That's not true at all. Very few candidates are being considered for positions known in advance. Applicants' real competition is not other applicants, but othe

That's not true at all. Very few candidates are being considered for positions known in advance. Applicants' real competition is not other applicants, but other Google employees. As Peter Norvig detailed[0], the bar is set by the Google employees: as interviewers, we should reject any candidate who isn't clearly better than the average googler. And, in my experience, that's a pretty high bar. [0] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg... "First we decide which candidates are above the hiring threshold, and then we decide what projects they can best contribute to."