That's not the ideal response if you actually wanted to defend your claim about the internal data and special competitive advantage rather than just abandoning

That's not the ideal response if you actually wanted to defend your claim about the internal data and special competitive advantage rather than just abandoning the claim. Seriously, I would say that the competitive advantage of a company comes primarily from its product and the vision and competence of the company leadership. You can't just hire your way to success without that foundation. Bad leadership can destroy the greatest employees. The company founders almost always come together in a very informal manner, and often the early employees do too. And that's the basis of the company. It has nothing whatsoever to do with some special snowflake data-driven formal hiring process. Indeed, I would argue that once a company becomes very large and successful, they become bloated and bad at pretty much everything, including hiring. At that point they have to get better by acquiring other companies, not by hiring through their standard bureaucratic processes. The competitive advantage of giant corporations is the ability to swallow other companies whole.