I'd be embarrassed to admit to these metrics. This guy has wasted not only his own time by bringing 5x the candidates needed onsite, but his team's, his employers', and the candidates themselves'. A quality hiring process would know with at least a 50% confidence level that the person is worth hiring before bringing them in for the onsite. A phone call or one-hour Skype, or even 3 supplemental ones, is a lot cheaper than the onsite.
It says a lot about the industry that not only is it common practice to have a "concave" funnel where you don't winnow people out early enough and end up making your engineers spend half their workday conducting pointless interviews instead of doing actual work, but also that management writ large is too clueless to be embarrassed.
If anything your engineers did, anything, had a 20% success rate, would you consider them "only the best"? Even if their appraisal of the top 10% of candidates was accurate and reproducible (it's not even close), I'd still expect them to achieve their results with fewer than 3, and preferably fewer than 2 onsites per hire.
Sure, the guy can point to his numbers as some sort of merit badge, but if I told you I washed my hands 400 times a day, you wouldn't consider me some kind of expert on handwashing, would you? You'd rightly think I'm some kind of crazy person.
It says a lot about the industry that not only is it common practice to have a "concave" funnel where you don't winnow people out early enough and end up making your engineers spend half their workday conducting pointless interviews instead of doing actual work, but also that management writ large is too clueless to be embarrassed.
If anything your engineers did, anything, had a 20% success rate, would you consider them "only the best"? Even if their appraisal of the top 10% of candidates was accurate and reproducible (it's not even close), I'd still expect them to achieve their results with fewer than 3, and preferably fewer than 2 onsites per hire.
Sure, the guy can point to his numbers as some sort of merit badge, but if I told you I washed my hands 400 times a day, you wouldn't consider me some kind of expert on handwashing, would you? You'd rightly think I'm some kind of crazy person.