A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and don’t think of it like that. What it really is good at is finding patterns of behavior in someone’s life and work history. It’s not full of campy dumb mental problem questions. You just talk about yourself and your work history and how you relate to previous colleagues and managers. And it’s done consistently to make it a little more comparable from one person to the next. The reference checks are one of the most useful and valuable parts of the whole process (we are flexible here, we are a small company). I can see how this process could get morphed into something less friendly, but at the end of the day it’s a huge time investment for us and the candidate so we don’t embark upon it lightly. I haven’t found a better interviewing technique that takes the pain out of it for the employee and the employer. Our team all appreciated the process and we take their feedback seriously. We don’t follow all of the steps in top grading religiously, but the interviewing process is really good. We also read a lot of other books on building a hiring process and settled on top grading as the most consistent and logical. The few people we didn’t hire threw up major red flags in their interview process in terms of how they would fit in at the company and the work we do. How else should a company hire people? For a small business we try to de-risk the hiring process as much as possible because mishiring is /extremely/ painful. We have grown from 3-20 people organically. Each hire we made was and is very important to our growth and stability.

Edit: just wanted to say I am a partner/founder at my company and we deeply give a shit about what we do and who we work with. Our turnover across 7 years is very, very low. We strive for a good work life harmony with everyone that works with us. You have to have some process to fit people into a company and that means you gotta talk to people and get to know them. The goal is to eliminate interviewer bias as much as humanly possible after the technical screening. So it goes. Not everyone can be pleased and I would defend our hiring practices as very reasonable and humanistic in an otherwise crazy tech interviewing system at the FAANGs of the world.