No it's not. As I said in the sibling comment, competitive programming (or algorithm skills in general) isn't about memorizing algorithms, it's about developing skills that allow you to understand and create algorithms to solve problems. In this case, it would be sufficient to understand why looking up a phone number in a phone book should inherently be a O(log n) operation, not a O(n) operation.

> I don't want to hire software engineers who have memorized the algorithm book, that's not useful to me. I want to hire those who can apply discipline to the work, such as (in this example) be aware of performance and know how to analyze it and find solutions.

So we're discussing a hypothetical developer who has "no interest towards algorithms", and you're imagining that this person is going to run a profiler to troubleshoot a performance issue and subsequently optimize algorithms to fix said performance issue? This sounds like a fantasy to me. If you want skilled software engineers who have the ability to troubleshoot and optimize algorithms, you probably need someone who has some kind of interest towards algorithms.