As a former member of a recruiting team at a ~100 person company, I don’t have much to comment. But we did a lot of engineering/dev hiring like the rest of tech companies.

One thing I noticed (and other engineers made these comments) is that some very smart engineers made it their job to try and stump candidates in a negative fashion. Asking questions wwwayyyy out of a candidates league just to prove they are smarter or whatever their reasoning was.

For the internal recruiting team this sucked. We would bring in mostly qualified candidates and watch 1 member of our back-end team screw them over. They would pass every other test with every other engineer/dev/director.

It got to a point where we wouldn’t invite those engineers to interview unless a candidate was so damn smart/good we just wanted to see if they could take on our best.