Reason 1: It Increases Their Leverage#

This is a big one. According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it now takes the average person 24 weeks to get through the whole hiring and interview process for a new job.

• If you’re unemployed: After 24 weeks of interviews, you’re probably pretty desperate to accept any offer. You won’t risk losing the offer by trying to negotiate for a better salary or benefits. From the company’s perspective, that’s pretty smart.
• If you already have a job: This strategy can still work against you. Your current employer will only be so patient about you taking time off for interviews. Going through this process once is tough enough. You’ll likely feel pressure to either take the job offer or stay at your current place, which might be annoyed you missed so many days.

The same report mentioned that the number one reason people turned down a new job was because the offered wage was too low. In 2023, people were also saying no to jobs that didn’t offer work-from-home flexibility.

Interestingly, about a third of managers want employees back in the office just so they can monitor them. Around a quarter of those managers want people back to make sure they take shorter breaks.

However, respondents were much more likely to overlook issues like low pay or lack of flexibility if they had already gone through a really extended hiring process.

Employees are also less likely to leave a company if they feel it was a real challenge to get the job in the first place. So, management can use a difficult interview process as a staff retention technique before someone is even officially on staff.

Psychologists call this the sunk cost fallacy – if you’ve already put so much time into chasing a job, you don’t want that effort to feel wasted by not taking the offer. Hiring managers, on the other hand, just see it as an effective negotiation technique for the company.

For employers, this extra time spent interviewing is a calculated expense. The hours they pay HR and hiring managers to sit through interviews are seen as an investment that will be paid back by forcing you to accept a lower starting salary, potentially for your entire time with that company.

Not all companies or hiring managers are this strategic, but getting the upper hand on your pay and benefits is a major reason for this trend.

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Reason 2: Copying Big Tech (But Missing the Point)#

The second reason companies are asking for multiple interviews is that they seem to think it will magically make them a better company. Most regular business managers aren’t sitting around reading workforce surveys from the Harvard Business Review. They just hear about big names like Google, Meta, and Apple requiring lots of interview rounds, even for something like a summer internship.

Roles at these huge tech companies often need serious hard skills, and because they offer super competitive salaries, benefits, and career paths, they get way more applications than they have jobs.

• Google got 3 million job applications in 2021 but only hired 7,000 people.
• A former senior vice president of product management at Google told CNBC that hiring often took 6 to 9 months and candidates sat for anywhere from 15 to 25 interviews. He called it “an awful experience” – and he was one of the people doing the hiring! It was even more stressful for the job seekers.

Google and other large tech companies do need to be this rigorous to find the absolute best employees from that massive pile of applicants. A single brilliant developer could make the company hundreds of millions of dollars, and a weak one could cost them just as much.

These companies are being “very deliberate on hiring,” meaning they are still hiring but not everywhere, focusing on specific roles like engineers. Engineers at these places can also earn seven figures a year before they turn 30. So, even the most outstanding applicants are willing to go through multiple interview rounds because there really isn’t anywhere else they can reliably make that kind of money.

In my own experience applying for an investment banking associate job, I did 10 interviews with the firm that hired me. Each interview covered something specific:

• Some tested financial technical skills.
• Another tested market knowledge.
• I had a one-on-one with a Managing Director (MD) to test interpersonal skills.
• There was a panel interview with senior bankers where I could ask my own questions.

For these kinds of jobs, firms really need to interview candidates thoroughly, and they can get away with it because they offer successful applicants life-changing amounts of money.

Regular managers at regular companies interviewing for regular jobs with regular salaries have missed all those specific details. They’ve just seen that “prestigious companies that everyone wants to be like” have lots of interviews, and thought, “Okay, we should have lots of interviews too!”

Reason 3: It’s Not Their Time Being Wasted#

The third reason you’re doing so many interviews is that the people doing the interviewing aren’t really wasting their own time or money in the same way you are.

• Hiring managers and HR departments usually don’t have direct ownership of the business unit they’re hiring for.
• They get paid for the time they spend doing interviews. If they fill up their calendars with interviews, they can even make a case to their own managers that they need additional staff on their team just to handle the workload.

Also, a bad hire can be really bad for the business and make the hiring manager’s daily job much harder down the line. Leaders sometimes want very elaborate hiring processes so that if a hire does go south, there’s plenty of blame to go around because they followed this big, careful process.

From the perspective of managers looking out for themselves, the cost-benefit is clear: they need to be super careful who they hire, and if that takes a long time (meaning lots of interviews), then so be it. Managers might assume there’s safety in numbers – that doing lots of interviews will filter out bad candidates. But this doesn’t always work. Some people are just better at interviewing than others, and except for roles like sales or team management, there’s often no overlap between interview skills and actual job performance.

You might have noticed this problem has gotten worse as companies are using recruitment agencies more and more to fill jobs. Third-party recruiters make money by finding candidates for companies who pay for their services.

The hiring company pays the recruiter a commission for each role they fill, usually paid in three stages:

1. When the applicant starts the job.
2. At 6 months.
3. After the applicant has been with the company for a full year.

This creates a weird situation because the hiring manager doesn’t pay the recruiter until someone is hired. They actually have slightly different goals:

• The recruiter wants to fill the job fast with someone just good enough to stay for 12 months (so they get all three payments).
• The hiring manager wants to see as many candidates as possible before taking the risk of hiring someone and paying that commission.

Good recruiters usually interview candidates themselves before recommending them to their clients. So, with recruitment firms being more popular (demand for their services increased by over 25% since the start of the pandemic, partly because companies adapted to online interviews), you’re likely doing at least one extra interview just because a recruiter is involved.

Reason 4: Looking for a Reason to Reject You#

The fourth reason for so many interviews is sometimes companies just want a reason to say no to you.

• The US Department of Labor has rules for offering jobs to immigrants. Before a company can offer a job to a foreign worker in the U.S., they have to show they made “every effort” to make sure hiring that worker won’t negatively affect American workers’ job opportunities, wages, or conditions. This isn’t about “they took our jobs” – sometimes a company genuinely wants a foreign worker because they are the absolute best person for the job. But to offer them the role, they have to prove they tried their best to hire an American first. This happens in other countries too.

More commonly than foreign workers, companies often want to hire internal candidates or people they already know. However, company policy often says they must advertise the job externally.

So, unfortunately, it’s likely that at least once in your career, you’ll go through a bunch of interviews for a role where the company just needs to tick a box before giving the job to the person they already wanted in the first place.

This is also a big reason why you often get ghosted after applying for a job. If a company gives any specific reason for not hiring you over someone else, they could potentially open themselves up to legal problems. If they just say nothing, they’re usually safe.