Eric Schmidt on the optimal number of interviews

And so I still remember this packet, this gentleman who we'd interviewed 16 times, and the person who was running this process had come in and said, look, you guys have got to make a decision. And the recommendation was to not hire him. And I said, look, you just can't do this anymore to people. So I said, you cannot interview people more than eight times. Okay. They have since revised the statistical metaphor that for engineers they have five interviews and for non engineers they have four, and that turns out to be statistically significant. So very interesting you can systematize even that. Yeah, well, because as I actually recall, the way you did that is you actually looked at when was the score drop off no longer predicted because you were taking all that and you said, okay, at this interview. That's it. Yeah. And that was. But those are simple techniques that wouldn't have occurred to the normal company, but because we'd hired all these smart generalist types with obnoxious degrees from famous universities that were obnoxious, you know, whatever stereotype you want, they applied an analytical bias.