> Because the damage when hiring a bad candidate is much higher than the damage from missing out on a good one!
I get that this is the conventional wisdom in a subset of this industry, but in my experience this "truth" does not have as much objective support as the people who keep repeating it think it does.
In at least one aspect, the adage becomes facially untrue -- you can fire bad employees, but you cannot get back good candidates rejected by means of a degrading exercise. You probably lose them forever.
In companies where opportunity cost and hidden losses are nobody's responsibility, this sort of mediocrity is well accepted.
You can fire the bad ones, sure. After you document everything and cross i's and dot t's. Even if you don't CYA, you still lost team productivity while they onboarded the new person, and that time is lost. Plus the hit to team moral, and possible negative affects to team culture of dealing with an under performer or toxic individual.
What's the cost to team morale when the team members have to put in extra time to meet deadlines because the team is shorthanded? What's the cost to the company when the team doesn't have the bandwidth to take on work and projects start slipping? How does team culture fare when someone on the team always finds some reason to reject every candidate they see, and this continues for weeks or months on end? What is the loss of productivity from having to conduct all these extra interviews until just the right person walks through the door?
The answers to both sets of questions are very situational, yet some people treat them as if they have universal answers.
