Wow, that sounds like a toxic mentality. First, interviewing is notoriously hard and random. I feel like in sport, when they scout, they can look at young play

Wow, that sounds like a toxic mentality. First, interviewing is notoriously hard and random. I feel like in sport, when they scout, they can look at young players doing pretty much exactly what they will be doing for the rest of their career. Baseball won't dramatically change during the course of their career. Software engineering feels more like your next baseball game may require swimming, or sailing, or the ball may be replaced with cards. And it's not like you observe your "rookies" doing exactly what you think you need now: you observe them in an environment where they excel at passing exams. Second, I wouldn't be proud to strive to mimic a system that is very, very far from perfect. In sport, if you're not in the very few players who get very rich or in the pretty limited amount of players who can make a living out of it, you pretty much have to find another job and practice your sport in your free time. Even if you are excellent. A company recruiting "the best of the best" must fundamentally lack humility: do they think that they themselves are the very best in the world? As in, not only they must be excellent, but they must be at the very top of the excellent people in the world. If not, why would this exceptional rookie go work for them? I don't want to work with superstars, I want to work with nice humans that are competent for their job, have a healthy work/life balance and care about doing something that matters, and doing it right. If you so openly look for someone who either wants to feel special or earn a lot of money, you risk ending up recruiting someone like "Big Balls". And I surely don't want to work with them, or for you.