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Well, you see, the potential cost of losing a good candidate is much less than the potential cost of hiring a bad candidate, so every effort should be made to p

Well, you see, the potential cost of losing a good candidate is much less than the potential cost of hiring a bad candidate, so every effort should be made to prevent the latter. There's a Joel on Software or Stack Overflow thing on this....

TrackerFF 3y ago
The fatal error here is to believe that the hiring process follows a linear curve, so that the outcome is directly proportional to the effort spent. When in reality I believe the hiring process follows some kind of logistic curve - after some point you're only getting very, very marginal returns on the extra effort spent.
- rwmj 3y ago
  You may be assuming there is any kind of rational process here, when Mark Shuttleworth thinks it is important to find out what you did in high school.
  - voakbasda 3y ago
    I think that emphasis makes it obvious that they only want high school or recent college grads. It's a clear signal that real experience is not valued.
danenania 3y ago
Unless you are paying at the very top of the market or are doing something so extremely prestigious/cool that it makes top people want to work for your org specifically (SpaceX, NASA, OpenAI, maybe a handful of others), a process like this seems guaranteed to only select for candidates that have no other options.
pengaru 3y ago
I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The issue is more that this process can't possibly be selecting for the best hires.
bloaf 3y ago
Which is fine, but the point here is that as you increase the onerousness of your interview process you don't just get diminishing returns, your ability to attract good people at all actually declines past some point. Qualified people have other options.
raverbashing 3y ago
Unless you alienate most of them because of your hard head. Thinking of cost like this is very shallow The post is not doing any favours and it is not convincing anybody to apply to the position, quite the contrary And guess what, your company is not the shining star that has to make absolute sure to never have a bad hire. Sure, take the low-hanging fruit as early in the process as possible, but up to a certain point, more interviews won't mean better results

TrackerFF 3y ago

The fatal error here is to believe that the hiring process follows a linear curve, so that the outcome is directly proportional to the effort spent. When in reality I believe the hiring process follows some kind of logistic curve - after some point you're only getting very, very marginal returns on the extra effort spent.

rwmj 3y ago
You may be assuming there is any kind of rational process here, when Mark Shuttleworth thinks it is important to find out what you did in high school.
- voakbasda 3y ago
  I think that emphasis makes it obvious that they only want high school or recent college grads. It's a clear signal that real experience is not valued.

danenania 3y ago

Unless you are paying at the very top of the market or are doing something so extremely prestigious/cool that it makes top people want to work for your org specifically (SpaceX, NASA, OpenAI, maybe a handful of others), a process like this seems guaranteed to only select for candidates that have no other options.

pengaru 3y ago

I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The issue is more that this process can't possibly be selecting for the best hires.

bloaf 3y ago

Which is fine, but the point here is that as you increase the onerousness of your interview process you don't just get diminishing returns, your ability to attract good people at all actually declines past some point. Qualified people have other options.

raverbashing 3y ago

Unless you alienate most of them because of your hard head. Thinking of cost like this is very shallow The post is not doing any favours and it is not convincing anybody to apply to the position, quite the contrary And guess what, your company is not the shining star that has to make absolute sure to never have a bad hire. Sure, take the low-hanging fruit as early in the process as possible, but up to a certain point, more interviews won't mean better results