This seems somewhat unrealistic.<p>&gt; &quot;A company can&#x27;t meaningfully evaluate candidates if it treats each one differently.&quot;<p>Each candidate may have very different kinds of experience! Different industries, different requirements, large or small projects, embedded or platform-agnostic, backend QC or live high traffic production code, different education, different specialties, different styles, different processes, people who work better alone or in groups, etc. People are highly variant.<p>&gt; &quot;What matters is a candidate&#x27;s strengths, and how quickly they can learn new things.&quot;<p>Or, you know, if they are being hired to write production industrial control software and have never had to write code that doesn&#x27;t just dump core on the first error, or understanding security when you&#x27;re writing a web app for a bank. Picking up things as you go is great, but certain weaknesses conflict with the job.<p>&gt; &quot;The hiring process should be treated like a software product, constantly iterated on using data, and improved over time.&quot;<p>Nice idea. Nobody I know has the time for this, as hiring is generally done by the team and its manager.<p>&gt; &quot;Compensation statistics should be public.&quot;<p>There are many problems with this, besides the obvious poaching of employees. Salaries often range based on a number of criteria, and different offers are extended with different benefits or perks for different reasons. This can create emotional conflict between employees, make it harder to retain good talent, and can&#x27;t be easily adjusted into a statistic. And of course, leaks about monetary figures can damage deals with potential clients or partners.<p>&gt; &quot;they should be able to outsource technical hiring. The flaw with current external recruiting firms is they don&#x27;t reliably deliver enough good candidates to build trust with companies.&quot;<p>External recruiting firms generally result in bottom-of-the-barrel hiring. Companies use them because they don&#x27;t have time to look themselves, and if they did have time they wouldn&#x27;t know where to start, nor how to weed out undesirables. Companies that put focus and effort on hiring by themselves are going to look harder for someone they really want, rather than fill another seat with someone with a compatible resume.<p>--<p>Hiring anecdote: The best hiring interview i&#x27;ve ever been in is still the first one I ever had for a real job. I had no experience, so they asked all kinds of things to evaluate how I thought, what I was comfortable or not comfortable with, and how I might adapt.<p>They posed a technical problem to me, something they were looking for a solution to. I sat there and came up with a couple solutions, and they said no that doesn&#x27;t work. I thought about it more and came up with two new solutions, and soon they had the whole team in there shaking my hand.<p>Right after that, an HR hiring manager&#x2F;rep gave me the lowest offer i&#x27;ve ever heard of in my life - it literally would have put me under the poverty line. He said my lack of experience and education was the reason. I teared up and left, knowing the only thing meaner than that offer was the way they made me believe I had the job. But I got a better job after that :-)