<p>I applied to job a that I thought was a good fit for me, and matched my current skillset, a few months ago. Since then I have had 3 interviews, and was recently invited for a fourth one.</p>
<p>I was just wondering has anyone experienced such a long interview process before? It makes me wonder if this is a by-product of state of our current economy. Maybe the companies are getting thousands of applicants and are devising better methods to find the right “fit”?</p>
<p>I know 2 recent grads who had this experience with livingsocial and neither was ultimately offered a position.</p>
<p>^You mean they were applying to livingsocial the company? Or that they found the job the posting there?</p>
<p>yes, applying to living social for a job. Really got an unprofessional runaround.</p>
<p>2 years ago my husband was hired for his current job (after 20 years with his previous company, at age 55) and it still took him 2 phone interivews, in person interview-out of state, multiple phone contacts and 4 months. Thankfully, he was hired and loves his job. But it was a very long nerve-wracking process. So I don’t think it’s just recent grads.</p>
<p>I had five visits at my company before I was hired, with anywhere from two to six separate interviews at each one. I was applying to be a receptionist, but was ultimately hired for a better position. My first interview was in April and I started in August. I guess they figure applicants are a dime a dozen and they’re happy to take their time. </p>
<p>By the time I had reached my final interview, which was with the CEO as everyone who works at the home office has to meet his approval, I’d begun to feel like if I didn’t get the job it would feel more like being fired from applying for a job at the company rather than just not getting the job. I was on first name terms with a lot of people before I ever started.</p>
<p>^^ Yuppers, a couple years ago I had over 6 interviews stretching over 6 months the culmination of which was they pulled the req for the position and never hired me. A couple months later I got hired in my dream job at a competitor after 2 interviews and the process took less than 2 weeks.</p>
<p>Two years ago, my daughter was applying for a management training program at a large multinational. They had a six-stage interview process over the course of 3-4 months, with people getting culled at each stage. She made it to the 4th level but not farther. </p>
<p>Almost every place she applied had at least a three-stage process. It was really wearing her out – she is good at presenting herself, so she usually made it through at least a couple stages before getting rejected. She often had many hours invested in a job she didn’t get. She had a full-time job at the time, and was spending 15+ hours/week on her search for the next job.</p>
<p>S1 generally had four interviews per offer (he’s a software engineer) – one with HR, two phone interviews with online programming projects, then a fly-out. </p>
<p>His spouse had seven for the same company – the HR, two programming interviews by phone, a fly-out, and then once she had an offer from the company, they had her interview with two departments who were specifically interested in her. She then talked to each of them on the phone, and then a face-to-face with the position she ultimately chose. </p>
<p>I thought it a little strange that one was signing on for a job w/the company vs. a specific position. S had been recruited to a specific group that he had done a great deal of work for, as an intern and doing open source in his free time. He shut down the other department inquiries for him pretty early on in the process.</p>
<p>DH works in the gov’t and it is generally four interviews to an offer when he is hiring staff. At my company, which is tiny, it’s two, always face-to-face and with the owner. Chemistry is everything in that office.</p>
<p>It depends… sometimes it is a sign of distrust between the people doing the interviewing. Once I interviewed with a company that made me talk to 14 people before offering me a first line manager job (4 person staff). Yup… it was crazy. I felt like they were so tied up in their own internal struggle that they forgot that they had to convince me it would be a good place to work – when they scheduled for me to do a presentation for them at 7 am one morning without checking with me first to see if it would work (it worked for THEIR schedules, but I had day care dropoff that would have to be re-arranged), I knew it was not a good fit. I did the presentation anyway, got the offer, and turned 'em down. About killed them when I turned them down, I think, as they had to start all over again.</p>
<p>So far this is what I had:
1 - phone interview
2 - onsite interview - one with a panel then two individuals, then an IQ test (well they didn’t call it that but I know what they look like), and a personality test
3 - They use a corporate psychologists consulting firm so I had to fly out to interview with two shrinks for about 2 hours and then took another personality test, and an ACT style test.
