"Many companies regularly pass on very good people who simply don't fit an immediate defined need. I think this is a common mistake, and one that isn't just made by corporate HR drones and technical recruiters. Part of the goal of this post was drawing attention to how common this mistake is."
There are always stories going around, maybe true, maybe urban legends about how, for example, IBM could had an opportunity to buy Xerox and could have owned the copier market (which was a really big deal at one point). People talk about how a company passes on an opportunity and, after the fact, what a mistake it was.
What the stories never mention is how many ideas they passed up that never amounted to anything. They only focus on the mistake they made.
You can't hire everyone and you used your best judgment given what you needed and what you saw. If 42floors hadn't written the blog post and it hadn't appeared on HN this situation with Dan wouldn't mean anything to you you wouldn't even know about it.
There are always stories going around, maybe true, maybe urban legends about how, for example, IBM could had an opportunity to buy Xerox and could have owned the copier market (which was a really big deal at one point). People talk about how a company passes on an opportunity and, after the fact, what a mistake it was.
What the stories never mention is how many ideas they passed up that never amounted to anything. They only focus on the mistake they made.
You can't hire everyone and you used your best judgment given what you needed and what you saw. If 42floors hadn't written the blog post and it hadn't appeared on HN this situation with Dan wouldn't mean anything to you you wouldn't even know about it.