Hiring employees is not angel investing. You want to minimize risk, not maximize it. VCs and angels are in the business of assuming massive amounts of risk.
Startups and small businesses.. aren't.
Startups and small businesses.. aren't.
All I'm saying is that if, as a business, you are seeking to minimize your risk portfolio during hiring you are, by definition, not seeking to hire the "best" employees, but to hire the best employees with the lowest risk profile.
Once again, I don't think this is bad. You're running a business and the task is to get the highest probability you'll hire a productive employee.
Nonetheless, the OP has a point that you may lose employees due to your risk tolerance being too low.
Example: I work on the C# compiler. I'm not going to take a prospective employer's "knowledge test" on C#, regardless of if that is statistically a good filter for them in hiring.