When you're operating a small furniture company, your master craftsmen can hand-fit every part. Match up the hole that's slightly too big with the dowel that's slightly too big, which they put to one side the other day.
When you're operating a huge furniture company, you want every dowel and every hole the same size. Then any fool can assemble it, and you don't have to waste time and space on a collection of slightly-too-large dowels.
To scale up often means focusing on consistency and precision, and less on expert judgement and care.
That's a nice story, and completely irrelevant. Different orgs scale different ways, and ultimately hiring is done at the team level. You have a vacancy or need on a team to fill. Big org or small org, the situation is the same.
Interestingly large companies will often have a hiring pipeline that isn't specific to a single team and role.
In the past Google made a lot of hires where they first give people a phone screen, then five in-person whiteboard interviews, then the interviewers send a dossier to a committee, then that committee decides whether to hire or not, then "team matching" lets hiring managers see the resumes.
So the interviews are basically conducted by random people, who have no idea what team the candidate will end up on.
Of course if you look at the number of employees Google has, and the average tenure, you can see why they make hires like Ikea makes chairs.
Yes that is how FAANG works, but they’re the oddity. Most large organizations don’t hire that way. Google invented this method of hiring, and others copied. It is debatable whether it has been good or not for them.
Usually what happens in a large org is (1) a department gets allocated a head count, and it eventually trickles down to team allocations; (2) a team needs a role that they can’t backfill from the rest of the company; (3) the team lead puts out an ad, receives resumes (directly or through HR), schedules interviews, and makes the hiring decision themselves. Exactly the same as a small company or startup in the last step.
Also human judgement is loaded with bias. Height influences outcome and this is a statistically proven phenomena. Ask any interviewer in this thread and they will claim height and good looks aren’t a factor but the statistics prove them wrong.
The literal only way to get rid of that is quantitative tests.
When you're operating a huge furniture company, you want every dowel and every hole the same size. Then any fool can assemble it, and you don't have to waste time and space on a collection of slightly-too-large dowels.
To scale up often means focusing on consistency and precision, and less on expert judgement and care.