> there are too many applicants who can't do the job but apply anyway. So the company needs some way to filter,
If we take that as a given, and I don't disagree with you, what happens? The hiring pipeline becomes optimized to prevent unqualified people from getting through the process. It's focused on reducing false positives: hiring the wrong person. As a side effect, it eliminates more people who might be hired before they get far. In other words, the number of false negatives is not controlled.
In short, the way the filter works is broken. Good candidates never get to the offer stage. They are incorrectly filtered out by a process optimized for filtering, not discovering.
Probably the case, but the iterated version of this is far worse: imagine the process is optimized so that qualified candidates are made offers 25% of the time (vs 100% ideally) and unqualified are made offers 1% of the time (va 0% ideally).
This isn’t a single round N-choose-1 game; the unqualified candidates don’t dematerialize, but rather keep applying and may even engage with automation tools to apply to hundreds of roles every day. So, they become wildly over-represented in the applicant pool for any given role.
If we take that as a given, and I don't disagree with you, what happens? The hiring pipeline becomes optimized to prevent unqualified people from getting through the process. It's focused on reducing false positives: hiring the wrong person. As a side effect, it eliminates more people who might be hired before they get far. In other words, the number of false negatives is not controlled.
In short, the way the filter works is broken. Good candidates never get to the offer stage. They are incorrectly filtered out by a process optimized for filtering, not discovering.