[woofie11]

It's a random process. I think the comments here are misleading.

FAANG and peers set the bar about 1-2 std. div. above their typical hire. The cost of a bad hire is much higher than the cost of a missed good hire. People run the gauntlet. You can do the stats, but it:

- Misses a majority of good hires

- Rejects a supermajority of bad hires

Unless you are 1-2 std. div. above a typical Googler, you should expect multiple interviews before you're hired. If you're qualified, and it's 1 std div, it takes about 3-4 tries. If it's 2 std. div, it takes 20(!) tries. If you're underqualified, that goes up very rapidly, and if you're overqualified, it goes down a bit.

Few people are overqualified on all axes (soft skills, coding, system design, etc.), so virtually everyone runs into rejections like this. The sooner you learn to deal with rejection, the better off you are.

[TrackerFF]

"The cost of a bad hire is much higher than the cost of a missed good hire."

I see this all the time, but never anyone backing it up with studies.

I'm not calling you out specifically - but rather, I wonder, does anyone here have any comprehensive study on this topic that they can link?

(I'm asking, because this industry is littered with dubious claims that sooner or later become accepted as facts)

[woofie11]

It's one of those things, if you've ever managed a larger team, that's incredibly, incredibly obvious.

A single bad hire can suck up the vast majority of your management time, drain team morale, drain it further when you inevitably fire them, open you up to liability, and generally make your life miserable.

Bad hires do slip in, and each time they do, BOY does it suck.

You need a study for this just about as much as you need a study for "Don't touch the kitchen burner."

[mattbrewsbytes]

I think there is another angle of this that a "good hire" that is missed because of ridiculous interview practices could potentially be an exceptionally great hire over time. If anything, FAANG companies are probably an ideal environment for people to deepen skills.

I think, based on comments here and elsewhere, FAANG companies always have job postings up and are always interviewing simply to vacuum talent up from competition and to project the image of an ever expanding company that is hard to get into. I wouldn't like to be forced into interviewing candidates for essentially generic job postings where the majority of outcomes for candidates is negative. How depressing.

[specialist]

> ...set the bar about 1-2 std. div. above their typical hire.

How's that metric determined? For the candidate, current staff, and interviewer themself?

[stillblue]

What do you mean when you say “1 to 2 std div above….”?

[ht85]

    <div style="z-index: 2" />

[MrWiffles]

A "standard div", I like it!

[xvedejas]

It sound probably be "std dev", shorthand for "standard deviation".

[woofie11]

Yup. The stupid brain version of a typo.

* Setting the bar at 2 std dev means you need to interview 20 candidates at your hiring cut-off to find one you believe is qualified. The other 19 qualified candidates get rejected by chance.

* Setting the bar at 1 std dev means you need to interview 3-4 candidates to find one who you believe is qualified. The other 2-3 are rejected by chance.

Of course, most candidates aren't right at cut-off, so it's not quite 1:20, but it is pretty random. A good model for hiring, from the candidate side, is that you interview. If you pass, you role a die, just like in an RPG.

Unless you're coming in through a side door or a backdoor, rejections are just part of life. People take it personally, and fault the interviewer for a bad process, but interviewing is fundamentally a very noise measurement. It's the only way we've found to get good employees at scale:

* You set an unreasonably high bar.

* You interview a lot of people.

* Occasionally, qualified candidates pass by chance, but the majority are rejected.

* If you set the bar high enough, unqualified candidates will rarely pass by chance, by virtue of how Gaussian curves look

[stillblue]

I'm still confused. Standard deviation of what? What is being measured here?

[woofie11]

Some measure of employee quality, as evidenced in the interview. To make this simple, let's take an exam instead of an interview:

* Let's say I was hiring someone to do calculus.

* I want applicants who typically score at least a 90% on a calculus AP. The exam has a std. dev. of 3 points.

* I get an applicant, and I give them an AP exam.

* They score a 91. What do I do?

That means they are 1/3 of a std. dev. above my cut-off. They might typically score 88 and got a little bit lucky, or even 85 and got very lucky. Or they might typically score a 94, and got unlucky.

If I hire that person, although they're probably qualified (assuming a uniform distribution of applicants), I'll get a lot of bad hires.

To avoid that, I set the cut-off at 93% or 96%. This means I intentionally reject most people who meet my cut-off. On the other hand, if I hire someone, I can be pretty confident they're qualified.

The cut-off needs to be high in part since the distribution of applicants isn't uniform. Most applicants are unqualified morons. Qualified people will apply to a few places, and are quickly hired. Unqualified people will apply over, and over, and over, everywhere they can.

[stillblue]

>Unqualified people will apply >over, and over, and over, >everywhere they can

Given this is true, won’t it be the case that you’d hire more people who were unqualified but repeatedly got better at interviews as opposed to the qualified one(someone who always gets 91 or 92 in your example)

You’ll actually end up hiring folks who are not good at what they do but people who got better at interviews.

[papaf]

Certainly not clarity of written communication.

[amir734jj]

> The sooner you learn to deal with rejection, the better off you are.

Definitely a good advice. Thank you. I appreciate it.