How do you know? How often did you follow up on rejections to see whether they should have been hires?
The only one that made me sad, was a chap who used to show up on the Adobe Photoshop splash page. We offered, he declined.
In the aggregate, I think things turned out OK for all of us. There are some folks that I have to admit, probably did best by not accepting us.
Yeah, I hear that. I remember interviewing someone who was _good_, but not at this narrow thing that we were hiring for. She seemed SO hopeful that we would give her an offer, I wanted to tell her directly "this job is going to waste 6 mo of your life and offer you nothing I return"
He turned out to be an amazing hire. I think that he far outstripped the first choice, and he has gone on to do quite well, after leaving our company.
I like to think that I ran a fairly good shop. We kept people for decades.
When they finally rolled up our shop (after 27 years), the person with the least seniority had ten years.
I was a hiring manager for 25 years, and this was exactly what I did.
I made very, very few mistakes, and actually had some pleasant surprises.