Hacker News Reader

Comment by zodiac | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you that if hiring strategy B led to hiring 10% of the good candidates and cut the odds of hiring the bad candidate to 0.5%, compared to 100% and 1% for hiring strategy A, then strategy B is worse than strategy A. However

1) This means that by raising your hiring bar (adopting B instead of A), you eliminate more good candidates than bad candidates. You now have to prove this empirical claim. 2) All I wanted to say was that the statements you made like "every time you pass on a good candidate that increases your odds of making a bad hire!" is only true under certain conditions (namely that raising hiring standards eliminates more good candidates than bad candidates), and it's not "simple bayesian reasoning".

View on HN

The original slogan "It is better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad candidate." specifically says to make that fallacy.

As long as good candidates are rare, and bad candidates have a small-but-nonzero chance of tricking you into hiring them, it's very expensive to pass on a good candidate.

Even if you pass on 50% of the good candidates (no matter how many bad ones trick you), you're doubling the amount of time you're spending interviewing.

The only way to be sure about how many "good" candidates your are missing is to hire some random percentage of the people who fail your interview. Only a large tech company would have the resources to do that, and I'm not sure if it would be ethical, or even get the employer in legal trouble.

NO employer knows how many good candidates they miss out on, which makes this analysis very difficult.

Also, I question the ability of most employers to evaluate employees AFTER they are hired, so any analysis of post-interview performance might just be reinforcing whatever biases are present.

Also, candidates fall into THREE groups: great, mediocre, and toxic. The catch is that the toxic ones are most likely to trick you into thinking they're great. That makes it even more expensive to pass on a good candidate.

> As long as good candidates are rare, and bad candidates have a small-but-nonzero chance of tricking you into hiring them, it's very expensive to pass on a good candidate.

Yes, I agree with you. My point is that even taking this into account, even after taking into account all the other costs you mention into account, it might still be better to pass on candidates you're not sure about.

> The original slogan "It is better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad candidate." specifically says to make that fallacy.

So going by the slogan, even if passing on too many good candidates increases your odds of a bad hire (say from 50% to 80%), it's still better than hiring a bad candidate, since if you hire a bad candidate, the odds that you made a bad hire is 100%!

My interpretation of the slogan seems different from yours, mine is something like: if you hire a good person the value of your business will increase by X, if you hire a bad person the value of your business will decrease by Y, and Y is much greater than X.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com