Optima & Outliers
If you’re Meta, Google or the real life version of Dunder Mifflin Paper Co, you can afford to have a recruitment funnel that filters out good candidates along with bad ones. In other words, false negatives are fine but false negatives must be avoided at all costs. If you’re a recruiter at one of these places, your incentives will drive you towards finding candidates who won’t fuck up or make you look bad. And if your guy or gal does in fact fuck up, you should be ready for the ultimate exculpatory move: raising your hands up and saying “But he went to Harvard” or “But Goldman hired him”,
The “traditional” hiring process, sourced via Linkedin or other job boards, is optimized for this objective function. Get a large pile of resumes in by making it trivially easy to apply; then use keywords like “Harvard” and “Goldman” to slash that pile to a tenth of its size; out of that pile, select only those candidates for interviews that have done precisely the same job at a well known competitor.
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