from Patrick McKenzie | by Patrick McKenzie

One of the reasons every hiring process is terrible, only one but unfortunately it is a true one, is that the median candidate for any publicly posted job will be a terrible fit. t.co/8NUmU31LeB

Partly this is the dating site problem (some candidates believe their dominant strategy is applying to a hundred jobs in parallel, with relatively little individualized effort) and partly it is a subtly different one.

That problem is difficult to talk about, and rounds to “Are current candidates less competent than current employees as a class? Almost definitionally yes, because the competent candidates get employed and then there is a new iteration of the game. Solve for equilibrium.”

(Some of the competence is in playing the game and is not directly reflective of skills one needs to succeed once hired, incidentally.)

(This is one reason why hiring managers consider gaps in employment to be strikes against a candidate, though rarely advanced as such. And thus it is necessary to avoid saying “I have been looking for work for months” if that is true.)