[switchbak]

Hiring people is also about portraying your company in a positive light. Your allusions to the TSA security screen, and how you have to be "trained and calibrated" seem to imply a robotic kind of detachment that would probably be very off-putting to me.

Often employers seem to be of the mind that they have the treasure and it's up to them to filter out the best candidates (sellers market I suppose) regardless of how they appear in the process. I would imagine that a lot of brilliant people get turned off by this. Which (oddly enough) is also fine by me - like dating, I'd rather spend my time finding an open minded/humane place to work, and I find hiring practices are often a rough initial proxy for that.