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I'd guess as an alternative to the "demeaning" HackerRank style tests which are purely meritocratic and allow smaller companies to interview large amounts of people you would prefer nepotism and only hiring and interviewing people with high GPAs from expensive schools?

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The problem with meritocracy by standardized testing is eventually you reach Eastern/Southern Asian extremes with cram school culture of people endlessly drilling for tests. It's possible to rotely memorize strategies for applying algorithms until you excel at HackerRank type tests. By then you're just interviewing for candidates who spent the most to enter the most expensive boot camps.

Which is why you

A. Don't make the interviews so hard that they require multiple months of preparation. You can be prepared for the google interview by simply having taken an algorithms course and studying for 2 or 3 weeks.

B. Make sure the people you hire are good communicators and are a good culture fit.

C. Try to make your workforce diverse.

That's a strawman if I ever saw one. He never said anything like this.

He didn't provide any alternative and what I described is the status quo for companies outside of software engineering.

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