I admit that this is certainly possible (Google recruiters wildly underleveling people, at least relative to their expectations if not their actual qualifications, and not clarifying this before passing the candidate onto other recruiters).
If it's happening, it's a very different problem (no less real of a problem, though) and process fixes at this stage wouldn't help.
Also, this interview performance should have been enough to disqualify this candidate for the role he envisioned, too. If only because, if he was actually intending on applying to be a director of engineering, the right answer to question 3 is something like "I think there's been some sort of mistake."
It's not only possible it's likely if they are setting general hiring quotas for their recruiters.
And, they almost certainly are setting quotas because they're currently being sued by one of their own recruiters over their quota policy.
>Also, this interview performance should have been enough to disqualify this candidate
They neither qualify him nor disqualify him. Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questions tell you almost nothing about a candidate other than that they're probably a software engineer of some kind.
> They neither qualify him nor disqualify him. Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questions tell you almost nothing about a candidate other than that they're probably a software engineer of some kind.
Please read the entire sentence you quoted halfway - by "interview performance" I don't mean the correctness of the answers, I mean his a) expectation that UNIX trivia quizzes are a normal part of a director-level interview (and that it's not more likely that there was a miscommunication in scheduling) and b) attitude.
"Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questions tell you almost nothing about a candidate other than that they're probably a software engineer of some kind."
This. I hate trivia, and trivia questions. You can get a book or find a website to bone up on trivia questions if that's your thing. However, it says nothing about whether you actually know anything about working with computers every day.
If it's happening, it's a very different problem (no less real of a problem, though) and process fixes at this stage wouldn't help.
Also, this interview performance should have been enough to disqualify this candidate for the role he envisioned, too. If only because, if he was actually intending on applying to be a director of engineering, the right answer to question 3 is something like "I think there's been some sort of mistake."