Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage.

It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.

I’ve worked with places that have had HR bungle the hiring and places that haven’t. The only difference is whether it’s HR or Engineering bungling the hiring. Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work. Sifting through 300 applicants that don’t meet the requirements or lie on the application form is hard work. Doing 10 30 minute intro calls is hard work. Desigining “standard” questions for comparison is hard work. Wrangling 2 rounds of interviews per candidate, dealing with people who are too busy with work for hiring is hard work. Chasing people for interview feedback that isn’t just “yeah seems fine” is hard work. And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the last few years as a peer, hiring manager, and as a “bar raiser”, and it’s just a lot of work no matter who does it…

Because like a lot of things, metric of "What does recruiting cost us?" is very easy number to quantify so companies will attempt to reduce it.

"What does bad recruiting cost us?" is very hard number to quantify because it's just sand that gets thrown into so many gears, but cost of that sand is across a ton of departments and so measuring for it is very difficult.

I think being successful makes hiring easier because you can source better candidates, and being big makes hiring easier because candidates are more likely to know people at the firm who can use referrals to work around otherwise broken systems.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that lots of companies used to copy how Microsoft did interviews and later they copied how google did interviews so clearly there were some ideas that those companies were good at hiring. (I’m not sure this strategy was that good. The problem for the Microsoft or google type companies is filtering out acceptable hires from a deluge of applicants with acceptably low errors and costs; the challenge for less desirable firms is sourcing candidates who are both high quality and not about to be hired by Microsoft or Google)

One company that comes to mind when I think about being good at hiring was one that recruited a bunch from my university around when I was graduating. Their particular specialty was hiring illegible graduates with a lot of potential (eg classicists, science students without little programming, etc), training them well, and effectively underpaying them a bit for how skilled they were (which only worked out because the UK has a pretty shit job market for tech and because those people liked working there). I think it was more effective for them than trying to hire the same computer science graduates as everyone else would have been.

Because it is really hard to reliably hire good people. Almost all typical signals & methods (CVs, experience based interviews, …) have very low reliability. An IQ test has the highest reliability according to studies but would be illegal in most jurisdictions. Plus, hiring managers frequently don’t know what they want or they believe they want something that they actually don’t

The best hiring is generally expected to happen through referrals, so there's not a ton of pressure to improve the public application pipeline beyond the minimum required to keep it functional.

Here's the secret: it's still just gambling. Elon musk isn't a trillionaire because he brought something special to the table; it's because he was able to perform the martigale enough times and he arbitrarily reached the top.

Hiring is exactly the same thing, even when trying to do it on merit, people are simply poor judges of character, ability and the rest.

Most of society is governed by people who simply kept getting lucky and kept doubling down because their ego demanded it and their last roll of the dice didn't drive them to poverty or happiness.

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