To account for some interviewers being sadist in general, may be companies can implement a per interviewer rejection quota. For example, if you interview 10 candidates at max you can reject 7 candidates. You have to yes to 3 candidates or be removed from the interviewing committee. This will ensure that just one bitter person is not preventing good candidates from clearing the interview process.
The speaker formerly worked at Google, and around 8:55 in the video relates the story of being on a hiring committee that was known for being tough on candidates. And a recruiter once forwarded a set of interview packets to them, and they voted "no hire" on all of them. The recruiter then revealed to the committee that they'd been given their own packets, slightly anonymized, from when they were interviewed, and had just voted against hiring themselves.
I would never vote for a candidate I didn't believe in. If you want to remove qualified engineers from hiring decisions based on arbitrary metrics, I'd probably be looking for another job on the side.
How about Olympics style scoring -- a panel of interviewers rate each candidate, then the highest and lowest individual scores are removed before averaging?
