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Comment by munchbunny | Hacker News Reader

At risk of proposing a generalization, I think that this comes from the same place that other gatekeeping behaviors come from: you see yourself as the in-group's bouncer.

That puts you in a mindset to run the interviewee through a gauntlet, partly as a ritual to show their desire to get in, and partly through a sense of duty to hire "only the best".

But hiring is not a filtering problem. It's a matching problem. And the more interviewers embrace that they're there to find the right people and to recruit them, not to filter people out, I think the more humane the interviews will be.

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I've been mentally drafting a blog post on exactly this topic, so while that percolates in my mind I'll answer with: it totally is a filtering problem.

For a small company whose culture is in flux and needs the right person, it's absolutely a matching problem. You need to find the right person for the job, period.

At the scale of a company like Google, however, it's absolutely a filtering problem. First off, we're large enough that most (perhaps not all) people talented enough to clear our interviews will (given enough persistence) find a place where they can be happy and contribute. We can get away with not worrying about the subtleties of matching and instead only focus on technical skills.

Second off, the number of applications rejected for every hire is staggering, simply because of how many people apply. These numbers are fantasy, but imagine if you had to choose one person out of a hundred applicants, and you actually had the means to interview every single one. You're going to pay this person a quarter of a million dollars a year and aim to keep them for half a decade or more. The economically rational thing to do is be picky as all hell, and this is exactly how Google and friends do it.

> Second off, the number of applications rejected for every hire is staggering, simply because of how many people apply. These numbers are fantasy, but imagine if you had to choose one person out of a hundred applicants, and you actually had the means to interview every single one. You're going to pay this person a quarter of a million dollars a year and aim to keep them for half a decade or more. The economically rational thing to do is be picky as all hell, and this is exactly how Google and friends do it.

That's a good point. It's hard to ignore just how many applicants you filter out in the hiring process. However, Google and Facebook are exceptions in terms of having a non-differentiated hiring test. They are very big exceptions, but still exceptions. They have a standard interview bar and matching with teams comes later. On the other hand, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Adobe, etc. all hire for specific roles.

I think the way to reconcile the nuance I was getting at with "matching problem" is this: "picky as all hell" must still be fair and backed up by a clear idea of why your requirements are as tough as they are. When you see yourself as a gatekeeper you're more likely to lose sight of that.

Also keep in mind that inhumane interview processes necessarily filter out the candidates who refuse to put up with inhumane treatment.

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