You only need to fill a position with a person that is good enough.

If you reject someone who would have been a good fit but still hire someone good eventually, that’s ok.

A bad hire is not fun, not for HR, not for the hiring manager, not for the colleagues and ultimately not for the person who got hired. Especially if they had to move for the job, possibly with family.

A bad hire has massive negative consequences for many people. Of course you want to avoid that, if that comes at the cost of not hiring someone who would have been great occasionally, that’s unfortunate but acceptable.

I don’t disagree but “good enough” comes with its own risks. That may be fine for an organization that has a lot of inertia and is biased towards the “maintaining” side of the house. However, I think it would make it make things more difficult if the intent was for bold, transformative change.

The bar for "good enough" can of course be quite high.

If you're hiring people at the very top or with rare skillsets, like building browser engines, building databases or people whose skill is at author/contributor level to relevant technology (for the job in question), you're probably not going to go with the usual process anyway as there is less uncertainty.

Fun fact: Google & other tech giants have poached a lot of game engine designers to optimise datacenters at truly obnoxious salaries, because their fundamental skill is making complex systems of interacting entities run as efficiently as possible. It's causing problems in the games industry because they can't compete.

Understanding this is the most important part of interview process, in my opinion. Large companies want to minimise bad hires, small companies are more open to odd CVs and novel approaches. Market yourself appropriately.

Yes this. Hiring the wrong person can be ridiculously expensive, especially if they linger on in a role for years corroding the culture.

obligatory request for citation

Not trying to be snarky but isn’t it intuitively more expensive assuming you’ll try to fire and then rehire correctly? It’s like asking “why does it cost more to go through a process twice rather than once?”

Do you really need a citation for this obvious fact?

This isn't StackExchange.

I think the problem is HR itself. Few companies should be large enough to warrant full time HR, but even small companies need many.. HR are specialist in expanding the disconnect between people the company thinks it needs and people who are willing to work for it.

You say that, but look through this thread. HR has a solid understanding of what a given company's large-scale objectives are when hiring. As evidenced by most replies in this thread, technicians on the ground do not.

The evidence is that it is a hard problem that is not solved. No amount of people who can't do the task demonstrate the existence of experts who can. Google and Microsoft have shown us examples of failing at simple HR tasks for years or decades with budgets for HR that dwarf a small companies entire payroll.

What virtually every attempt shows is that it is better to hire people who are roughly qualified and see what happens, managing the results instead of filtering. Having an HR strategy for hiring leads to creating biases (i.e. requirements based on your current work force) that gets you a group of overly similar and therefore collectively incompetent work force.