Tech Hiring Filters

just because you hire anyone who applies doesn't mean just anyone will apply. people don't actually want to get a job they have no idea how to do. applicants will filter themselves. the question is how much better is a company's filtering process, really, than the applicants' self-filtering? would be embarrassing if it were no better, or even worse.

With hiring I feel like it always comes down to two potential paths to pursue:1) Hire all good candidates as well as a fairly large percentage of bad candidates.2) Reject all bad candidates, and hire a fraction of the good candidates.Which route a company takes generally depends on what the company needs. In this case it sounds like his company needed to minimize bad candidate hires more than find all good candidates.So yes, what you said is correct. This approach will filter out a l

It's a capacity issue - you wouldn't 'find somebody who ticked all the boxes, but didn't have a degree' in the first place, because their resume would simply not make it into the interview pile. Now that may be shortsighted or suboptimal on the part of the hiring company, but it's a quick and dirty heuristic to reduce the pile of resumes to something more manageable.

It's not necessarily that it's beneath them, but more that they have so many options available to them.Imagine you have 10 companies that you are willing to consider:- 5 of them are willing to immediately bring you into a serious interview- 5 of them want you to take a coding test or some other pre-interview stepWhy would you bother with those last 5 companies? Just go for the companies that respect your resume enough to bring you in for a real interview.Those latter 5 c

Can't they simply hire the first eligible person? One can go through resumes and filter out people who don't meet objective criteria(e.g. work experience, location). This should be trivial. Then once they have 30 good resumes, they can call these people for interview. Assuming 10% chance of each candidate meeting the job requirements, they have >95% chance of finding a good candidate.With automated resume pruning, it shouldn't take more than two hours for initial pruning. Ac

Either end of the hiring channel is extremely noisy, recruiters work by spamming and candidates get seen by spamming. In my anecdotal experience, maybe 1 in 10 of any given job listing or applicant is worth pursuing.These questions are a less bad way of filtering people out than others. They're not the only filters used, and others have different tradeoffs. Sometimes if you're hitting these questions it's because the other filters have already excluded you.

Any hiring process will necessarily filter out a large percentage of qualified candidates so it's not a major concern. If I'm hiring for X positions, and there are X + Y qualified candidates, then any hiring process whatsoever will necessarily have to filter out at a minimum Y candidates, and usually Y will be much much greater than X.The problem is that the total number of candidates who apply for the position, Z, is significantly higher than X + Y by a very very large margin, and

These companies don't notice that in this way, the good people a driven away, and only the desperate will apply.It's a catch-22. Without this process, every man & his dog will apply for the job causing the company to have to filter through literally hundreds of applications in order to find appropriate candidates. Those that actually take the time to tolerate the process obviously consider themselves suitable and do really want the job.As a Tech Recruiter, I'm generally the fron

I'm pretty sure filters like this exist because the real world people that are doing the interviewing / filtering aren't good enough / experienced enough / invested enough in interviewing to come up with a better filter.

I fully agree. Here is my experience hiring from a pool of candidates:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22740897