[jseban]

Your goal is to enable your business to make more money, that requires hiring enough competent people that can do the work that needs to be done, to make that money.

Sometimes that work is really not especially interesting, or challenging. Nobody is going to love it, or be passionate about it, and it really doesn't require a person to be more than average in terms of skill, because it's just not that technically difficult.

And that sometimes is the majority of all salaried work, so statistically speaking, that's probably also you and your company.

Why pretend to be a unicorn and only insist on hiring passionate self motivated people who will be a bad fit anyway, and be bored after two weeks.

The hiring process is not for stroking the egos of middle managers who want to feel special.

[twawaaay]

I am not pretending to be unicorn by keeping high hiring standards.

It is a reflection on our strategy. Our strategy is that, long term, is better to have smaller, tight knit community of highly intelligent, capable and motivated people than try to throw masses of lower paid employees at the problem.

We are fighting complexity and having large team of constantly rotating people that never seem to bear responsibility for their decisions is one of the worst things you can do.

I prefer to spend more time on hiring, find people I am satisfied with and then pay them well so that they are not looking to change their job in two years as most IT seems to be doing nowadays. Retention is a hugely underestimated success factor.

[jseban]

Highly intelligent, (technically) capable and motivated people are probably not in any way correlated with the amount of complexity you are needing to fight with. And if it is, it's most likely negative.

Lack of intelligence is probably not your problem, the computer genius who swoops in and saves the day only exists in movies. You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management who actually structures the work and aligns the team by making decisions.

There are plenty of reliable, mature, productive people with great team work and communication skills, who will get rejected because they say that they are actually passionate about playing guitar, not programming, and because they can't solve esoteric programming problems on whiteboards.

Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals, it's optimised for acting out the big bang theory in the workplace.