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by danjac 1183 days ago
That's just it. They are willing to lose the occasional great hire in order to avoid the risk of a bad hire.
2 comments

> to avoid the risk of a bad hire

But the silly thing it, the convoluted interviews don't avoid the risk of a bad hire because they test for the wrong things.

The analogy I use is that it's like a hospital trying to hire a heart surgeon by extensively grilling candidates on trick questions about organic chemistry. I mean sure, the surgeons probably took that class a few decades ago prior to medical school. So they end up with surgeons that are wizards in organic chemistry but might well not know how to use a scalpel or know where the heart is.

Sure, that's the reasoning, but I've yet to see any evidence that it actually does reduce bad hires
> I've yet to see any evidence that it actually does reduce bad hires

And the OP's own point "responsibility is diluted so if there's a bad hire you can blame the process rather than one manager" would be needless if the process actually did avoid bad hires.

A good general rule is that most things can be explained by people trying to avoid responsibility for making a mistake.
It's not a reasoning I would agree with either. The core of my original comment is "avoid responsibility": people don't want to be held responsible for a bad hire (or a discrimination lawsuit), so adding multiple rounds to the process shares that responsibility among as many other people as possible. By cargo-culting from FAANG you can also use the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument and this dilutes responsibility further.

So does that actually reduce bad hires (or increase good to excellent hires)? Probably not, but that's not really the purpose of all this theatre. The purpose is that if there's a bad hire, do I, personally, get the blame?