Never do more than 3 interviews. And that’s assuming they’re relatively short, maybe 1 hour apiece. Any more than that, and they don’t want you bad enough.
I don’t know if I agree with that. Having been on the hiring side of the table more than a few times.
Hiring a new employee is a risk; especially when you’re hiring at a senior enough level where the wrong decisions are amplified as the complexity of the software grows—and it becomes far more expensive to un/redo bad architectural decisions.
And the amount of time it takes for even an experienced engineer to learn their way around your existing stack, understand the reasons for certain design decisions, and contribute in a way that’s not disruptive—that’s like 6 months minimum for some code bases. More if there’s crazy data flows and weird ML stuff. And if they’re “full stack (backend and frontend) then it’s gonna be even longer before you see how good of a hiring decision you really made. For a $160k+/yr senior dev role, that’s $80k (before benefits and other onboarding costs) before you really expect to see anything really significant.
So you schedule as many interviews as you need to get a feel for what they can do, because false negatives are way less expensive than false positives.
Sometimes people can be cunning: charm, wow annd woo their way past even the savviest of recruiters with the right combinations of jargon patterns.
Sometimes they can even fool a technical round interviewer.
4-5 interviews (esp. if the last is an onsite in which you’ll meet many) seems to be about the norm in my field. Even if it kinda sucks for the person looking for the job.
Yeah, it saves you money…by costing the prospective employee. There’s only so much we as employees can or should be willing to give up for free, and it’s 3 interviews.
I also question if more than that is really improving the quality of your hires. Far more often (100% of the time, in my experience), multiple interviews are more a symptom of bureaucracy; multiple managers insisting that they get to stick their fingers in the pie, rather than actually learning anything more meaningful about the candidate.
I’ve rejected someone on their 4th round before—1st round with me. That candidate had managed to convince the recruiter that they had the chops for a staff engineer (>$200k/yr!) and passed two coding rounds before mine, testing knowledge of relevant techs on our stack—at this level of role, you have to know this coming in; table stakes.
I was giving the systems design round. Asked them to design something that was on their resume—they couldn’t. They’d grossly misrepresented their role/involvement in that project and since they were interviewing for a staff level role, high-level design is going to be a big part of it and will impact the product and development team in significant ways. No doubt they’d been involved in implementing, and can code—but it was very clear that they didn’t understand the design decisions that were made and I had no confidence that they would contribute positively in our team.
Sucks for them to be rejected, but one criteria we look for is someone who will be honest when they don’t know—and we do push to find the frontiers of their knowledge. We even instruct them to just say it when they don’t know and we can problem-solve together. But a lot of people have too much ego to accept that, but we don’t have time for people like that on the team either.
Look, I get what you’re saying and clearly I’ve been on the wrong end of it too, but if we make a bad hiring decision, it costs not just the candidate their job but also the team and company they work on can get into a bad place too. What would you do in that situation? Just hire them anyway and risk the livelihood of everyone else on the team? That’s a non-starter; try to see a bigger picture.
