The scourge of the Endless Interview

During the course of my career, I've had the pleasure of interviewing and hiring a number of very talented employees. In the years that I've been leading a team, I have yet to make a regrettable choice and I'm very proud of the process that I use to interview people and the criteria that I use to measure all candidates equally. However, I've also observed colleagues as well as spoken to other people who have either created or have been subjected to an extraordinarily convoluted interview process which seems puzzling.

When I find myself with an open position I have a few key goals: find a person who is above all else, intelligent, has a good blend of relevant experience and is available for hire in the very near future. The first two requirements are self-explanatory, but the third does bear some discussion. While in an ideal world, you would be able to interview candidates until you find the absolute best match for the open role, this rarely happens. In the real world you are faced with the pressure and expectations of your leadership as they face down the same. If you have an open seat for too long, the assumption is that you didn't really need the employee as you've successfully demonstrated that your team is functional without that person and the open position is either closed or moved to another team. This is every hiring manager's nightmare--to lose headcount as it is rare to claw back lost headcount once it's gone. Your team shrinks, your ability to deliver drops and the remaining employees have to cover the additional work which harms morale and will often have your team looking for a new job if conditions don't improve. So when I seek candidates that are available for immediate hire, there's a very good reason. When I find someone who meets my criteria, I talk to the candidate directly, then have one of the current team members spend an hour on a peer interview and then I will make the offer if they fit. That's it! The whole process fits into a week. I don't have time to waste on the Endless Interview and I know that if I don't make the offer soon, the candidate who is actively interviewing will likely land a new role quickly if they're worth hiring. The positions that I've hired are very specific and finding people with the right experience is not always easy. Unless you're hiring entry-level positions, I presume this is the case for almost anyone who is trying to fill a role.

However, the more I speak with peers the more I hear about the Endless Interview. Either they've gone through it or they're putting candidates through this process. Let's consider the case of Noel (not her actual name) who has shared her experience with me. Noel is a mid-career director with excellent experience in her field, boasts a strong network of well-placed peers as well as an advanced degree from a well-respected university. She's applying for a senior director position for a large national organization; she's well-qualified for the role and even has personal connections to the people who are directly responsible for hiring. One might think that the interview process would be brief and the offer would be extended quickly for fear of losing a qualified candidate. Instead, Noel has endured three rounds of interviews with various members of the organization; one was the hiring manager, the others were members of a parallel internal organization. She would not report to them, nor directly work with them but on rare occasion. After the three rounds, there was then a request to write what basically boils down to an essay, not that different from what one does when they apply to a university. It was demanded that she conceive and share solutions to problems that the company is currently working on. Following the essay exercise, the company then asked her to join them on-site for a FULL DAY of meetings with potential peers, employees and others for customer visits. If you find yourself wondering, "Who the hell has enough resources to burn 20+ labor hours for an interview?!" you would not be alone. Of course this entirely ignores the message that is sent to the candidate during this process which is "Your time is free for me to waste, and if I hire you, I'll probably do it a lot more." The reality is that most people interview for their next job from their desk of their current role. Depending on the industry, it might be necessary to have an on-site interview, but typically it is something that can happen during a lunch hour or at most a half-day. Expecting that candidates spend an entire day plus multiple hours on interviews is entirely unreasonable and is a great way to scare off talent.

I once spoke to a peer who had been inflicting the Endless Interview process on candidates and I bluntly asked him why he was wasting so much time. His justification was that he needed his new hire to "hit the ground running" which caused me to involuntarily roll my eyes in protest. To unpack that notion of his expectations, he wanted someone who knew how to do the job exactly as it is done today and was perfectly happy to spend as much candidate time as he liked to find them. The person he would eventually hire could do the job with very little time to onboard which is often seen as a strong hire. However, what is overlooked is that if they're brought in and can do the job as-is, they don't bring any new perspectives to their work, they just pull the levers as they're told. Additionally, if they've got 5 years of experience doing the same work, most candidates aren't going to want to keep on doing the same job that they're leaving--they could just stay put in their old role! That leaves people who are only taking the job for better compensation--and they'll probably do the same thing in a year or two when they find a better opportunity.

So what can we do about the rise of the endless interview?

• If you're subjecting your candidates to more than two hours of interview time, you need to reconsider your goals for these discussions.
• Have a plan for whom it is they should speak with directly and constrain it to your own organization.
• For jobs that require a panel of interviewers, collect them for a single call or meeting and use everyone's time efficiently.
• If you've reviewed their resume, checked out their online profile or completed any other background research, then you should be well-prepared to measure your candidates against a standard set of job requirements or decide that they are not suitable for an interview.
• If the interview gets underway and it's very clear that the candidate isn't a good match, stop the process, thank them for their time and MOVE ON. It is not professional to subject candidates to an undetermined number of interviews because you failed to understand or define your own requirements.
• Furthermore, if a candidate is no longer being considered for a position, it is ENTIRELY unprofessional to ghost them on the decision! Once disqualified from consideration, providing timely notification is a mandatory part of the process.

If you're a candidate, there will undoubtedly be a a point during the initial interview where your interviewer will ask you if you have any questions. Of course, you should have some role-specific or organizational questions, but you should close by asking what the interview process consists of, how many interviews there will be and what the timeframe for decision is. While this may not prevent a company from inflicting the endless interview process, it may reveal their intent. You can then use this information to make a few qualitative decisions about the organization you're applying to. If they don't know what the process is, or don't know the timeline, that should be an indicator of disorganization or bureaucratic overload and perhaps you should reconsider your application. Remember, an interview should be a discussion where the candidate learns just as much about the company as the company learns about the candidate.

So what happened to Noel? She took a new position after three brief interviews with a different company--all during the time that the first company was mired in indecision and a lack of process discipline.