IMO selecting the most talented candidates from among a candidate pool is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Interviews are a joke, past experience ends

IMO selecting the most talented candidates from among a candidate pool is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Interviews are a joke, past experience ends up being basically meaningless, and references are too easily gamed. I think the whole idea of hiring the most talented individuals is a fools game. I'm sure many people disagree, but this has been my experience over the years. In fact, I think trying to go for the best candidates will hard backfire most of the time: you'll end up paying far more for no real gain. So if we assume that we are going to get a more or less random sample of quality then what you can we screen for? As far as I can tell there's basically only two positive signals we can look for: motivation and agreeableness. So I think that explains why interview processes end up the way they do. Maybe that's an overly cynical take, but I really just don't think that it's possible to find the "best candidates," so you end up just filtering for what you can control.