In my experience, there was considerable pressure on hiring managers to hire someone, because people are honestly needed. So, the risk of hiring one bad apple is offset by risk of being seen as someone who will never hire anyone (and thus will be excluded from hiring).

Then again, probably one of the worst bad apple I have seen would ace whiteboard as he was quite good at trics. He just did not like the actual work involved in software development and tended not to do work he don't like except bare minimum.