Everyone seems to have missed the most important part of the article "this was in France, and you can't just fire someone so if you hire badly you are stuck with that person forever"
The US has the most liberal/right wing/psychotic labour laws in the Western world, and as such the best approach is to hire anyone not an idiot and fire them once on the job experience teaches you if it's a good fit.
This results in massive turnover, and little incentive to improve the interview process
I'm not sure where I am going with this but I am amazed that the local labour laws are not mentioned on this three (afaik)
Even in the US, where labour laws generally don't favour the worker, it wouldn't make much sense to set the bar too low and count on being able to fire people to eventually get the right one.
Hiring people is resource consuming and is always a large investment for a company. Unless you are hiring low-skill workers who can easily be replaced, a high-tech worker will require time before she's productive on the job. Those weeks/months, cost money and figuring out that someone is not working out after 3 months of investing in her could cost a lot more to the company than just the cost of re-hiring someone else.
It's always a better strategy to be diligent early and avoid wasting company resources just to shorten the hiring process.
That being said, being able to easily part ways with an employee is important for a company since the cost of taking a risk is much lower. In France, employers are very reluctant to take risks as they can get stuck with people who are either bad or don't fit in.
There is a middle ground between a system where you can fire people for any reason, whether related to their work or not, and a system where you can't even fire people who don't work out.
Tokenadult has a regular post that has grown to the size of a small essay which basically says the only way to tell if someone can do the job is to give them the job to do.
How long does it take to become obvious someone is not a good fit? A couple of hours? No, if humans could not fake it for a couple of hours no one would ever go on a date again.
A couple of days - maybe. My own pet theory is when I hit a new contract is to commit a bug fix by the end of the day and push to production by the end of the week.
But no one sane is willing to give a week to an interview, and few a whole day.
I think in the end we judge people by their public output - in other words GitHub reall is going to be our CV
This "in France you can't fire people" meme needs to die. Most software engineer contracts have an four or eight month no questions asked firing provision.
The US has the most liberal/right wing/psychotic labour laws in the Western world, and as such the best approach is to hire anyone not an idiot and fire them once on the job experience teaches you if it's a good fit.
This results in massive turnover, and little incentive to improve the interview process
I'm not sure where I am going with this but I am amazed that the local labour laws are not mentioned on this three (afaik)