Misidentifying talent

As far as play strategy goes, it's actually really interesting that baseball does not allow for real-time analytics in the game. You can print out some cards and give them to players to keep in their pocket (baseball uniforms have pockets!) and they can refer to them during the game. You can give a binder full of information to the coach and he can keep it in the dugout. But once the game begins, you cannot communicate strategy to the players and coaches. That's quite different than most sports.

What is interesting about scouting/player development vs play strategy is that the "revolution" in scouting started 100 years ago! Branch Rickey, most famous for signing and playing Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers, began creating the modern farm system for St. Louis in 1919 - with a lot of derision from other teams. But funny thing - from that point on (until he left for Brooklyn) nobody but the Yankees won more games than the Cardinals. The Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies at various times hired people to collect data about young players to use for skill development and practice recommendations, as well as personnel decisions. The shape of a guys butt and the attractiveness of his girlfriend are actually data driven heuristics!!!

If one accepts the premise of the OP that typical interviewing processes are bad at identifying good recruits, and if one believes the trends implied by eg hiring behaviours of big companies and some hn comments, then that implies:

- there is some subset of candidates who are attractive to big companies and those companies mostly compete with each other for those candidates.

- there are candidates who would make good hires who are (incorrectly) identified as uninteresting by these large companies

And so:

- if you are better at identifying people who would make good hires than the big companies, you will be able to hire people big companies would overlook.

- on average your offers are more likely to be accepted by people with fewer offers by big companies (even if you can pay as well or better this is still true because if a candidate has more options they may choose one that isn’t yours for reasons you can’t control)

- so your recruiting will be more cost-effective (in terms of spending less resources finding candidates and, optionally, paying new hires less) if your process mostly finds people who are (a) likely good hires and (b) more likely to accept your offer (because they don’t have so many options).

If one believes that the toplevel poster in this thread finds good candidates by having week-long trial periods then one should also expect this process to be more cost-efficient as it naturally selects for candidates who are less likely to be competed for by other companies (because those companies mistakenly think that unemployed people are unemployable)

You don’t need to pay those people less; the cost being optimised for here could be the internal resources spent on the hiring process which can be high even if you have large teams.

I think one thing I struggled with for a while was that I implicitly felt that companies ought to be designing recruiting processes that could fairly identify any candidate who would be a good employee, but really it is sufficient for a company to come up with a process that gets sufficiently many hires at a reasonable cost and doing things like reducing the applicant pool with arbitrary restrictions like job history or pedigree may reduce the cost of applying the later stages (because they would be applied to fewer people) even if it increases the salary they are hired at (because eg they are using the same arbitrary restrictions as many other companies).