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by Kwantuum 2123 days ago
I've recently started doing interviews for my company, and while there are definitely candidates that we have been on the fence about accepting that would probably have been a great fit, in the end, the false positive rate is more important to us than the false negative rate. Maybe we missed out on some great candidates but the criteria we used to evaluate them also allowed us to avoid a lot of very bad candidates. The perfect interview process doesn't exist, we have to make do with the fact that whatever the interview process is, we will miss out on great candidates and end up making an offer to candidates that will not work out. But indeed: for candidates, this means that you shouldn't take rejections to heart too much: you might have been a great fit for the role and a bad fit for the interview process. If you're consistently getting rejected for positions for which you believe you are qualified, maybe you need to get better at interviews, or maybe you're not as qualified as you may think.
3 comments

> If you're consistently getting rejected for positions for which you believe you are qualified, maybe you need to get better at interviews, or maybe you're not as qualified as you may think.

This comment represents everything that is wrong with your technical interview process. Big yikes.

agreed.

The lack of self-awareness displayed by that comment is kind of impressive. Especially the bit about being so keen on identifying "bad" candidates, not realizing that the entire point is that interviewers are actively bad at determining good vs bad candidates.

>but the criteria we used to evaluate them also allowed us to avoid a lot of very bad candidates.

I have a hard time following this conclusion - how do you know this?

How do you know they were bad candidates?

That's the entire point, you don't, you only think you do.