[ashraymalhotra]

I would love help from the community on what the best solution for hiring is.

Sharing a real example I am going through -> * A single LinkedIn post about a job I was hiring for got me 300+ candidates in a single day. I am sure if I went through the channels, I would have 1000+ candidates for a single role (assuming 1000 in this example). * There are candidates that I think might be great for the role, who I will do outbound to try to attract them. * A single interview process would involve at least 4+ people in the process, potentially taking half a day of cumulative eng time away from the company (4 hours).

The current hiring process is massively broken for all parties involved. It's not a good experience for candidates, or for hiring managers, or for the people who volunteer their time to interviews.

Out of the 1000 candidates, either AI, or humans today will pick, say, the top 50 to proceed to the next step (with humans). There's no "perfect" process to do this today, hence it's likely to happen based on past employers/colleges/github contributions etc.

Is there an opportunity for AI interviews for the other 950 people and find the hidden gems of talent who get overlooked today because of the biases above? This can especially help people who would be overlooked by typical ATS filtering mechanisms.

[tveita]

Sure, for instance, if all of them go through an 1 hour AI interview, then you might find a better candidate, at the cost of 1000 man-hours of work. You hire that person, another company opens a position, gets 999 applicants, send them all their own AI interview, and so forth.

How much would better would your hire be considering that you managed to check all 1000 of them, rather than just 50?

Assume that candidate fitness is a number normally distributed around 0 (half of them obviously being negative), that both you and the AI can perfectly pick out the best candidate, and that you picked the 50 to interview completely at random. The average actually seems to be around 40% better? Suprisingly decent. Is that improvement worth 1000 man-hours?

So attempt two here: maybe instead of each company sending candidates through an interview, there should be a common gatekeeper. All working age people take the same 1-hour AI interview, and the glorious overseer assigns them to the position they are best suited for.

(An actual answer here is you assess how important it is to get "the best candidate", and you interview enough people to get a reasonable approximation. The hour cost on your side is what keeps you honest. If wasting candidate time is free on your side, you're going to waste 500 man-hours of work for a 5% better result for you.)

[aakresearch]

Agree. Your post mirrors surprisingly well with mine of last year [0] - did you, by chance, happened to come across it? I said "you’d likely get approximately the same quality of candidates from a randomly selected 50 out of 5,000". And the main idea I was trying to convey is parallel to yours too: companies, consciously or not, try to find "the best candidate", while using completely inadequate "hiring funnel" approach. If that is their genuine need, they would be better off with "headhunting" approach. And the whole industry, businesses and candidates alike, would be better off if businesses recognize that the difference between "best" and "second best", or even "third best" is not meaningful (outside of C-suite) and not worth exponentially higher spend.

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271736 (believe it or not, em-dashes are all mine, even though I regret now putting my original draft through LLM - even if it was for grammar-check only)

[desert_rue]

Don’t interview the 950. If you want to see if there are any diamonds in the rough, put it in your ‘no thanks’ email that if the want to make another case as to why you all should talk, then they should reply to that email or email you directly, or something.

[satisfice]

All you need to do is hire someone who is hungry and has potential. That’s most people. So riffle through the resumes to find anyone who shows any kind of spark or humanity. Pick the five of those. Hire one of those five.