If you wish to maximize A, you will need to lower your standards for B, C, and D. This is the nature of any selection process: choosing a home to buy, breeding crops, writing legislation, etc. It us no less true for hiring employees.

There are a very limited quantity of perfect employees, and you are unlikely to ever have the opportunity to hire one. The vast majority of employees have a mixture of good qualities (e.g., being hardworking) and bad qualities (e.g., expecting a higher salary). Your best strategy is to prioritize those characteristics that are most important to the role you are hiring for and be flexible on characteristics that are less important.

If you get your priorities out of order, even if inadvertently (e.g., by asking unverifiable interview questions that select for better liars), you will make suboptimal decisions.

> Would that it were so simple! But are you saying this from your experience hiring for teams that execute well?

I oversimplified it not to stray away from the main topic but actually they need to have very specific features like the willingness to collaborate, the ability to communicate when the time is right, being technically proficient and so on.

> Do you have statistics proving this? Please share data.

Let A be the set of people who like to work remotely and B the set of people who love to do hybrid. (I leave out the set of people who love full RTO because I haven't yet met such a person, even hard-core office lovers admit a day of remote work is doing wonders to them.) Let A1 be the subset of people who would be fit for the job from the set A, and B1 be the subset of people who would be fit for the job from the set B. From the basic properties of real numbers one can infer that A1 + B1 is at least equal to B1.

> Are you honestly saying that in all the interviews you've attended, you never ask and you've never been asked "why do you want to work here?" And if the question was asked the answer had nothing to do with the company's mission?

Actually, they rarely ask it these days. Maybe the hiring folks are tired of this meaningless ritual? I once said I applied by mistake and they still wanted to hire me (I declined the offer as it was a different time zone, I realized this too far in the recruitment process and was quite embarrassed by mistake.)

> And if the question was asked the answer had nothing to do with the company's mission? That's amazing

No offense, are you being for real? Do you think a single employee gives even the faintest of a fuck about the company's mission?

Everyone bullshits it. We all know, and understand, that when you're asked questions like that you say what people want to hear.

People work for exactly one thing, money. The trick is making the money in the least expensive way - expenses being time, energy, and health. It's all fun going to an office 5 days a week until you're old, fat, and your smoking habit has caught up to you. And now what? You die feeling like you did the last 30 years of your life: shit.

Who will remember you? I won't. Your coworkers won't. The company as a whole won't. And what did you gain?

Everything in life is a game of cost analysis. If you're not prioritizing yourself and your own cost analysis, you're a sucker. There're people making more money than you, who are MUCH happier, who work less, and are healthier. Do you want to continue a life of jealousy and self-hatred? Or, will you demand better for yourself? Ultimately, nobody else cares, so you don't have to bother answering. This is just food for thought.