Failure rate?
To be fair, he may be speaking of a 70% failure rate at the interview stage. As one who sees the occasional bright-faced prospectives for their interview sim session I can tell you with certainty that we are getting a large number of apes. I can't believe some of them have survived thus far; it must be down to the high quality of autopilots these days.
This is to be contrasted with the failure rate of those who are hired and then fail the initial training. I would be very surprised if this exceeds 1%, a number which is a credit to those who actually do the interviewing and hiring.