[jfindley]

High barriers to entry on the interview process don't mean as much as you may think. Even with the best interview process in the world, you're only going to have a small number of hours to try to evaluate a lot of complex factors about a human you know nothing about. You're going to hire people you shouldn't - and lots of them. You're also going to miss hiring people you should. It sucks, but that's life.

With that in mind I do think your conclusion's a little suspect - there really will be a good amount of underperforming people you really do want to part ways with. Maybe not 6% - I don't work in HR, so I don't see those sorts of metrics - but I definitely have encountered lots of people who got through the interview process but nevertheless had no ability to do the job adequately.

I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on this to then complain about the arduous interview process - but NO interview process is perfect. Having a tough process is a reasonable way to reduce the number of people you end up not keeping on, and expecting any process involving humans to be anything close to perfect is wildly unrealistic.

[ghaff]

And for roles at companies with very quantifiable outputs--like sales for example--the approach at a lot of companies is not to sweat the hiring process too much and just let go people who don't make their numbers (whether it's really their fault or not). Someone I knew's shorthand for this was that sales managers have no trouble firing people.

[HDThoreaun]

Right. FAANG interviews generally aren't even trying to figure out if someone will be good at their job. Leetcode tests for IQ and being willing to sink tons of hours into bs to get the job. FAANG companies have decided those are important qualities needed to succeed, but they clearly aren't the only ones.