The "Are you good enough for us?" interview process is seriously broken, maybe even neurotic, considering that the excessive focus on weeding out false positives actually ends up rejecting too many good people such as you who would end up contributing a LOT.
The inequation is :
Savings due to reducing false positives << Loss due to increased false negatives.
10X lower
It takes intelligence to realize this, because weeding out false positives (LHS) is a Realized profit : your workplace is full of smart people and you get to say, "See, our process works", while the RHS is an Unrealized loss : you never got the chance to quantify how much you lost by rejecting the next amazing employee.
IMHO, everybody needs to get off their high horse and start accepting employees after gasp just a cursory inspection of resumes / qualifications / blog posts, or even more radically, random double gasp selection of 10% of candidates who meet the minimum criteria. Give everyone a long probation period, and allowing them to seek feedback frequently as to how they can influence the decision to hire them on a more permanent basis so that the final decision will not be a surprise binary event.
Hire for passion and ability, not just "the best"; how can you know the best among a sample if you never gave them a chance to score at the job (NOT looking good in an interview)?
I have been surprised many times by hiring non-superstars and then finding out that there are many dimensions to doing a job, such as perseverance and sincerity, that they can bring to the table that can tilt the final score in their favour.
>> Give everyone a long probation period, and allowing them to seek feedback frequently as to how they can influence the decision to hire them on a more permanent basis so that the final decision will not be a surprise binary event.
Hypothetically, let's assume every company follows this method and around 30% of the employees who went through long probation period didn't make it through. Wouldn't that leave the employees in an even worse situation than getting rejected immediately, since they resigned their current job and now everyone in his professional circle knows that he or she didn't make it through company X's probation period? In addition to that, the employer will also accrue a lot more negative publicity from the employees who didn't make it through.
This will not be as big a problem as you assume because the "everyone in his professional circle who knows that he or she didn't make it through company X's probation period" would also have gotten their fair chance to try their hand at being a Google or Apple employee, to aim as high as possible, and would have faced the same rate of rejection.
It is only a problem if failing probation is a huge black mark. If there are a large number of people for whom the company-employee fit didn't occur, the word "probation" would lose it's sting. Maybe we can call it an "apprenticeship" period? Or other innocuous term without previous negative connotation.
> In addition to that, the employer will also accrue a lot more negative publicity from the employees who didn't make it through.
The same could be said of ex-employees, too.
In general, the problem is the neurosis of giving too much importance to "failure" or "probation". It is ironic that this is the case even in a startup discussion board :-)
The inequation is :
Savings due to reducing false positives << Loss due to increased false negatives.
10X lower
It takes intelligence to realize this, because weeding out false positives (LHS) is a Realized profit : your workplace is full of smart people and you get to say, "See, our process works", while the RHS is an Unrealized loss : you never got the chance to quantify how much you lost by rejecting the next amazing employee.
IMHO, everybody needs to get off their high horse and start accepting employees after gasp just a cursory inspection of resumes / qualifications / blog posts, or even more radically, random double gasp selection of 10% of candidates who meet the minimum criteria. Give everyone a long probation period, and allowing them to seek feedback frequently as to how they can influence the decision to hire them on a more permanent basis so that the final decision will not be a surprise binary event.
Hire for passion and ability, not just "the best"; how can you know the best among a sample if you never gave them a chance to score at the job (NOT looking good in an interview)?
I have been surprised many times by hiring non-superstars and then finding out that there are many dimensions to doing a job, such as perseverance and sincerity, that they can bring to the table that can tilt the final score in their favour.