Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

This is one of my favorite Joel articles. The conclusion is relevant to us both as business owners and job seekers: any publicly available job will get spammed to death with offal, accordingly, the best jobs and the best candidates for jobs will both be placed privately.

I literally have not had a resume since I read this, with the exception of a pro-forma one to give my ex-job so that they could pretend I was hired on the basis of what was written on my resume as opposed to, say, hired as a favor to a vendor who owed me a favor. We brought the resume to the job interview that happened after the decision had been made to employ me.

One great take-down of this kind of thing.

Another point to consider is that there's more to people than just good or bad. Sure, some people just don't have the skills they need. But there are a lot of situations where someone can be great at one job and terrible at another depending on the fit.

The posturing about "the 1%", "A-players" and so-forth misses the idea that you want an optimal team, not magic people guaranteed to give you results.

Of course, to build an optimal team, you need a skilled organizer. So, for example, you can take someone who's otherwise low-skill, low-motivation and give them what they need to improve.

What Joel doesn't mention is that the top talent when considering a job opening is always looking at the following :

1) prestige employer (think Google, Facebook) 2) money 3) is the job interesting?

To paraphrase Joel, don't fixate on your acceptance rate, instead worry whether your job opening is attracting top-tier job applicants.

Even amongst those available on the job market, the "top 1%" is highly subjective based on an employer's interpretation of employee virtues.

What is this argument, and which side is it on?