This blog post reads a lot like "users are using our product incorrectly, so we wrote them a blog post". Of course, the problem is almost never the user and alm

This blog post reads a lot like "users are using our product incorrectly, so we wrote them a blog post". Of course, the problem is almost never the user and almost always the product's UX design. Just like with UX design, you should design your interview process with the people you're interviewing in mind. The interview process isn't valuable in and of itself; it only matters to the extent that it fulfills your actual goals—evaluating and recruiting suitable talent. If you are rejecting or scaring away candidates with PhDs and you believe it's because they approach your interview incorrectly (even though they might actually be a great fit to the company), change your interview process. In this case, it feels like the company came up with an interview process and then decided that the interview was an end unto itself. That is not a good approach to building a strong team. Just imagine how a similar outlook would look like in your sales process—would you ever write a blog post about how clients with PhDs weren't understanding your sales pitch correctly? Of course, it's possible that the candidates you rejected would not have been a good fit. But if you believe that, you would not write a blog post like this—instead, you would focus on improving your upstream recruitment process. Either way, the important attitude is the same: you should treat this as a defect in your process and you should debug it. Find the root cause of the issue and fix it by changing your system.