Maybe it's an age thing, because I've already hit 40, but doing 5-7 interviews seems like time lost for all the people involved. If a company cannot decide after 1-2 interviews if the person they're trying to hire it's worth the effort or not then it means it has lost its golden touch, especially in this industry. And vice-versa, if, as a potential employee, you don't "sense" your employer after 1-2 meetings then it means it's not meant to be.

Case in point, all these FAANG companies which pride themselves in doing 6-7 interviews, they all are spitting out shitty product after shitty product (that is when they're launching any new products at all). Exceptions do exist, I know of that, and when do they show up everyone is so surprised (see Apple and M1 recently). The pay at these companies is also very good, that is correct, but it's not correlated with the quality of the people who work for them or to how their talents are put to work. More exactly, a company so immersed in bureaucracy that it needs this amount of work to hire just one person is sure to waste the talent that it already has at its disposal.

This is my conclusion as well: exluding total unusual cases, where three candidates are all equally good and you can't decide: not beeing able to tell whether a candidate fits after more than two interviews tells more about the company than the interview.

I agree with this. Honestly, as a candidate, I don't mind the longer interview loop. What I do mind is if it's very spread out. I'm willing to invest an hour up front + a full day round, but I don't want that longer round spread out over the course of multiple days. I'll give you 6 hours in a day, but not 2-3 days of 2-3 hours each.

My expectation at this point is:

Pre-onsite:

- 15 minute with a recruiter, tell me a little bit about the role, spend the majority of the time telling me why I should join the company, and take a few questions

- 30-45 minutes with the hiring manager. Tell me about what you really want, scope, the challenges, and let's talk about how I might fit. Do enough Q&A both ways to feel comfortable, and then let's make a call right there as to whether we want to continue on. For my part, I always tell the HM at this stage whether or not I'd be excited to continue.

Up to now, I've invested an hour. This is reasonable. Maybe we both like each other, so presuming we do, when you call me about the on-site, we should work out acceptable comp ranges. These may move upward after the on-site based on what I learn about the role, but let's make sure we won't waste one anothers' time with the on-site.

Continuing to the on-site:

- 60-90 mins on whatever technical background is required for the role. I'm fairly senior in management, so this usually doesn't involve code, but should cover whether or not I have a clue how to lead it. For an IC technical role, if we're smart about it, we'll know enough without doing 5X leetcode and 3X design here. I can also evaluate whether I care about your problem space if we don't make the content entirely synthetic. In 90 minutes, it's perfectly reasonable to do a design exercise + picking something in there to write some code around. This is it, though. One technical round!

- 30 mins x 3-4 with key peers/stakeholders. Make sure my behavioral stuff works for you, that we can understand one another, and yeah, that we might actually like each other enough to work together. I like to talk, and so if the other person does, make it 45 mins.

- 60 mins with the HM again to dive deeper on the role with the context gained from the interviews. Heavy Q&A. Let's give each other enough to make a decision.

- If you want, 60 minutes with whatever executive (besides the HM) will be closest to the role. Whatever you want to talk about. Let's just see if we can communicate.

You can cut this to half a day if you cut your most efficient interviewers down to 45 mins and don't overdo it with peer/stakeholder interviews, but I'd rather make it a full day with some breaks. This is because I need time to interview you, and that mostly happens after you've run through your things in each interview. We should all have enough information to decide here, and I'm not taking the on-site anyway if the first hour we had together didn't generate strong interest, right?

After this, call me within a couple of days, let me know if we're doing an offer or not. If we are, let's confirm expectations. The only things that will offend me at this point is if we're not in the ranges we previously discussed, or you want to do more rounds. I'm open to one more if there's a good reason for it (not wanting to use that person's time for the on-site is not a good reason). But we've had a day together. While one day is not necessarily enough to know for sure that things will work well long-term, even another full day isn't going to change anything about that.

Also, while the focus of the original post is mostly critical of the lengthy process and it being annoying to candidates, there's also the reality that the longer the loop, the fewer candidate throughput the hiring manager can have. There are only so many interview cycles per week before an interviewer burns out on it or can't get their job done as well. I'd argue that if you stretch these things out to a day, you will think harder about who you are bringing on-site.

If we agree for the most part that the time together wasn't nonsense and a headache, as you put it, that's a good indicator that we should work together!

tl;dr - I'm fine with 7 interviews if they're the right 7 interviews and planned thoughtfully.

> Honestly, as a candidate, I don't mind the longer interview loop. What I do mind is if it's very spread out.

As a candidate, I would also be wondering what it would be like to work for a company with a spread out interview process. I have been through multistage interviews, but decisions were always made quickly. Made it to the end of the phone screening, at the end of the conversation there is an offer to be flown out for a panel interview. Made it past an interview with the IT manager, then head straight down to someone else to discuss software development. Made it past the interview with the lead scientist, then head straight down to the lab to see the lab and meet the research team. Even though I was in my prime, I was by no means special and I only secured some of the positions I applied for. Yet I always knew one way or another within days. I was happy to work for those who I did get hired by and I would have been proud to be hired by those who declined.

Thankfully, I have never had to endure a strung out interview process. Because of that, I don't know how I would feel in such a situation. Yet looking at the prospect from afar, it leads me to believe that it would be difficult to work in such an environment: it would involve dealing with people who are more concerned about process than decisions, and with people who are not available when decisions need to be made (or even for process to be followed).