It's a bit like the good-books/bad-movies phenomenon.
There's a quality-distribution of both books and films.
There are only so many good books. And a percentage of films end up poorly made.
Sufficiently low-quality books tend not to get made into films. The ones that succeed are notable --- there's nothing but upside.
A good book can be made into either a good or a bad film. If it's a good film, then yay, but if it's a bad film, people are aware of it (through the book's quality and popularity). This is a perception illusion called Berkson's Paradox. It's an illusion because what awareness fails to account for are all the bad films made from bad books.
In the interviewing / performance case, you have good vs. bad interviewees, and good vs. bad performers.
Someonehone who interviews poorly but performs well is a positive exception. Someon who interviews well and performs well meets expectations. It's the good interviewer/bad performer who stands out. But it's the poor-interviewer/poor-performer who is missed by this assessment.
Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire.
In the past I would never have been interested in a contract-to-hire. These days though if the company and role is right, and this an option to short-cut a ridiculous interview process, I might spring for it.
Just personally I would never accept an offer that was contract for hire and think it's downright insulting a suggestion. My family needs health insurance and the market has never been so cold that I'd be desperate enough to take such a garbage offer.
Nothing about contracting precludes having health insurance though? For the roles and situations I'm talking about this would all just be factored into the rates.
Even if they can just pay for health insurance out of pocket, they’d be switching plans twice, and each time they’d reset their deductible and possibly need to find a new doctor.
When I was an actuary we used to do “intern to hire” for unemployed recent grads, but I can’t imagine leaving a full time position for a contract-to-hire position. I think for me personally the opportunity would have to be really interesting and the comp upon converting to FTE would need to be at least double my previous comp (meaning the contracted rate would probably be something like 4x my implied hourly).
> Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire.
I've see that work before, but it was some time ago. The company also had a very large test department with separate management and kept to a strongly enforced waterfall-esque design routine.
Of course, it used to be a lot harder to ship out version 1.01 of the software.
I just assume it was a different world as this was in the days of US manufacturing, very limited set of software tools, high importance placed on domain knowledge as opposed to toolset, longer average stays at employer, lower wages for programmers. Probably not applicable to modern times.
There's probably not a single one-size-fits-all solution - what works for FAANG and their millions of applicants is lunacy when you're a three-person startup, much like adopting Kubernetes to run an internal web app with half a dozen users. It probably starts with proper training in conducting interviews, a respect for candidates' time, a realistic appraisal of your needs and budget, and constant feedback-driven refinement of your process.
I would also suspect that any filtering mechanism that cuts out the truly destructive people might well be either unacceptable or illegal at this point.
The solution is to accept that shitty candidates can't always be filtered out and to have a probation period to remove them before they do too much damage to your codebase/morale.
Honestly, I don't have a good solution to the problem.