[CobrastanJorji]

> They select for comfort with the prevailing mess, because they have no other frame of reference.

This doesn't go far enough. Employees on hiring committees select for conformance with their peers on the hiring committee because conformance with the other hiring committee members is the only success signal they will ever receive. An interviewer at a sufficiently large company will never receive any feedback (let alone timely feedback) on whether they are choosing good or bad coworker candidates. They will only ever get feedback on how other interviewers vote. In such an environment, the best you can learn to do is to conform.

In a small startup, where you immediately begin to work with the person you chose, you will get a lot more feedback on the people you chose to hire. Even then, though, you will never get any feedback on your false negatives. Are you rejecting lots of good candidates? You'll never know.