[em500]

Google receives about 3 million applications per year, and hires less than 1% of them. Not all of them for dev positions, but still probably at least a million. Google is probably the most popular, but even the maligned Facebook gets a few hundred thousand applications per year.

I concur with the parent's point. HN is perpetually complaining about tech interviews, but nobody ever suggests a viable alternative that can cope with such application volumes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/heres-how-many-google-job-in...

[Beltalowda]

Companies like Google (and similar) are kind of the exception; I'm starting a job next week, and I had an initial video call for almost all jobs I applied for when searching. Sometimes I wrote a cover letter, often I don't. My CV is decent enough, but not uniquely "oh wow!"-type of impressive. I don't think I was filtered out of thousands of applicants in ~90% of the cases.

While remote positions can certainly receive a lot of "noise applicants", as I discovered in my last job, you can filter out half, if not more, on just a quick pass. Most companies are dealing with dozens of candidates at the most, often less. Certainly not thousands of them.

[vanusa]

Google (and all the other companies with similar net hiring ratios) use multiple factors to narrow their pre-interview pool; including standard techniques such as resume and phone screening. And then there's in-person interview itself, which involves broader cognitive and personality assessments (apart from in-person LC recitation).

The parent poster was literally saying that LC screening by itself will get you your 99 percent reduction.

[em500]

Of course, LC-only won't get you there, and all companies with LC use the whole arsenal. But I don't doubt that LC will filter out a very large fraction of applicants (hence the incessant whining on HN). The point is though, with Google-like application volumes, if they drop LC they'll need to substitute it with something that also filters out a very large fraction.

The actual hiring ratio at google is something like 0.2%. They pass over 998 out of 1000 applicants, so no matter what they do, they'll pass over a substantial number of qualified people, and no matter what they do there will be complaints on HN.

[vanusa]

I'll go with a "very large fraction".

It was this resorting to made-up numbers that I found to be kind of weird.