The philosophy at Google is that it's better to filter out 3 good engineers than to let in a bad one.
Corollary: "If I follow (what I've heard to be) Google's hiring practices (despite not having their brand recognition or candidate pool or a comparable engineering environment to offer) -- then my company is on the way to becoming another Google!"
Sure, it's something not to be copied by a small company. But it's important to understand for good developers that they can be great and still fail the process (they just have to prepare again adn reapply)
