Suppose you get interviews on 10% of those. That’s 10 interview pipelines, and if every company had this policy, 90 unpaid interviewing hours.
Like the comment elsewhere in this thread, candidates will find other roles before your interview gauntlet concludes.
You’d be so lucky! You could then actually prioritize and choose the companies you might want to work for. If you’re spamming applications and waiting for a low callback rate, the expected value of job offer quality is low and the amount of control you have over where you find work is low.
I’m always so curious when people frame interviewing as unpaid work why they think about it this way; it doesn’t seem like a helpful framing. For someone out of work, looking for a job is a full time unpaid job no matter what, and interviews are a good thing - a chance to talk to people and show them you’re hireable. If you spend your time applying but not interviewing, that’s a signal that your strategy needs to change.
Companies don’t make money on the time they spend interviewing you, they aren’t getting direct financial value out of it either, in fact it’s a cost for them, they lose money on the immediate transaction, but they make it back in spades when they hire good people, just like you make it back in spades when you get hired. Interviews are considered an investment by them, and you should consider whether viewing them the same way and acting on it might actually increase your odds.
When a company says they have 9 hours of interview time, that’s usually the maximum time if you make it through all the rounds. If you get that far, you’re highly likely to get an offer.
You would also be surprised at how many people will actually do 10-20 long interview rounds to try to maximize their chances for the best job.
There are almost two different bubbles of candidates: Those who refuse to do anything more than a couple quick calls, and those who will rearrange their life to spend days putting in work for each job they want. I think that’s fine and everyone should do what works for them, but if you think 9 hours of interviewing is going to turn candidates away from a company like Oxide you’d be very surprised to see the quantity and caliber of applicants who line up for jobs like this.
I think you also might need to adjust your expectations now that AI interview cheating is getting out of control. A lot of companies are moving back to on-site interviews. I’d happily do 3 x 3 hour video calls more than flying and staying at hotels and renting cars to get to an office in another city just to interview.
Spotted your first problem. Don't shotgun apply to anyone and everyone. You should only be applying to jobs you actually want.
I've always preferred this kind of targeted application -- I've applied to 5 jobs total in my ~15 year career and gotten 4 offers, two of which I accepted. Everyone has their own objectives they optimize for -- personally, I care most about building monuments of lasting value.
I'm on the market right now due to a layoff and I have an agent that reviews linkedin every morning and cross references levels.fyi for role leveling and salary and then assess fit to my resume. I get around 5-10 _possible_ positions per day and with human judgement that's usually down to 0-2, averaging about 0.5 per day.
I hear back from probably close to 10% but that's with a highly targeted approach, not just spamming my resume everywhere. And my pipeline is freaking full. It's a full time job doing prep and participating in all the interviews.
The only interview so far that's been a huge time sink has been anthropic's. But that's because I chose it. Their take home I have the option to use between 2 and 8 hours and I used the full 8 hours because I'm highly motivated and the position is well fit to my career history.
That’s 2.5 hours allotted per application, some of which may just be attaching a resume and hitting a submit button.