How to Make Interviewing Suck Less

Interviewing is not fun and never will be, but there are plenty of ways it can suck less. I've had a wide range of experiences over the last few months (but luckily no horror stories), so let's discuss #interviewing:

1. It's not an endurance test: you don't need half a dozen 1-hour interviews. 45 minutes is a good duration, and 4 or 5 should be plenty.
2. It's not a duel between interviewer and candidate: taking an antagonistic posture just alienates the candidate and makes it less likely you get good 'signal' about their value as an employee.
3. Recruiters need to be communicative and timely: feedback from a phone screen shouldn't take a week, and you should never just go silent.
4. The current pattern of not providing any feedback is ridiculous: it's unfair, and eliminates an opportunity for teaching. I assume there is a legal basis for this, but the 'solution' of zero feedback seems overly simplistic.
5. 'Shooting the shit' is not interviewing. I've been guilty as an interviewer of not having thought about what I want to get out of an interview, but I know better now.
6. Reusing interview questions is good: that's the only way you get calibrated on candidate performance. Having a shared repo of interview questions is thus also good.
7. Whiteboard coding is perhaps the least bad of all the imperfect options for testing coding ability, especially if done reasonably: don't be pedantic, and don't ask questions ill-suited to a whiteboard solution.

Recruiting state should be a shared append-only object, with candidates getting a filtered, read-only view of that object. I'd invest in a start-up that built that and got people to adopt it.