>One of the open secrets of working in technology is that technical interviews are completely worthless as a predictor for whether someone is a good hire or not. [...]
>> We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.
> It’s amazing to think that Google found zero relationship between an interviewer saying “Hire” and whether the candidate was actually a good hire or not.
The fact [the scores of someone who gets hired] are not predictive of their eventual performance, does not mean that hiring process is completely random, or worthless.
In order to tell that, you would need to look at the cohort of people who were 'no hire' and compare them to the 'hire' cohort; it's not enough to just look within the 'hire' cohort.
In other words, the hiring process is (1) designed to be a Classifier, typically tuned with an emphasis on having a low false positive rate. Hoping that (2) the scores of the small subset of candidates who are classed 'hire', also act well as a regression to the candidate's eventual performance, is a big additional ask.
Just because there is evidence that (2) is untrue, or particularly noisy, does not necessarily mean that (1) is broken.
I don't see a great way of solving this, without a large company like Google also randomly hiring 'no hires' from different stages in their hiring process (and subsequently measuring their performance) in order to quantify the performance of subsequent steps in the hiring process - not aware of anyone who has done that; it would be really interesting to read how a company who does that gets on, but an expensive experiment.