Ask HN: How can a unhireable person get a job?

I'm not saying no human should be involved. I'm saying an excellent human should screen candidates in a phone (or Teams or Zoom or whatever) interview before they are invited to sit across from you at your desk or in a conference room.

If you find yourself sitting across from someone who cannot technically do the job, your step one has failed (and should never fail).

If you don't hire someone because their in-person interview didn't go well, it is social skill (or cultural fit) related.

If that's not the case, reference step one to see that you have an error in who you are inviting for in-person interviews (or your phone screener should not be the person phone screening).

"If you find yourself sitting across from someone who cannot technically do the job, your step one has failed (and should never fail)."

The suggestion that any screening test must be infallible is simply nonsense, since simultaneous perfect specificity and sensitivity is impossible, and contradicts numerous findings in decision-theoretic research, and I therefore simply and absolutely disagree. All processes fail, and in particular, because individual process steps fail; it merely remains to determine whether you're biased for showing interesting people the door, or inviting them in to take a closer look. This is also the essence of a screening test in, say, medicine, that are necessarily biased to be sensitive over specific, since a false rejection of a patient may be health threatening; more specific (and generally more expensive) testing follows. Or perhaps in sales, where a lead attracts ever more attention as it moves through the qualification funnel.

As I say, these are general consequences of decision theory, a branch of mathematics to which hiring has no magical exemption.

Ergo, anyone claiming their screening is infallible is either a fool or a liar. Sadly, many recruiters are both, which partially explains why so many HR departments are essentially a mediocrity police that create barriers to accessing the entire talent pool. These are not to be trusted (and must, therefore, be bypassed at the earliest opportunity) when in comes to building teams of heterogeneous and interesting people with complementary skills and diverse perspectives, which is to say, any high-performance team, or at least every high-performing team I've been privileged to encounter in the last forty years.

Incidentally, my experience at AWS was the opposite. The talent acquisition team there, at least that assisting my own business unit, was very much on the ball when it came to pulling in candidates from left-field.