The Job Interview With Six Rounds And A Presentation

Six conversations, a written exercise and a presentation to a room, for a role that will be done alone at a desk. The length is a response to risk rather than a measure of care.

One error is visible and the other is not

A poor appointment is obvious, expensive and attributable. Everyone involved remembers who recommended the candidate, and the consequences play out in public over months.

A strong candidate who was rejected, or who lost patience and withdrew, produces no evidence at all. Nobody ever learns what that person would have delivered.

Faced with one error that is punished and another that is invisible, a rational organisation adds caution until the process is very slow indeed.

Every extra interviewer is another veto

Panels expand because inclusion is easy to justify and exclusion is not. Adding a stakeholder costs an hour and avoids an awkward conversation about why they were left out.

Most processes then require broad agreement rather than a majority, so each additional person can stop a hire but none can complete one.

As the panel grows, the chance that everybody is enthusiastic about the same person falls, and the process converges on candidates nobody objects to.

Scheduling adds more delay than interviewing

The interviews themselves occupy a few hours. Finding those hours in six busy calendars, sequentially, across several weeks, is what makes the process long.

Each stage waits for the previous one, because organisations are reluctant to book later rounds before earlier ones have passed, which is efficient for them and slow for everyone else.

A candidate experiences the gaps, not the meetings, and the gaps are where competing offers arrive and decisions get made elsewhere.

Work samples migrated into the process

Presentations, take-home tasks and strategy documents genuinely predict performance better than conversation does, which is why they spread so quickly.

They also transfer several hours of unpaid work from the employer to the applicant, and the incentive to keep them modest is weak on the side asking for them.

Because there is no cost to the requester, tasks grow, and a process designed to reduce uncertainty becomes a filter for who has spare evenings.

The process selects for availability

People with the strongest options withdraw first, since they have alternatives that will conclude sooner and have less reason to tolerate an open-ended sequence.

What remains is a pool selected partly for patience and current circumstances, which is not the trait the assessment was designed to measure.

The organisation then concludes that good candidates are scarce, and responds by adding another stage to be certain about the ones who are left.