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Re:We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2... by aetherson on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @03:43PM (#15595940)
If you have 100 candidates for a job, then doing a half-hour phone screen for all 100 of them is 50 hours of work -- a bit more than one whole work-week.

And if you're committed to not missing a candidate who might be really good but your heuristics would lead to a false negative on, how much does a half-hour phone screen really tell you? I mean, can you really reject more than half of the candidates based on a half-hour phone screen if you're committed to a very low false-negative rate?

What are you going to do, bring 50 candidates into the office for half-day interviews? You've now brought your sunk cost of interviewing from one person-week to 6 person-weeks. And you've also actually probably spent 3 months doing this process, so you've probably also delayed actually hiring someone for at least a month. 10 person-weeks worth of productivity starts looking a lot less good compared to a 10% productivity bonus.

Re:We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2... by mrkurt on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @04:00PM (#15596058)
Given how unreliable interviews can be (both phone and in person), you'd have to solve it with another mechanism.

At my last company, we "screened" ~200-500 candidates per job with a work sample. It was really hard to put together, and worked amazingly well once we had it going. We did a structured interview everyone who passed the work samples and it never felt like a waste of time.

Re:We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2... by pjmlp on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @04:29PM (#15596273)
The first round of filtering is one of the jobs HR is supposed to do.