I know hiring is hard, and the truly qualified candidates for any posting are sparse, but startups throw out way too many potentially-decent candidates before g

I know hiring is hard, and the truly qualified candidates for any posting are sparse, but startups throw out way too many potentially-decent candidates before giving them a real look. Bigger companies can afford to use more blunt heuristics than startups can. When that "elite 1%" only makes up .1% of your applicants, you have to be willing to use a finer comb. I can't speak to the general case, only my personal experience as an applicant and early employee at 3 startups, but I can't count how many times I've been told that I wasn't a good fit (pre-interview) because I didn't have experience with parts of their tech stack, even though any developer worth hiring for those early positions should be able to pick up a new stack and run with it. Very little development experience is actually "irrelevant" to any given opening.