That makes sense, and I think your skepticism is reasonable.

From the candidate side, it’s almost impossible to tell whether criteria are being refined thoughtfully or just drifting based on recent hires or strong opinions in the room.

What strikes me is that without explicit feedback loops, iteration can easily turn into reinforcement, people conclude “this worked” without ever seeing the counterfactual of who was filtered out.

From the outside, it often looks less like a calibrated process and more like accumulated intuition. I’m curious whether that matches what others here have seen from the inside.