Also depends on what they're counting in their percentiles.

You can pretty easily hire the top 1% of applicants, and still get only mediocre results. E.g. at one job, when looking for a senior-level eng position, clearly stated in the description, we easily weeded out a couple hundred applicants who had effectively zero experience whatsoever. No prior programming-related jobs, internships, side projects, open source, nothing.

Which is a waste of time for everyone involved. Hence the heavy reliance on connections :(