I work in a Danish municipality with 7000 employees where we replace around 2000 people each year of which half are education-interns[0]. So I think it’s fair t

I work in a Danish municipality with 7000 employees where we replace around 2000 people each year of which half are education-interns[0]. So I think it’s fair to say that we have a good deal of experience with hiring people. I’ve been involved with quite a few of these processes, and I’m truly fascinated by how many resources and how much effort Americans seem to put into hiring. Our data shows that if you filter by education, then it’s actually relatively easy to hire someone who will perform well. If you get 100 applicants and pick the best 10 based on their A4 sized application letter, their education results and their CV, then you’ll typically end up with a pile of at least 10 people who are going to be good enough. Hell once you build that pile of 10 people, you don’t even have to read through the rest of the applications because it really won’t matter. I say this fully aware that hiring the wrong person is the most expensive mistake any manager can make. It’s just that people aren’t really unicorns, and good enough is good enough. Part of our success is how we onboard people. Because we do use resources on hiring people, we just save them for when people are actually hired. We try to make sure people get the best start they possibly can, because we have found that achieving great employee performance is our responsibility more so than the fresh hire. As a result our interview consists of 30-45 minutes of small talk where we try to find the person with the best chemistry to fit in their coming team. Don’t get me wrong, once in a while we do get an interviewee who flunks completely, but it’s very rare. We have tried a lot of the tricks by the way. We’ve done code reviews, we’ve done whiteboard algorithms, we’ve done live code and it really, really didn’t help us get better workers but it did waste a tremendous amount of our time. Our process is a little different when we hire managers. They get to go through a more standard HR process with personality tests and such. I’m not personally sure it helps though, but I don’t have any data to back that last statement up. 0: I’m not sure what they are called in English, they work for half a year as part of their education.