The Never-Ending Interviews Problem

I met a woman in Chicago at a trade show years ago who had 16 interviews for one job, and the job made about $70,000/year. That seemed like overkill for a sub-six-figure job, but about three months after I met her, a company based in Tampa interviewed me eight times for a job that paid roughly the same. I didn’t get it. I saw an article during early COVID about how said company was struggling. Vindicatively, I laughed.

This is such a common topic that semi-prominent YouTubers are doing videos on it now:

In 2018, the average time to hire for professional, white-collar roles was about 24–30 weeks. That’s insane, as it’s half a year, and if you’ve ever set foot inside an American white-collar office for 30 seconds, you know that all anyone does is talk about how busy they are. If they’re busy, and they need people to help them be more balanced, then why are we taking 30 weeks to hire?

That’s the main question most people want to understand. Those answers are kind of simple:

1. By lengthening a hiring process, HR teams make themselves more relevant, which is all they care about in an age of automation. (HR will be one of the first departments to be wholly automated, as it already mostly is with Indian outsourcing and third-party recruitment models.)
2. Hiring managers who are incompetent and/or “Peter Principle” guys love to hide themselves in meetings and interviews, because when their productivity gets questioned in a downturn, they have something to point to about why they’re not as productive.
3. Everyone who vaguely touches a new hire wants to “see for themselves,” so instead of just reading notes from another interviewer and trusting that co-worker’s notes, they need to schedule time themselves.
4. Cover your ass play in general.
5. Analysis paralysis in general.
6. A lot of times, people hire to (a) show growth or (b) feel less busy, in the process, they don’t really know what they’re hiring for — so the process becomes longer as they’re essentially figuring out who they need and what they need them to do on the fly.
7. General play to show relevance.

Those are the big reasons: companies are mostly made up of people who want to feel relevant and important and feel like their productivity and time cannot and will not be questioned. Hiding in interviews, calls, and meetings is the easiest way to do this and retain your salary. Plus, if you’re seen as someone who hires a lot, then your team must be important and relevant and thus immune to automation and SaaS. A lot of people spend their time on these things as a psychological play around relevance and control, and not because they’re making the company better or knowing what they want in a new hire. That’s what makes the whole thing vaguely pathetic.

The other elephant in this particular room is the quality of the interviews being conducted. With that Tampa company, every single of the eight people asked me the same things. They could have just passed notes or recorded me and put it on their internal cloud. But no, eight interviews where I said the same stuff in moderately different ways 50 times. And I still didn’t get that job, despite jumping through all those hoops.

Most interviews suck and are generic.

But even deeply-technical interviews, which have more relevance than standard interviews, become tedious when you’re at Round 12 for a product manager role.

The easiest way to bring people into companies would be (a) define clear roles and responsibilities and then (b) reach out to current internal stars looking for referrals, and if there’s nothing on the referral market, then go to market (post the job) with clear roles and responsibilities and a salary that makes sense relative to that position and geography. However, that’s too rational and companies need to cut their heads off and run around like chickens screaming how slammed they are, because otherwise no one feels like they’re doing right by their corporate overlords. As a result, humans get in the way and we over-complicate and over-analyze the hiring process, which butchers the quality of hire, thus allowing managers to constantly bitch and moan about their teams (without helping or training them, naturally) and screech about how “no one wants to work anymore.”

Maybe … just maybe … no one wants to interview 12 times for below-market compensation?

What’s the most interviews you’ve ever had?