That's not the whole explanation, IMO. If you had the same distribution of accepted candidates with both the loose and strict policies, I'd still expect intervi

That's not the whole explanation, IMO. If you had the same distribution of accepted candidates with both the loose and strict policies, I'd still expect interviewers to use the strict one. Why? If their hire doesn't work out, they've got a much better story - "Our hiring processes are really strict and everyone got on board with it, it must've been something else that went wrong". And when the hire does work, people at the company get to self-congratulate about how "elite" they are. The costs of extraneous interviewing and leaving positions unfilled is borne more by the company, while the costs of making a bad hire is borne more by the hiring manager, so the hiring manager makes choices that offload costs more onto the company. Principle-Agent problem.