4 - now they want me to go back to meet with more people in the office</p>
<p>I’ve had 2-3 step interviews before, but this one is by far the most elaborate.</p>
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<p>This is why they have so many interviews at my company, among other reasons. They bring you in with a specific job with a specific department in mind, but they let the heads of all the major departments interview you-- and now that I am on the “inside,” so to speak, I see they fight over candidates. I think I actually got rejected for the position I applied for, but somebody else I interviewed with wanted me and that was how I got hired. At one point I was asked my preference between two positions that were the same job in two different departments.</p>
<p>That, and they also like to get EVERYBODY to approve of the new candidate, even though I’ve never spoken to some of those people ever again after my interview and I do not work under them. They had to approve me anyway.</p>
<p>At my current company we do a phone interview with HR and a staff. One round of 4 people, then another round of 2-3 people. If most people like the candidate and few people are unsure then we’ll bring the candidate back again. If everyone agrees then the candidate meets the President. We are upfront with our process.</p>
<p>OP - if you are meeting some people more than once, ask them if there is additional information about you that they are looking for.</p>
<p>For my biggest opportunity move within my industry, there were four in-person interviews, progressively up the ranks, over roughly 4 months, one involved me flying to another city- and only two of us were being considered. Both hired. It’s sometimes their desire to work through the process, in the way they feel is best. And, that they have that time to get it right. Good luck.</p>
<p>I think my son had a phone interview and a fly-out for the internship at the company he’s now working at. No new interviews for the permanent job. But who knows he may not have told me about all of them!</p>
<p>It seems like a good sign if they are investing in more interviews… good luck!</p>
<p>Some companies just have a dysfunctional interview methodology. If a company need months and round after round after round of interviews, that company does not have their act together.</p>
<p>I’ve worked for companies that are serial interviewers, and cannot pull the trigger no matter how awesome the person - the feeling is, there is always someone better no matter how good the person is, so they keep looking. And those companies were messed up in other ways as well, it all ties together. So beware.</p>
<p>The only exception might be google, because so many people want to work there. You go through an HR screen, two phone interviews, an on-site interview, then it goes to a committee, if you make it through that it goes to another committee. They tell you up front it will take months to get through it all.</p>
<p>There are a lot of reasons for multiple rounds, it isn’t necessarily a sign of dysfunction, but it can be of course. </p>
<p>In some cultures fit is important and they want consensus, in our development teams we tend to have people see a wide range of people from the different areas, because technical prowess is not the only thing, fit is important, too, we run a small team, collegial, highly hard driving culture, and someone who doesn’t fit will cause a train wreck. </p>
<p>We generally do a phone screen with a tech person or two, if the person seems good, we bring them in for live interviews, usually in a couple of rounds, to have different tech people and then finally the cto to talk to them. We don’t do everyone and his brother, but it can take several rounds. We don’t have HR interview candidates, we get the resumes and decide who to see, in part because of bad experience with HR people interviewing and rejecting people for idiotic reasons, like “I didn’t like them” (I once had an HR person nearly mess me up on a prior interview, she decided unilaterally to reject me, fortunately the head of the group got wind of it…I am in for an interview at 7:30 in the morning, I had been up all night with a prod issue, got to sleep at 4, got up at 6…I was with the person who would become my boss, he ran into her in the hall, went over to ask her what had happened, and the idiot told him “Well, why would you want to hire him? He looks like he was partying all night”…my boss said 'He was up all night solving a production issue and had maybe 2 hours of sleep…I guess we only want people who work 9-5 and get 10 hours of sleep, huh?"). </p>
<p>Some companies are dysfunctional, they think that doing that will mean getting a good quality candidate, by making them see everyone or dragging it out because 'someone better is out there", and that doesn’t work any better, and quite frankly, the psych tests, personality profiles and such, don’t work any better, there isn’t any study that has shown they increase the yield of quality employees, but they do make firms a lot of money who claim they do (there are studies that indicate they actually tend to have a negative correlation, like companies that hire only 4.0 gpas). </p>
<p>What really bothers me is the companies where you go through interview after interview, you get positive feedback, then suddenly nothing back at all…very unprofessional, but many companies seem to think that they have the upper hand and they have no obligation to be professional, a lot of the big banks are like that. They may think that, but companies that have a reputation for doing that also lose good people, who won’t put up with that crap, and the people who will put up with that often aren’t particularly good IME. </p>
<p>What is sad is people can pass through the interviews with flying colors and then the job is no longer open, either you have companies that literally don’t open the req until you actually have someone (idiotic, but that is beancounters), or they decide stock analysts won’t like you hiring.</p>
<p>A phone screen and 2 rounds should be the limit if you have your act together, IMO. But four rounds, as mentioned by the OP, is ridiculous.</p>
<p>I have never worked for a company (and I’ve worked for a lot of companies) that provided even 10 minutes of training on how to effectively interview people. It is a learned skill, and not many people and organizations know how to do it well IME.</p>
<p>financegrad - I had three interviews for my current position but it was interesting the way it was done. they were scheduled all on the same day, back to back to back. I’ve never been more nervouse for an interview before! One was by phone with someone in our other office, and the other two were in person. I"m not sure if everyone got passed on to the next interview or not but it was a long process. Interesting thing was the first two were in person and it was the last one that was via phone.</p>