Most Hiring Finds Whoever Is Left, Not Who Is Best

When asked how companies get hiring wrong, Adam Ward, head of talent at Cursor, went back to 1998, when he was an intern at a software company called Trilogy, touring the country to talk to computer science students. His first manager there, Jeff Daniel, called the standard method the funnel of doom, a phrase Ward credits Daniel with coining and still uses.

The idea, as Ward puts it, is simple. "I am going to reach out to 100 people. Twenty people will reply," he says. "By definition that is not the top 20 percent, that is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day."

From there, he argues, most companies make the problem worse. They treat hiring like a sales funnel, moving candidates through stages and tracking the share who advance at each step. They screen that first, already random group, weed people out round by round, and hire whoever survives. He calls that remainder hiring.

The concern raised in the conversation was whether even a careful process, with strong interviews and consistent standards, could do better than slightly above average, because hiring this way would tend to drift back toward the average as hiring volume grows.

Ward argues the sales comparison is detrimental. Sales is a centuries-old discipline, he notes, while recruiting as a craft is only a few decades old, so people reached for a familiar model. But selling software means selling something relatively static and rational, while hiring involves an irrational group of hiring manager and recruiter on one side and an irrational candidate on the other, so he says it is a fallacy to expect hiring to move in the same linear, transactional way.

His alternative, Ward says, is to reverse the order. Instead of starting wide and narrowing to whoever is left, start with confidence about who the strongest people are and use interviews to test that view. In other words, begin with a small core of likely stars, then validate, rather than filtering a crowd and hoping a star remains.