Comment by zodiac

> As long as good candidates are rare, and bad candidates have a small-but-nonzero chance of tricking you into hiring them, it's very expensive to pass on a good candidate.

Yes, I agree with you. My point is that even taking this into account, even after taking into account all the other costs you mention into account, it might still be better to pass on candidates you're not sure about.

> The original slogan "It is better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad candidate." specifically says to make that fallacy.

So going by the slogan, even if passing on too many good candidates increases your odds of a bad hire (say from 50% to 80%), it's still better than hiring a bad candidate, since if you hire a bad candidate, the odds that you made a bad hire is 100%!

My interpretation of the slogan seems different from yours, mine is something like: if you hire a good person the value of your business will increase by X, if you hire a bad person the value of your business will decrease by Y, and Y is much greater than X.