[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)