Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

No, an online presence can either accelerate the interview process or cut it short. No online presence extends the process and makes me leary of making a bad hire, so I'm looking for tells in a weak signal source of an in-person interview where someone adopts a persona to get the job.

I've had to interview a candidate where I am literally handed the resume and said "can you take over? blahblahblah had to ditch." which is unprofessional but you do what you have to do. I walk in, sit with the candidate for about, maybe ten minutes total, whilst I am poking into his online presence and explaining what I am doing, whilst my colleague grills him on various aspects. After ten minutes I write on the resume "Hire this guy before someone else does", thanked the candidate for his time, explained that my colleague would take over, and politely left the interview. Poor guy thought he'd failed the interview. I will admit I handled that aspect of it badly. We made him an offer within the hour. He was an absolutely fantastic hire.

I've also looked at many social media posts by candidates and then put a strong "NO HIRE!" on their application. It isn't about skillset or education or capability, but there are things that people say on social media, in unguarded moments that make them unhirable in a modern work environment due to prejudices and their willingness to express those prejudices.

You should absolutely care about your online privacy. I have made myself "very findable" and if you go through any of my social media posts, you might take umbrage at some things I say (especially about recruiters), but I try to be a cross between Mr Rogers and Ted Lasso. If Mr Rogers said "F*K" an awful lot. I might think some things in the private thoughts of my own head, and thank goodness those aren't automatically transcribed by Google or Siri at this time, but when it comes to posting some very disparaging things in public, some people cannot help themselves and that can tell us whether those thoughts might spill over in the workplace as hidden prejudice or overtly expressed that would land the company in legal hot water.

It is very common in India. Especially the service based companies

I did a couple of interviews with Amazon and I similar experience as yours. The worst part was there is no feedback and one amazon recruiter scheduled a call (which she reschedule two times) just to tell me that I am not selected.

I'm a HM at a big tech company as well. We do 3 one hour slots.

In a previous company we pair interviewed, 1/2 hour screen + 2 one hour slots. I liked that format a little bit better.

I've been interviewing people for about 40 years now, I was just reflecting on my first ever interview that I participated in when I was still a teenager.

I would say there are some factors that are not going to come out in any number of interviews. Conversely there are factors that are immediately noticeable.

I can tell in 10-15 minutes how strong someone is technically. At least I can tell the difference between "weak", "maybe", "strong" in 10 minutes.

Going back to my first ever interview. The guy was brilliant. He was technically good. He ended up being a not so good hire for reasons that would have been very hard to discover during the interview. It was partly the intersection of very smart without the experience to match and partly that he was just weird in some other ways. He was hired, he left within a year or so.

I think the science says the best predictor is an IQ test. The rest of our practices are not really evidence based. We tend to want to hire people that are like us, that know the things we know, we have all sorts of biases during the interview process, and throwing more people/time at it doesn't really seem to make a big difference.

I would say the most important thing you can do to get good people is to make your company a place that good people want to be. I.e. what matters is more what enters the pipeline then the interview process. I would bet that having 7 interviews vs. 3 has a difference that's completely in the noise and that at least there's no solid evidence that it gets you anything re: the quality of people working in a company. Every company says it has the best people. Mostly channeling Joel Spolsky here but I've seen this principle in action.

EDIT: Another random thought is that there are other factors that influence whether someone is going to be successful in a given role. Even the best software engineer can fail if the conditions for him to be successful aren't there.

Multiple interviews is annoying as a candidate, but how they are used (or appear to be used) is the bigger problem. Instead of being used to strengthen a consensus they tend to be a series of filters where any "fail" invalidates everyone else's input. After all, why hire someone who everyone doesn't love? But that is the same logic as combining bad mortgages into tranches reduces their risk - sounds good on paper but doesn't work in reality.

Since you have a chance of getting cut at each round as an interviewee you are left hoping not to run into: some esoteric corner of programming you could learn in 10 minutes but haven't seen before; an interviewer who always asks a pet question (even if told not to do this); a personal dislike that is illegal but not challenged (age, gender, race, etc., waved away as "a bad fit").

If multiple interviews were used only to strengthen assumptions about a candidate and each interview had a narrow intent, they COULD help companies avoid more bad hires. But after interview #3 you are probably just filtering reasonable or even exceptional candidates based on random chance.

On the other hand, this may be a fantastic method to strengthen a "hive mind" culture, but that doesn't sound like a worthy goal.