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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

In all likelihood, you've rejected phenomenal candidates and you didn't even realize it.

This is the thing I most hate about being an experienced interviewer. I've interviewed hundreds of people. Am I getting better? Who knows! I get no feedback. I can find out whether other interviewers come to the same conclusions that I do, so I can learn to conform, but I will never find out if the person I rejected would've been fine, and I won't even find out if the person we hired did well.

How can ANYONE confidently proclaim that they're great at interviewing without some way of measuring the people they reject?

Google still hires people even if one interviewer rejects them, so at least the people doing statistics there knows the difference between having 1 rejection, no rejections and how well each interviewer performs.

But I agree, I interviewed some at Google and we can see the stuff that happened in every other interview. And I was really surprised many times, ultimately I realized that I can't really make good judgements based on an hours worth of data and stopped caring.

This is why I have candidates do a take home. We’ll (speaking across entire career not just current employer) have people who do mediocre in the video interviews but then turn in a great take home submission. Not everyone performs their best on the spot. I’ve hired so many talented people just by trying alternative formats to the traditional “today you’re gonna interview with 6 people hope you did your leet code.”

But did they hire any terrible ones?

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