A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.
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The six-rounds-to-compensate-for-noise observation is exactly right and I had never seen it put that way. Each additional stage is an admission that the previous one did not work, and nobody ever removes the stage that failed. The other cost nobody counts is who self-selects out. Long noisy processes filter hardest on people with the least slack, which is precisely the group most hiring managers claim to want more of.
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something you reckon. a gripe, a hunch, a hill you will die on. serious or not.
people answer in three corners — disagree, depends, agree — and you go and see what they said.
small on purpose. you will need a code from someone already here.
what all this does to your head, and what to do about it.