-negative rate, (the no-hires that you should have hired) you may find out that half your current team wouldn’t make it through your current hiring process. If people commonly apply to your company three or four times before getting in, your highly-selective hiring process is probably filtering on random noise more than skill or talent. In other words, your precision and recall[1] are both bad, the bad results are coming from a costly process, and adding more filters just makes things worse.
Comments
I couldn't agree more. I think the illusion that hiring is a deterministic and rational process, combined with the fear of firing, leads to adding more and more filters, which just makes things worse.
It's a really expensive and inefficient system, and tends to worsen as companies grow. It would be much better to hire fast and fire fast.
As I recently blogged about this issue:
You may be one of those companies that makes much of hiring only the top 1% of the top 1% of applicants. This can be good for morale (“We are the best of the best”) but a too-selective hiring process is quite hazardous. If you find a way to effectively measure your false-negative rate, (the no-hires that you should have hired) you may find out that half your current team wouldn’t make it through your current hiring process. If people commonly apply to your company three or four times before getting in, your highly-selective hiring process is probably filtering on random noise more than skill or talent. In other words, your precision and recall[1] are both bad, the bad results are coming from a costly process, and adding more filters just makes things worse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall