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Comment by thurn | Hacker News Reader

People never talk about the most important metric for interviews: your target rejection rate. Google and Facebook need to do these interviews because of the number of applicants they get. Any process they design must definitionally reject 99% of people who go through it, and they found it is essentially impossible to hit that kind of rejection rate with just 'tell me about your work' questions.

If your startup operates with a 50% or 75% target rejection rate, you absolutely can and should operate differently, and this could be an important competitive advantage for you.

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Doesn't this work like Harvard/Yale/Princeton/etc admissions, where if they selected a completely different set of applicants everyone there would just as likely be qualified and deserving of attending?

I swear sometimes it might just be easier or even fairer to throw all resumes/applications in the air and see which ones land inside of a predetermined circle.

> I swear sometimes it might just be easier or even fairer to throw all resumes/applications in the air and see which ones land inside of a predetermined circle.

When I was a responsible for hiring interns, we used to joke about this all the time. Just throw away 75% of applicants, everyone that got thrown out is unlucky, and we don't want unlucky people bringing the company down.

The Monte Carlo hiring technique?

Yes, but that would destroy the illusion of a meritocracy and the idea that these companies are basing their hiring decisions on rational, objective metrics and not simply making it up as they go along.

Steve Yegge made that observation many years ago regarding Google. For every person working at Google, there is a panel of interviewers that would have rejected that person.

They don't have a target rejection rate. They have a target quality threshold. More software engineers that can productively employed is good for them. It's not like Harvard or other institutions where the point is to be elite, not to do something. The more SEs Google can hire the better. If they could reduce their false negative rate in half that would materially impact their bottom line. False negative for Harvard is basically undefined. They could easily dectuple the number of students they admit without compromising on academic quality or family wealth and making only very small declines in average power level (dictator, princes, senator, governor children)

Can't they simply hire the first eligible person? One can go through resumes and filter out people who don't meet objective criteria(e.g. work experience, location). This should be trivial. Then once they have 30 good resumes, they can call these people for interview. Assuming 10% chance of each candidate meeting the job requirements, they have >95% chance of finding a good candidate.

With automated resume pruning, it shouldn't take more than two hours for initial pruning. Actually, the higher number of applications means they can put in stricter pruning conditions, leading to lesser manual pruning later on. Assuming 2 hours/person interviewing, it should take less than a 40 hours-person to close a position.

I'd guess there's also some benefit w.r.t company loyalty when hiring a good-enough candidate instead of the best-available. They would be less likely to switch jobs compared to someone who can solve a leetcode hard problem in 15 minutes.

Rejection rate has been discussed many times. It is not the most important metric since it's just an observation. You can't start with a desired rejection rate and come up with a good interview process. What you can do is know what kind of person you want to reject or select for, design a process to do that, and then adjust other factors (listed compensation, recruiter talent, marketing site, etc.) so that you have enough candidates to which you want to extend offers.

Few companies are actually in a position, given their knowledge, stability of their industry, and marginal quality of hiring success, to succeed at deliberately loosening or tightening their interview process to arrive at just the right number of final candidates.

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