If you have a test that can identify a good candidate quickly then you have honestly struck gold and can genuinely use that to start your own company. I mean this with absolute sincerity.

One of the absolute hardest part of my business is really hiring qualified candidates, and it's really demoralizing and time consuming and unbelievably expensive. The best that I've managed to do is the same that pretty much every other business owner says... which is that I can usually (not always) filter out the bad candidates (along with some false negatives), and have some degree of luck in hiring good candidates (with some false positives).

Good candidates are not universally good, they are good for you after hire.

One of the best business analysts I worked with (also a profession, mind you) was almost fired when working under an old, grumpy and clearly underskilled one.

I was hired once without interview into a unicorn, was loved by colleagues but hated the work, the business and the industry, then left rather quickly.

See? There are mismatches and unknown unknowns, not just bad or good developers.

yup, the worst performance i did on any job was due to the complete unavailability of a manager when i was a team of one. and then that manager would not even fire me. i had to quit to get out of there.

Yeah sourcing developers / collaborating with developers is a huge barrier of entry. More than others factors such as deciding what software to produce for the market

I’d love for you to elaborate :)

But along that thought, I’ve always held that a human conversation is the best filter. I’ll ask you what do you work on recently, what did you learn, what did you mess up, what did you hate about the tool / language / framework.

I strongly believe your ability to articulate your situation corresponds with your ability to do the job.

Take your current technical assessment and think about the types of responses or code submissions that really impressed you. What was special about them? What did you see in the response that drew a positive reaction from your team?

Can you re-frame your process or the prompt to only elicit those specific responses?

So instead of a whole exercise of building a React app or a whole backend API, for example, what would really "wow" you if you saw the candidate do it in the submission for a project? Could you re-frame your whole process so you only target those specific responses and elicit specific outputs?

Now that you've taken what was previously a 2 hour coding exercise (for example) and distilled down to 3-4 key questions, you can seek the same outputs in 15-30 minutes instead.

There are several advantages to this:

1) Many times, candidates know the answer but they actually can't figure out what you're looking for when there's a lot of cruft around the question/problem being solved. You can end up losing candidates that know how to solve the problem the way you want, but because of the way the question was posed, the objective is opaque.

2) It saves a lot of time for both sides. Interviewer doesn't have to review a big submission, candidate doesn't have to waste time doing a long project.

3) By condensing the cycle, you can evaluate more candidates and you can hopefully select a top candidate before they get another opportunity. You shorten the cycle time because the candidate doesn't have to find free time to do a project or sit down for long interviews, you don't need to have people review the code submissions, etc.

There are quite a few people who can code but have 0 social skills and can’t talk well or at all. In that sense I have to disagree with you, but I still wouldn’t hire them because they drag teams down.

These days there are more people in the industry that have great social skills, memorize leetcode but have 0 ability to patiently sit down and do meaningful work.

They don't just drag teams down, they destroy once great companies.

But how do you know if the remote candidate used AI or his brain?