This is the core frustration shared by thousands of professionals: the process has become the performance. Eight rounds. I know someone who went through eight rounds for a mid-level marketing role. They met the hiring manager twice, the CEO once, the entire future team, and then, inexplicably, a VP from a completely different division who asked them to describe their relationship with their childhood dog. That VP was the final gatekeeper. The candidate was ghosted two weeks later. Not even a form email. Just silence, the digital equivalent of being left alone on a stage when the lights suddenly cut out.

Why do we do this? Why have companies convinced themselves that a process so brutally inefficient-one that costs them money, wastes hundreds of candidate-hours, and breeds cynicism-is somehow protective? The standard operating procedure for hiring managers seems to be: when in doubt, add four more steps. The assumption is that complexity equals rigor, that duration equals diligence.

Filtering for Athletes, Not Marathon Runners

But the counterintuitive truth, the one nobody wants to admit, is that this entire protracted audition selects for a very specific type of person: those who are currently unemployed and desperate, or those who are extraordinarily gifted at time management and delegation (the 44-minute kind of genius) but perhaps not actually the best performers in a steady, complex role. Companies are filtering for interview athletes, not marathon runners.

And the cost? I pulled some old, messy data-it’s probably inflated by 4, but let’s go with it-the average cost of a bad hire is somewhere around $44,404, depending on the role and how long they lasted. That fear of hitting the $44,404 trap drives HR departments and hiring managers into a neurotic, risk-averse spiral. They believe that if they just add *one more* stage, if they just ask *one more* behavioral question, they will inoculate themselves against failure.

The Hospice Coordinator’s Lesson in Presence

It’s almost like trying to organize a highly volatile environment. This brings me to Claire L.M. Claire is a hospice volunteer coordinator… She told me once that she used to spend weeks vetting people… “It was useless,” she said, peeling an orange in a perfect, single spiral… “I spent 4 days a week interviewing… and I was losing the people who were already doing hard, meaningful work elsewhere.”

The key realization for her was that the length of the process didn’t correlate to the quality of their soul or their competence. It only correlated to their available free time.

Her solution? The process now takes exactly four interactions. Two quick conversations, one with her, one with an existing volunteer, and a half-day shadowing session. She judges presence, not theoretical performance. Corporate HR departments, obsessed with data points, could learn something crucial from a hospice coordinator focused on humanity.

The Mental Cost of Presentation

But back to the corporate grind. The true tragedy of the eight-round audition is that by the time you reach the final stage, your mental reserves are decimated. You are not presenting your best self; you are presenting your most stressed, exhausted self. We are demanding peak mental clarity in a situation designed for anxiety.

It’s fear dressed up as rigor. We mistake the process for the outcome. A long process feels responsible. It feels like due diligence. But what is it really doing? It’s signaling internal chaos. If a company requires eight interviews to decide if you fit, it means the hiring manager doesn’t trust HR, HR doesn’t trust the team, and the team doesn’t trust the core organizational values.

The Lowest Common Denominator Wins

I worked with a startup… who had a four-person interview panel for every entry-level role. Four people, all asking the same four categories of questions… The data was so rich, so redundant, that they paralyzed themselves. They ended up passing on the top four candidates because the composite score showed four conflicting assessments of “cultural fit.” They hired the fifth person, the one who was merely adequate, because they generated the least internal friction. The lowest common denominator won.

That’s the ultimate failure. The system, designed to maximize quality, inherently maximizes risk-aversion. It’s almost insulting how little transparency there is. If you’re going to put a candidate through 8 interviews, the least you can do is give them specific, actionable feedback if they fail. Instead, we offer that generic rejection letter, reinforcing the automated, soulless nature of the transaction.

The Rigor vs. Availability Trade-Off

We need to stop conflating difficulty with due diligence. Claire L.M. figured it out in a highly emotionally charged environment: if the initial screening is precise, the rest can be quick and observational. If your initial screen is fuzzy, you compensate by adding six more fuzzy layers, achieving nothing but a highly polished form of delay.

The long interview process isn’t rigorous; it’s a lack of organizational spine. It says, “We aren’t brave enough to trust our initial judgment, so we will make you prove your worth to eight different, often disconnected, parties.”

We have to recognize that the ability to ace a mock presentation for a fake client… is a separate skill set entirely from the ability to navigate internal politics… The process measures the former, assuming it translates perfectly to the latter. It rarely does.

I am tired of hearing companies complain they can’t find talent. No, you can’t find talent that is simultaneously perfect for the role, willing to jump through 44 hoops, and currently underemployed enough to have the time for your unnecessary 10-hour assignment. You are designing a sieve that specifically filters out the most valuable employees-the ones who are currently too busy creating value to waste time on your four VPs.

So, we end where we started: the exhausted candidate, looking at the automated rejection, a single generic paragraph appearing after 8 interviews and 10 hours of free labor. The company has successfully mitigated risk-not the risk of a bad hire, but the risk of *blame*. They can point to the 8 steps and say, “We followed the process.” But the process failed to hire the best person, scared off the second best, and ultimately settled for someone who was merely available.

The True Question

When we design a system this draining, this disrespectful of time, are we truly testing for the potential of the future, or are we just punishing candidates for our own deep-seated organizational fear of being held accountable? That’s the question we should be asking ourselves on Day 4 of the recruitment process.