I answered your question. Expect an invoice at my hourly rate.
A company seeking to sell a customer an automatically-renewing subscription to its services, that grosses n 000 USD per period, that comes with considerable legal protections against non-payment, might spend a considerable amount of time and money to close the deal.
Edit: I’m assuming full-time employment. (The term “interview” pushed my thinking that way. IMHO freelancers should avoid presenting themselves the same way employees would.)
They’ll often offer the pay you but demanding money for an interview is crazy.
Think of it more like a first date and you each pay for your own meal.
Reasonable point, but many companies expect you do to a reasonably substantial technical test (minimum half a days work, often more) after a quick chat with their HR people. I usually refuse unless they have managed to convince me that I really want the job and I am not competing with ten others for the job.
This has become a good filter.
Seriously though, I've only done even a half-day interview if there was at least a 50% chance I'd want to work for the company at the end of the day. I'm about 5 for 7. One that fell through, I wanted to work at but their HR went into freeze and I ended up working for a spin-off company. Another I spent way too long on an obvious recruiting open coding contest so counted it.
The rest of us can refuse the interview, demand an invoice or whatever, but there are others to take our place without those headaches. I understand the pain as I was a consultant and got upset at losing a day's wages on nit-picky and uncertain interviewers (especially for a contract), but there's not much to do about it.
That said, interviews serve both parties to some extent. You want to know if you like the company, too.
If the company is inconsiderate enough to demand a whole day of unpaid time, perhaps the culture is a bad fit to begin with.
Either in 4-5 hour-long, mostly technical sessions + lunch, or just in "meeting all your potential colleagues, the CEO, COO, etc." for 45min-1h each.
It's common in some sectors, such as oilfield services, for example. About twelve hours with some breaks. I remember going through that with Schlumberger. The last step was getting called into an office, being asked to sit down, and told to assemble a set of mechanical pieces of some proprietary equipment you've never seen on the table. No blueprint. No context. You have five minutes. Go.
The interviewer tries to build up pressure calling the time every thirty seconds or so.
Yes, I assembled the pieces with time to spare. The only one who did in that batch, actually. Woohoo. They want to see how you handle pressure and they left that exercise when we were all tired at the end of the interview. "Jobs" on oil rigs are chaotic: everything can go wrong, hazardous material, lack of sleep, coordination with people you can't hear, company person on your case, tool strings getting stuck, gas kicks, blow ups, etc. You really need to keep cool and be deliberate under pressure and maintain a high level of attention and focus for extended periods of time.
I do like the idea of them paying you for your time. I dislike sending a thank you letter, I always think they owe me a thank you letter.
Interview at a company that pays for it if you want to be paid. Airflow offered me $500 upon acceptance of their coding challenge. I would never ask, that’s dumb. If in the 0.001% chance they do pay, you will cost yourself the job.
An all-day interview is okay in my books, it's like an open house in a way.