[rizzom5000]

Wow, if Google wants to hire the top 1%, it hardly means rejecting 99% of the interview candidates.

First of all, that logic only works if Google only wants the top 1% of people who apply to Google, and that Google is completely and absolutely incompetent at weeding out the bottom 99% through other screening methods.

Secondly, I doubt that Google has any kind of monopoly that allows them to determine what, exactly, the top 1% or even the top 10% is. A lot of people are fond of throwing these percentages around without even rudimentary data to support their notions of competence - which I think is probably fair to use as a data point for evidence of incompetence.

Thirdly, I could go on, but...

[jmillikin]

I think you misread my post. Rejecting 99% of interview candidates would provide a result of hiring the top 10% of coders, because 90% of the interview candidates cannot write code. Hiring the top 1% requires rejecting 99.9% of candidates.

You're assuming that other levels of screening (resumes, phone screens) must not be working properly if there are so many bad interview candidates, but really they're working very well. A large company will receive millions of applications for any position, and needs to winnow that down to a few hundred interview candidates. How many nines of rejection do you expect out of a phone screen?

[rizzom5000]

I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I expect a baseline phone screen session to reject someone who cannot FizzBuzz.

Is that so hard to accomplish without inviting someone in for an interview ? I cannot answer in the affirmative as I do not work in HR.

[mseebach]

I think what is meant is that 90% are rejected at the phone screen, and the top 10% or 1% are of those who can code, ie passes the phone screen. That makes them 1% or 0.1% of your initial applicant pool.