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by Kranar 1475 days ago
Any hiring process will necessarily filter out a large percentage of qualified candidates so it's not a major concern. If I'm hiring for X positions, and there are X + Y qualified candidates, then any hiring process whatsoever will necessarily have to filter out at a minimum Y candidates, and usually Y will be much much greater than X.

The problem is that the total number of candidates who apply for the position, Z, is significantly higher than X + Y by a very very large margin, and I mean orders and orders of magnitude. For every position I post I get on the order of 600-1000 applicants in a matter of a week, even though I'm only looking to hire maybe 2-3 people. Of those 1000 applicants, 80% of them are simply unqualified, and that's being really really generous just for the sake of argument (I'd wager the figure is closer to 90-95%). So once again just for the sake of argument that means 200 of them are qualified, and I'm hiring three, which means any process I choose whatsoever will filter out a minimum of 197 out of the 200 qualified people, no matter what I do.

Given that calculus, it's better for me to focus on making sure that I filter out the 800 people who are simply unqualified for the position even if that means I end up filtering some of the 200 good developers, because I have no choice but to filter out at least 197 of the good developers anyways no matter what, whereas I do have a choice about filtering out the 800 bad ones.