Well, yes. And that 80/20 rule is always going to be the case. It's almost like a natural law.Where I'm not saying that you are wrong....things certainly can go that way. But instead of hiring people who can't hold a job for 2 years they will look for those who hold jobs for 10+ years or more. Especially if it's a position requiring a high amount of training.
Currently we have an epidemic of employers absolutely having zero concern for their employees as a result of legislation crafted by corporations instead of a representative government. Workers today have almost zero rights. So in turn you have workers pretending to work for employers who pretend to pay wages. Many job applicants flat out lie and exaggerate the truth on their resumes (CVs) to get a job that they are not qualified to hold. And basically just bluster through with their performance because upper management is asleep at the wheel. Nobody notices or pays attention or cares to do either.
But in the meantime the actual work is usually done by 20% of the employees. Who have an inkling that they are worth more than they are getting paid. (80/20 rule is alive and well among employees)
This gives those highly productive employees an opportunity to advance their income and opportunities in their trade.
Pareto Distribution & Price's Law Jordan Peterson
The square root of the number of people, produce 50% of the work. And he pointed out that this is true across the entire economy, and in every field. So if you take 1,000 musicians, the sq root is 30 of them produce 50% of the music. And even of those people, if you take the top musician, they produce 1,000 songs, the sq root is played half the time.
Take Beethoven which produced 733 songs. How many are popular and played over and over? About 20 of them at best. And rest no one has ever heard, or even heard of.
Unfortunately, there is no way around this.
Can companies do a better job of picking good employees? To some extent. Obviously I've been in companies that were in fact "asleep at the wheel" as you said. And those have the worst outcomes, no doubt. But at the end of the day, your best hope is to avoid hiring complete boat anchors that weight the team down. You will never get an entire team of people, all being the 20% as you said, and avoid the 80%. It's just not possible.
And maybe that's why some companies fall asleep. It would be curious to research that. Maybe some companies try super super hard to hire only the best employees on the planet, and they still end up with 20/80 like all companies do.... and so then they give up and just hire anyone, because they don't see working hard to pick and choose results in 50/50 instead of 20/80.
It would be interesting to see some research on that.