[gzer0]

The core issue here is the sheer volume of applicants. Microsoft opened 30 new-grad software engineering positions. Care to guess how many applications they got within 24 hours? 1,000? 10,000?

Nope.

100,000 applications. In under a single day.

With that kind of applicant pool, I’m honestly not sure what the best approach is—even though, in a perfect world, your suggestion would be the more appropriate route. The reality, however, is that these numbers are just absurd.

[lordnacho]

The problem is attempting to optimize a noisy process. Instinctively people think they need to look at all the applicants.

Start interviewing people, and once you have enough people who pass your bar, you tell the rest tough luck.

Secretary problem.

[dahart]

That, to some degree, is guaranteed to happen naturally. But why not use a sieve approach and narrow the pool exponentially using a range of tools that goes from automatic and instantaneous at the start to manual and time-intensive interviews at the end? The potential upside for a company is relatively large - with a small amount of work they have the opportunity to get the approximately best 30 people out of 100k graduating students. From the company’s perspective, this isn’t a problem at all, it’s a massive windfall of an opportunity. They can afford to optimize it, and they’re motivated to. As a hiring manager or company founder, I’d love to have this “problem”.

That said, your comment reminds me of a Monte Carlo algorithm I think I’ve heard about. There is a way to have some statistical confidence in getting the top K out of a sample of N without examining all N samples. I’m blanking on what it’s called, and I think it’s related to Reservoir Sampling. I don’t know if I read this or am making it up, but my instinct is that you can get to high levels of confidence after looking at sqrt(N) samples.

[xandrius]

I think at that point it's a lottery anyway, pick 50 truly randomly and try those?

[teddyh]

“We don’t want to hire unlucky people.”

[axus]

Wow, 30 for all of Microsoft... they probably lose 30 people a month just from attrition!

[thaumasiotes]

> With that kind of applicant pool, I’m honestly not sure what the best approach is

You should see the number of people that apply to college.

[turdprincess]

At least in the USA one major piece of the college application is a standardized test - a concept very similar to a Leetcode interview.