Intuitively I wanted to say "Yes 1000 times, unless you REALLY need to hire NOW, the effects of a bad hire are going to be a lot more negative than a no hire".

Intuitively I wanted to say "Yes 1000 times, unless you REALLY need to hire NOW, the effects of a bad hire are going to be a lot more negative than a no hire". But what about a very good hire that you end up missing that has been a very expensive mistake? I think we have a pretty high bias here. Organizations can see the effect of a bad hire and have more data on what went wrong during the hiring process, retrospect why that person passed and put more "tests" to prevent to repeat the mistake. But organizations can never measure the differential between the impact on the company of a candidate that was not hired and the present condition. There is simply no data about the impact that that person could have had. I heard a few detailed stories on "the guy that should not have been hired" and I can add my own stories. But the stories on the cool people that should have been hired are brief and rarely go beyond "I thought that guy was very smart." So I think we should make sure we check our hiring processes against negative positives. How? To be continued...