I never had the misfortune to encounter such interviewing techniques nor had to use them on others. This is in two Fortune 500 companies and few smaller busines

I never had the misfortune to encounter such interviewing techniques nor had to use them on others. This is in two Fortune 500 companies and few smaller businesses. Perhaps because I always interviewed for "full stack" jobs where the knowledge of tiny details this very moment is a lot less important than the ability to understand systems as a whole and how those little things fit together. On the hiring end before it came to me being directly involved the candidate would already have gone through the basic "test" I and my colleagues prepared. It was a series of "question" "answer" sets starting with really simple and increasing in difficulty we gave to our manager. He would do the first part of the interview with a candidate and to fail, one would have to really have no clue. It was really surprising that 90% of candidates, with really good resumes we got sent by recruitment agencies failed that. It is important to stress those were not questions of the sort "implement some algorithm in pseudo language", but more like, "explain what is a microservice", "what is redis and when you would use it(assuming they have it in their cv)" etc. They were simple questions. I had similar questions on every single interview asked of me when I was a candidate (except the very first one when I was asked to fix an actual issue, but by then I was almost hired). Then once they passed this initial step they would sit down with us(hopefully their future coworkers) and we would talk to them about their resume, ask what they worked at in previous jobs, what problems they resolved and how etc. This allowed me and my coworkers doing that part of the interview to very quickly get an idea if the person we're interviewing is on "our level" or not. Perhaps it was helpful that we interviewed people for both senior and junior positions so someone with less experience, but demonstrating ability/willingness to learn could still be a good match. At the end, if our manager was happy with what he heard he would ask us for our opinion. And I have to say, despite this easy-going interview method it took us over a year to find a good candidate for one senior role we were hiring for. During this year we had only 5 or 6 people progress to the second stage and we had a new stack of CVs to go through every 2 weeks or so. We did get 3 people for junior roles at the same time. So is it true "most people interviewing have no clue"? I'll respond to this by saying it depends which recruiter has sent them. I have had recruiters admit to me they "tweak" CVs on more than one occasion. Also, yes, there are lots of people applying for jobs way above their skill level. Hiring is not easy. That's why good recruiters make more money than developers they recruit (I know a recruiter making £50k monthly in commission).