Don't Hire All the Great Job Candidates?
I applied for a job at Google in the fall of 2003. 6 months later, a recruiter reached out and invited me in for an interview. I didn't get the job.
Why did it take them 6 months to decide if they liked my resume? Who knows. But Google’s byzantine hiring process was part of its mystique in those days. For ex, from a WSJ article from 2006:
Google Inc.'s recruiting process is legendary in Silicon Valley. Tales abound of job candidates who suffered through a dozen or more in-person interviews, and applicants with years of work experience who were spurned after disclosing they had so-so college grades.
Google’s process rejected a lot of great candidates (and so-so ones like me). Was this a feature or a bug?
If your startup is 100% accurate at only hiring great candidates, then there’s no reason to have a hiring process that will reject anyone who’s great. But if you’re less than 100% accurate & only want great hires, then you’re vulnerable to hiring mistakes. How to ensure your filter is sufficiently tight? If you aren’t occasionally rejecting great candidates, you’re likely hiring some not-great ones.
This logic can apply more broadly: a VC who wants to only invest in highly qualified startups will reject some great ones; founders who want to only accept highly qualified VCs on their cap table will do the same.
For me, this softens the blow of the occasional rejection. Many of the filters we want to pass through are designed to reject great candidates.