Sensitivity and specificity [0] seem relevant here. Every interview stage which is designed to reject bad candidates (true negatives) will also accidentally re

Sensitivity and specificity [0] seem relevant here. Every interview stage which is designed to reject bad candidates (true negatives) will also accidentally reject some good candidates (false negatives). The more eagerly you filter out bad candidates, the more you'll also filter out good candidates; sensitivity decreases as specificity increases. This means that building more pass/fail tests into your interview pipeline may produce worse results - even if you have an enormous number of applicants, all with infinite time and patience! At each interview stage, there's a risk of accidentally rejecting the best remaining applicant, the one who would have outperformed all others if they were hired. For example, the article mentions "values mismatch" as a particularly good reason to hard-reject a candidate, but several of the company's values seem like they ought to be optional. Surely some truly excellent software developers lack courage, humour, and thriftiness? Could those qualities just as well be taught on-the-job? Could a non-courageous hire have useful things to teach you about caution? Good hiring processes should draw a clear distinction between "must-have" qualities and "nice-to-have" qualities. Beyond a certain point, the problem stops being "filter out bad candidates", and starts being "out of several great candidates, make sure we choose the best one"; to solve those two problems, different tools are required. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity