This is very well put. There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool, from quizzes to purity tests. What a many startups don't seem to understand is that the 'culture' is the people and what they do. So taking care in interviews tends to hire people who take care in their work. And unlike the gp comment I never felt 'bad' after a number of hours of interviews and a decline, I had a better understanding of the company, presumably they had a better understanding of me.
Reading the article though it was interesting that having a positive EBITDA was the real news here. Not a single AI company can claim that. That's a pretty big milestone.
> There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool
Reading the replies here, most are assuming that every candidate gets the maximum interview duration. I see a lot of arguments that if someone applies to M jobs and each requires N hours of interviews then they're spending M*N hours without knowing they'll get a job.
Usually you don't get scheduled for interviews at all unless there's a good chance that they expect you to pass the hiring bar. When you are scheduled for interviews, they don't go straight to the full gauntlet until the early interviews show promise.
So by the time someone goes through the 3 x 3 hour interviews in this example, there's probably a very good chance that they're being seriously considered as a hire.
I agree with this. Also I empathize with the trauma a lot of tech people are going through in the current market because of my experiences in the 'chip downturn', 'dot com downturn' and the 'economic downturn in the late naughts'. So I'm seeing a lot of 'maxing' like this; "I send out 10,000 resumes and maybe get 1,000 people interested, and 100 people willing to interview me, and this takes 9 months and I've only got a few more months of 401k I can eat up ... ahhhhhhhh!" My experiences going through these sources of downturns changed me a lot, I don't see how it couldn't have.