I find attitudes towards risk in hiring very strange. Many companies seem to treat it like an opportunity for massive downside without much thought to the potential upside. I think the downside potential is mostly less than companies seem to worry (an argument against me is that a ‘bad’ employee negatively affects their teammates too). I also think the normal interview processes aren’t even very good at filtering out those feared candidates.

Instead I think companies, especially large companies where small numbers of employees aren’t a massive proportion of spending, should try to see the potential for upside more. Especially in a world where everyone does a similar interviewing process, a candidate who performs poorly at those interviews could be cheap and an excellent hire who is undervalued by the market because of their poor interviewing skills.