But have you also hired people who did not interview well and weren't great at the work? The goal of interviewing is to avoid false positives, not to avoid false negatives.
"The goal of interviewing is to avoid false positives, not to avoid false negatives" - why is it? I can rectify a false positive, but if I miss greatness I might fail. If you hire people that others do not look at you can get people who are very loyal too.
Rectifying a false positive is very expensive (cost of time they're not producing but drawing a salary, eating dev time for training, etc. + cost of firing), and firing people is a morale issue as well. Maybe this is from the perspective of a company that has no shortage of applications, but rejecting an applicant that would've been good costs basically nothing (dev time + travel if they got through phone screens).
I didn't realize there was dissent on this topic. Care to elaborate? I initially picked this up from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html ("An important thing to remember about interviewing is this: it is much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate.")
