Just because a fraction of people can answer something to your satisfaction, it doesn’t mean it’s a good signal. Eg I don’t think baseball trivia would be a gre

Just because a fraction of people can answer something to your satisfaction, it doesn’t mean it’s a good signal. Eg I don’t think baseball trivia would be a great way to narrow down candidates. That said, if you need to narrow down the pool and you like the question then go for it. I think it’s important to keep your ultimate goal in mind, which is probably: - find the desired number of acceptably competent candidates - who are likely to accept your offers - without needing to make very large offers - or spending a lot on finding and interviewing unsuitable candidates - while complying with any local laws These can lead to a bunch of different things you see in hiring processes (eg you prefer referrals because of 2 and 4, and candidates may be rejected for being overqualified for reasons 2, 3, and 4) As a candidate, this often feels very frustrating: you would rather companies follow processes that are maximally fair where so long as you demonstrate sufficient merit, you get an offer. Or even better, processes that do a good job of uncovering the value you bring. I guess one can try to look at the hiring process through this lens to not take rejections so personally, and one can hope that different companies will have different processes (to hopefully reduce how much they compete with each other for the same subset of candidates) though I don’t think they end up being very different in practice.