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

edit: I love this community! Thank you so much for all the insight. For those who complained, I'm sorry if this post comes across as complainy or redundant, I respect the HN hive-mind and was genuinely curious about everyone's thoughts on the matter.

Hello fellow travelers, I'll do my best to keep this brief(ish).

I've been in IT professionally since Y2K, data entry->QA->SysAdmin->PM->consultant->founder->sold and with the money took some years off, bought some property and a fixer upper and went to school and got a BSBA degree (never graduated from high school but wanted to show my kids the importance of a degree). I missed working and creating things with people so decided to reenter the job market in the PM space. So now that my hat is in the ring I have been told by recruiters what I need to "expect" in this "new market."

I was told "5 to 7 interviews is normal". What? I genuinely feel like I'm having a 'Blast from the Past' moment in this whole thing (good 90s romcom kids, look it up).

When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the organization to do their job? Am I just out of touch? How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive? Am i missing something? HN, please help!

Tech companies are extremely risk adverse when it comes to hiring the "wrong" person. More interviews means more people to spread to blame over if a wrong hire happens. At seven interviews, if everyone signed off on the bad hire, that wasn't anyone's fault, it must have been that the hire was skilled at deception or some other deflection.

It depends on what you are counting as interviews. Normally there is 1 recruiter/hiring manager initial call. Then there is 1 phone screen of some sort. If you pass that it's normal to have 4 onsite interviews in a day. That gets to 6. Sometimes there is a follow up interview and sometimes you skip the phone screen. I feel like 5-7 is the normal routine. Is there something else you expect?

> How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive?

Because hiring the wrong person becomes a colossal waste of time and money.

Yeah I have 16 years experience and was asked to take an aptitude (IQ) test. I find it personally insulting.

I think it all emerged from the recruiting/HR market. They started as middlemen but found a way to take on more of the "gatekeeping" role in hiring.

This then lead to recruiters using more and more technical jargon and then we saw the emergence of leetcode interviews trend from faang, and multiple stupid interviews, because it's the trend.