My background is consulting and earlier-stage startups in the UK which may mean we’re in a different environment to what you’re used to, but the teams are often lean, and sometimes strained by the time we’re out to hire.
Sourcing and screening often starts a few weeks/months before but generally we move quite quickly through technical to offer stages - I think its healthy and fair for both parties to keep expect these final stages around 1-2 weeks.
Interviewing takes quite a bit of time and energy from the tech team and can impact team health, delivery, and ultimately bottom line - where our salaries come from.
If we’re in the fortunate position to have a final candidate (or two - three), theres going to be an exploding offer because we need to get back to work, and we need to let other candidates know to move on.
As a candidate its very fair to line up your interviews with a few companies and tell them you would like to make a decision by a particular date. If they cant accommodate you or extend an offer with a deadline prior to that, its on them. In my last job hunt no company turned down this request and two adjusted their processes to accommodate it.
The only time things happen quickly is when someone is jobless, or if they already handed in their notice, they were going to join company X and you manage to snipe them in that 3-4 month period before they've started at company X.
The notice periods do get factored in both planning and _sometimes_ the deciding on a candidate.
It’s not that companies don’t want to hire fast (or don’t need to), I’ve worked at startups (in UK too), big tech and worked on hiring.
But if the rush is in their side and they want you, that’s different to an exploding offer in many ways, in that they aren’t trying to pressure you to move fast to improve their negotiating position and worsen yours, they’re the ones on the weaker position, and to get you to move fast for them, that gives you leverage.
You decide if you care about the offer and the company/role etc. and then ask them for a deal that’ll make you cancel your other interviews now in that case.
This works well if you don't urgently need income and have significant additional job prospects. The power imbalance between employers and employees means that "just avoid the businesses that exploit you" is not an option for a large number of workers.
The only way to actually defeat exploding offers is collective action.
Recognising you don’t have much leverage and have no option but to be exploited is a sad reality to have to accept, but of course if your job prospects are not great then that can be the case, and then maybe at least you can wait until the last day before you accept an exploding offer, where you have more knowledge of how the rest of your interview pipeline is progressing.