5 rounds is insane, and to me it's the mark of a severely dysfunctional company.
Don't even get me started on multiple choice personality tests taken by wannabe psychologists in HR, or the general idiocy that is whiteboard coding.
If we say half an hour for screening and 2h for onsite, that's 2.5h total for interviewing - seems very reasonable to me (still 5 rounds but it doesn't sound as scary).
Of course, I'm coming up with a generous interpretation of things. Some companies do take multiple cycles of interviewing and waiting for feedback after each one which is very tedious. My point is that you need to look a bit deeper than the number of rounds to get an idea of how smooth the interview process is.
Not really. I had 7 rounds for my current role. Granted it's not a coding role, but for many roles that touch many aspects of an organization it's important to meet as many people as possible for both the organization and the interviewee.
In France, engineers usually have 3 months notice period. So if you hire someone who already has a job, you have to wait for 3+ months for the new hire to leave the previous job. If that's a bad choice and you have to fire, you have to start again for the next candidate.
If it were me, I would have moved on to the next company where 2 or less rounds are more than sufficient.
5 rounds seems insane, 1 seems inefficient. Why 'waste' the time of several busy employees to interview a candidate that one person could quickly rule out in one interview.
The onsite, frequently, has 3-5 interviews each an hour long.
On site is after the initial 1-2 rounds of screening.
I have not seen a single company hire with less than 4 rounds ever. Mostly, it's 5-8.
Sent two emails focused on the area I wanted to work:
Company A: - Email the next day to schedule first call - 15 minutes hr talk (mostly if salary, way of work, etc aligned) - 60 minutes vp of engineering (my experience, challenges the company is facing, talk shop) - 30 minutes with cto (they selling me on their company) - Offer after 2 hours of ending the chat with the cto.
All this in the span of 4 days (could have been faster but time conflicts)
Company B: - Email same day to schedule call - 15 call with recruiter (salary, expectations, etc) - 1:30 call with tech lead + someone else I forgot (talk about my experience, shop, and included a quick simple 20 minute coding challenge) - Offer the next day
Span of a week and a half since there were some holidays involved.
In 20+ years of being a developer, I only once had more than 3 interviews to get a job (Spotify almost a decade ago). Some are quick one hour chats, one was just having lunch with the CEO and CTO for an hour and chatting, Had 1-2 that were coding challenges and then 30 minutes chat.
I would never ever work for a company that required 5-8 interviews. Jesus christ
edit: At the company I am leaving, currently the process is:
- After initial email, first call with CEO to assess match, culture, etc - Interview with me for an hour. We do 2 small coding challenges (your own editor, you chose the language, get information before hand, etc).
If 2nd interview goes well, we put an offer, if it doesn't, we give an option of them doing a small take home (4h max, but we hope no-one does more than 2h) if they want to continue with the process. If this goes well, offer, if it doesn't, we may have another call to let them 'explain' their code and solutions. At this point, is either an offer or a no.
Yes, technically it can be 4 interviews, but they are mostly to give more 'opportunities' to folks that may not be as good in a type of interview vs another type.
Another small company I am interviewing for, had a screening, a take home, discussion of the take home, and now a 3 round onsite.
All remote:
1 take-home code+essay test
1 technical discussion interview
2 management/consulting interviews (the role is pre-sales consultancy)
1 CEO interview which was essentially congratulatory, having passed the others
Second round was the following week, four almost-back-to-back 45-minute sessions, each with a different person. The last was hiring manager's manager.
Third round was the following week, and was that manager's manger.
Offer came after that.
Oh, this was because of a personal referral, that might have eliminated a round?
In any case, I had three "rounds" but talked to six people.
You can twist this all you like, but that is not a functional organization.
As it happens, each interviewer focused on different things, by prior arrangement. One person walked me through a coding exercise, while another asked about mentorship and infra-team communication, while still another focused more on intra-team communication and process. Six interviews in, I was still being asked new and different questions than I'd gotten before, and I was still asking new and different questions than I'd asked before.
At the level I'm talking about, and given that I wasn't unemployed, the interview process is as much about me deciding whether I want to switch jobs as it is them deciding whether they want to hire me. I had different questions for each of the people I talked to, suited to their level, and even where some of my questions were the same, I got different answers from the people I talked to, again, based on their level. I couldn't very well probe the hiring manager about company focus in the same way I could the VP of Engineering, and in fact it was the higher-level employees that sold me on the job.
All in all, 4.5 hours is not a ton of time for them to get to know me, or for me to get to know them. Given the amount of money involved and the level of the position, the number of people I talked to seemed very restrained.
If someone that reports to you does an interview, and you then follow up by interviewing the same person, yes, that means exactly you don't trust your report's judgement. Of course they're going to have slightly different questions; they are different human beings.
I can't think of a clearer example of being unable to delegate than redoing your underling's work.
If each round included multiple interviewers, we're firmly in clown show territory. If you need that many interviewers, your interviewers aren't on the same page or properly calibrated.
It's a poor candidate experience. And from an interviewer perspective, getting 6+ people in a room is cumbersome and it'll be nigh impossible to come to a consensus. I routinely am an interviewer with Amazon and it's hard to navigate interview debriefs with four interviewers, a neutral third-party (i.e. 'bar raiser') and recruiter in the room.
As an interviewer, I wouldn't participate in an interview process that had 6+ interviewers. As a candidate, the company better be doubling my six figure salary before I'll consider subjecting myself to that clown show.
It was indeed a bit of a clown show, and everyone agreed it was bad, but as long as I was there, I don't think it changed much.