A friend of mine went through 7 rounds of interviews for a senior position in a tech company.
The sixth round was actual work, coming up with a preliminary plan for their first 90 days at the company in the position. It took them about a week to pull together and finalize.
The last round was a 15 minute discussion with one of the founders (who has since moved to the board and isn’t involved in the day-to-day any more).
About 30 minutes later they got a call from the recruiter saying they “weren’t a good personality fit with the founder” and they offered the role to somebody else.
Let me guess… they took the plan implemented it and 90 days later do the whole process again with someone else. Basically, they never hire anyone and get free work.
7 rounds is way beyond insane. I’ve done 3 and 4 only to lose out to “a better fit.”
I just accepted an offer after a referral and a 30min interview with the hiring manager. That’s it.
It’s not with a VC funded company, which I count as a plus. Fewer circlejerking bike shedders.
7 rounds is way beyond insane. I’ve done 3 and 4 only to lose out to “a better fit.”
Way it works where I live is they had a relative in mind the whole time but still had to pretend to go through the motions of hiring.
Promoting within the company is always faster…
Why are people comparing this to a new hire? Apples and oranges people.
Oh man story time, I just went through this yesterday.
I applied for a government job posting. I have 8-years experience in this particular role, and I’ve trained hundreds of coworkers for the job — I’m a dream applicant. They request in the posting that I read through their department’s rubric on their values and cater my cover letter to it (e.g., demonstrate examples of showing service excellence, sound judgment, creative problem solving, yadda yadda yadda). Takes me an hour or two of what feels Iike writing a college thesis.
I get an offer to advance in the interview. I book off an hour of work for the first round of the interview, lying that it was a Doctor’s appointment; then, I come to find it was actually a mandatory presentation asking people to not apply for the job unless they “really want it” because it’s emotionally difficult. I consider it a waste of MY time.
Second round they offer me to take their ‘2-hour virtual exam’, only offering it during business hours. I lie to my boss again and attend the session. After showing up on time, waiting for the Microsoft teams invite and getting nothing, I email the talent acquisition person: they are out of office.
The following Monday the lady is back in office, emails me, and offers me another virtual exam slot: 4 hours from now, again during work hours, and again requiring me to request time off from my current job.
Wtf? Is there another stage after the exam? An interview? How ridiculous have job searches gotten where we are expected to jump through endless hoops to satisfy prospective employers. Nobody has time to do this for every single frigging job they apply for.
I once applied for a government position. Entry level admin. I had been working admin for 7+yrs plus various volunteer positions since I was 18.
It was about 2hrs to fill out the form and answer all their questions.
I didn’t hear anything back after a couple of weeks and was like, ‘Ok. I should have heard back by now, I didn’t get picked for an interview, whatever.’
ONE YEAR LATER I got an e-mail telling me that they weren’t going ahead with my application.
If it’s been a year and you’re reaching out then it had better say that a new position has opened up and would like to talk to me about it, not ‘We’re going ahead with other candidates.’ Also, if that’s when you’re getting an answer then it kinda looks like, ‘We finally saw your application.’ The slow turning wheels of bureaucracy…
It’s fuckin’ ridiculous.
The cardinals didn’t have to weed through 1000’s of AI generated resumes of people who don’t really exist. Lol
Depends on if I have the upper hand. market is not great for dev right now.
Plus this is the dumbest meme ever. Ya pope took 2 days to get the job, same with internal transfer hires.
Technology increasing the ability to advertise the position to a wider pool of candidates has accomplished nothing but to make companies paranoid about hiring nobody but the absolute most perfect one worldwide, instead of just picking somebody “good enough” from the smaller local pool of candidates and moving on.
Never do free work! Fucking never! If they ask you to do that kind of thing take the amount of time you think it’ll take to complete, and take the offered salary for that position to find out how much they need to pay you before hand. No exceptions!!
That’s not the best argument, since historically some popes took many years to select. Like, so long it was a major problem and they had to make reforms that included locking the cardinals in a room and taking away everything but bread and water at times.
Good details about the insanity in this Tasting History episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZCs9aMkzBQ
From my experience it’s usually because management doesn’t want to meet the applicants until person A, B, and C have all individually thought the candidate is worth the upper management team’s time.
Corporations don’t care unless they are regulated to care, but it’s also mixed with some corporations getting lots of flakes for the interviews. A hour wasted of upper management time spent studying up on someone that doesn’t show up for the interview could be a few hundred or a thousand dollars down the drain in “missed productivity”. Still, if they cared about the candidates they would do a team interview, and bring the executive team in right after if they thought the candidate was solid.
If somebody would do that do me I would very likely not show up after the third round because I would think they’re crazy. (Am in Austria though so results might differ) But seriously after a second interview I would feel like they are trolling me and chances of me not showing up would be high… Is that really normal in the USA?
I believe the job market dictates some of it. It depends a lot on your company’s structure here in the USA for if this is the standard or not as well. Plus different states have more protections for hired on workers which could further complicate how picky organizations get.
If it’s a mid to large size employer this becomes more common practice to do multiple interviews, I believe.
There could be time conflicts for organizing an interview, such as the need to hire someone during a busy season vs slow season, or when different key decision makers are out on PTO. The company could also be having a difficult time making a final choice between two or more candidates so they are trying to find anything to help weed some of them out. I think that last one is pretty pathetic though since it is wasting everyone’s time if can’t make that determination from the initial interview.
The quickness of the current pope being selected makes me wonder why it took so damn long last time.
