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Hiring's tough. It's not just filtering through hundreds of applications and blocking out big chunks of your day for interviews - those are the simple parts. The difficult thing is the nagging feeling that, despite your best efforts, the perfect candidate will somehow fall through the cracks.

Traditional technical interviews are terrible for everyone. They're a bad way for companies to evaluate candidates. They're a bad way for candidates to evaluate companies. They waste time and generate stress on both sides.

Don't let a lack of big company names on your resume get you down, but also, don't let it feed a Silicon Valley ego. Oftentimes, the best candidates come from startups or smaller companies. It shows they are open to risk and can keep up with the long hours and occasional harsh demands.

So interviews are a valuable tool, but under certain circumstances they'd be more valuable than others.

I had been a veteran of pretty challenging job searches, so I knew firsthand how frustrating, confusing, and demoralizing the job search process can be. Even after you get a job, many people join companies and discover in the first couple weeks that they aren't a good match with the personality and values of the company.

For business, government, and education, the lesson is clear: People ought to be relying far more on objective information and far less on interviews. They might even want to think about scaling back or cancelling interviews altogether. They'll save a lot of time - and make better decisions.

Resume? I wish I had a resume. And if I did, I wouldn't scrub anything from it. Who cares?

I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process.

Resume: a written exaggeration of only the good things a person has done in the past, as well as a wish list of the qualities a person would like to have.

There are some really interesting celebrities and people who are fun to interview, but when you have to do it every day because you have to fill a slot, the allure wears off.