This is asserted as a truism, and perhaps in Google's case it is, but if the difficulty in the hiring process dissuades enough people who have other options fro

This is asserted as a truism, and perhaps in Google's case it is, but if the difficulty in the hiring process dissuades enough people who have other options from applying I can see it hurting the job pool. If you were to get 100 applicants, and you were only interested in hiring the top 5% (5 people), and 3 of the good people decided to accept decent jobs they could get without giving blood samples and their first born, and 20 of the less capable people decided not to bother (Incompetents don't know they are in competent and have less choices), then now you have 2 good people out of 77. Now what if one of those two is a false negative? Google is attractive enough that good people go through all the trouble anyway, but is this always true? Since we are able to fire people easily in this country, is a bad hire really so ruinous? I don't actually know the answer to the question, but I am skeptical of your statement. Maybe the assumptions in my numbers are wrong (they almost certainly are), but what are the real numbers?