This has been a deepening mystery throughout my career. I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes, and are at the same time frustrated that most projects fail or don't quite deliver. Meanwhile, the best engineers I know have to look for a really long time to find suitable jobs.

> "I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes"

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Most companies seem to be interesting in improving their recruitment processes - but certain fundamental systems and assumptions are treated as inviolate and sacred.

Here is a quick but incomplete list of the ones that come to mind:

- Open-ended unstructured interviews are the optimal way to evaluate candidates.

- Whiteboard coding is an acceptable, reliable, and reasonably accurate way to gauge coding ability.

- Algorithms and data structure knowledge predicts overall software engineering capability.

- Culture fit (in however nebulous ways) is a stronger predictor of future performance than standardized evaluation.

The list goes on.

The tech industry overall seems very interested in improving recruitment and hiring, so long as these fundamental tenets are never violated. Suffice it to say, this stands in contrast to tech's (in)famous claims of thinking outside the box, breaking the rules, and holding nothing sacred to disruption.

I've personally seen companies try to improve candidate sourcing, scoring systems, interview scheduling, etc etc, but practically never any of the above. Companies try really, really hard to optimize within an extremely narrow band of parameters.

Agreed, but I'd put it that way: most companies I see are very interested in pretending to improve their recruitment processes.

What they don't really want, is to take on people who are noticeably better than (or different in any way from) the people already working there.

Perhaps a more exact personal observation would be that hiring managers always hire the same type of person.

There are many different constraints here. Many companies that hire software developers aren't necessarily in the "business" of software which colors their approach to hiring. They aren't experts in hiring developers so they tend to outsource it. As someone who is part of hiring decisions at just such a company I regularly see things like:

1. Pushback on work sample tests from the recruiting companies.

2. Upper management wondering why it's so hard to find candidates that can pass our work sample tests.

3. Suggestions that maybe we should be using an online coding test. (multiple choice questions of poor quality)

It can be really difficult for companies that don't have a lot of in-house experience here to figure out how to hire good developers. Much of what is known in Silicon Valley style companies isn't really known by HR in a smaller company in the midwest. They don't typically read HN or follow the tech blogs. And unless they luck into hiring a vocal Senior Developer like me to specifically guide their recruiting and interviewing process they won't even realize how badly their hiring process is.

But then, apparently, there are virtually no good companies to work for. So most people shouldn't bother worrying about it.

Nope. I only have time for one job, and I want it to be the best one possible. It doesn't matter if most companies are shitty; I won't be working for most companies.