Downward Angle Icon An icon shaped like an angle pointing downward. Some job seekers have to endure round after round of interviews. Joe Raedle//JOBs Apply News/Getty Images
- Octavius A. Newman endured a dozen interviews for a creative leadership position and didn’t get the job.
- Job seekers may face longer searches as fewer people change jobs.
- Most hires could be made in three or four interviews, the CEO of a staffing firm told Business Insider.
For Octavius A. Newman, a series of interviews for the same job had begun to resemble a video game.
“I kept climbing, step by step, until I reached another person,” he said.
In the end, Newman made it to level 12, but there was no confrontation with the final boss.
An email from the company’s recruiter revealed that the 12 interviews, both virtual and in-person, had yielded no results. Then, when Newman asked for comment, the answer to why the company had chosen another candidate stung.
“His response was, ‘Nothing in particular. We just decided to go with someone else,'” she said.
Newman, 41, told Business Insider that his experience trying to land a job as a creative director for a social media team in his hometown of Philadelphia was the most exasperating of his career. While the number of interviews can be extreme, even in a job market where power is shifting back to the boss, Newman isn’t alone in feeling fed up with some employers’ go-slow attitude.
After several years in which hiring managers often focused simply on filling vacancies, the return to a more normal U.S. labor market has proven painful for job seekers like Newman.
Employers may be tempted to take their time because of a combination of factors: More workers are staying put, which may reduce the number of positions that need to be filled. Also, over-hiring from a couple of years ago and concerns about amorphous qualities like “cultural fit” may make employers reluctant to make a bad decision.
Octavio A. Newman. Allen Johnson
All of this means that the job market that returns to normal in 2024 could turn out to be pretty dismal for those looking for a partner, like going from speed dating to Victorian courtship.
In fact, job hunting is taking longer than it did several years ago. In 2023, the time it took to find workers was 44.5 days, compared with 40 in 2019, according to the most recent figures from human resources data firm Josh Bersin Research.
It’s no wonder that many job seekers are dissatisfied. Indeed Survey Of the 2,000 Gen Zers set to be released in 2023, half of respondents said they would not apply for a job that required three separate interviews.
However, it’s often difficult to predict how an interview process will play out. In Newman’s experience, that was the case: He always expected the handshakes to end, but then learned there was someone else to meet with.
Newman said it would be best for applicants to have a rough idea of how many steps they would likely have to go through in a hiring process. She compared it to showing up at a crowded restaurant and deciding whether it’s worth waiting to get a seat.
“You can say, ‘Oh, no. I’m not going to wait an hour for French toast,'” she said.
Job seekers are “not looking for marriage”
J. Raymond Kilgore is an IT project manager near Chandler, Arizona, who has been looking for work for about two years after being sidelined by a medical issue. He told BI that he has done mostly contract work for more than a decade. But now, even the interview process to get something like a six-month position has proven difficult, Kilgore said.
When you are able to get interviews, these can span multiple rounds, even if the jobs are short-term roles.
“You’re not looking for marriage,” said Kilgore, 68.
He suspects one reason there are so many steps in the process, even for a temporary job, is because some people involved in hiring aren’t necessarily authorized to make an offer.
“The people in the trenches no longer have the authority to make those kinds of decisions. You still have to have interviews at the higher levels,” Kilgore said.
He said he would understand a longer process if the contracted position was one that could become a permanent hire, something Kilgore refers to as “try before you buy.”
Social media posts offer their own takes on the bloat of the interviews. A Reddit user wrote Years ago, hiring might have been completed in a matter of weeks and involved one or two in-person interviews.
“There is now an assessment or several assessments, a self-conducted video interview where you talk to a robot via webcam, then a phone screening interview, then some sort of in-person interview, and then an interview where you meet senior management,” the person wrote. Then, if applicants are lucky, they will hear back within a month or two, the writer lamented.
Even when it works for job seekers, it’s often not easy. In a recent post on Blind, one user wrote about what it took to get a job. I work at Nvidia“I studied a lot. The interview preparation consisted of a 35-page document with my own notes. This was my 94th attempt (93 previous applications, all rejected),” the worker wrote.
The sweet spot for a job is 3 or 4 interviews.
According to Jennifer Schielke, CEO of staffing firm Summit Group Solutions and author of “Leading for Impact,” employers’ slow approach isn’t always helpful.
Schielke advises his clients to be ready to hire when posting a job description. Schielke told BI that due to layoffs and long job search periods, some job seekers have lost a sense of security.
“Their trust has been taken away, so that is also a problem. If you delay, you may lose the person you really want,” she told BI.
Schielke said that for her, the sweet spot is three, maybe four, interviews. She said some hiring managers might have been chastened by the hot post-pandemic years, when attracting workers was difficult and employees had plenty of opportunities to hand in their resignation letters. That made some employers cautious about hiring.
“Cultural fit is important, now more than ever, for these companies because they want people who will stay and not leave,” Schielke said.
But some of the things he has seen appear to be overcorrection. Schielke recounted an interview he participated in that included the candidate and then 15 people on the other side. It was too many, Schielke said, making it difficult to ask the candidate in-depth questions.
“If you have your mission, your values and your vision, and you really live them, it shouldn’t be that difficult,” he said.
Schielke said that if it takes many months to hire someone, perhaps that position isn’t needed in the first place.
He added that some job seekers need to reset their expectations after several years of making decisions themselves.
In addition to round after round of interviews, there are other obstacles job seekers can face. They may encounter fake job ads or recruiters who ignore candidates even after a screening interview — something Kilgore, the IT project manager, said has happened to him about a half-dozen times.
For Newman in Philadelphia, he said he has no choice but to move on and keep looking for his next job even after going through a dozen interviews on his last attempt.
“You start counting time. You start counting the months that have passed in interviews and the things you didn’t do because you did this instead,” he said. “You’re left there thinking, ‘Why did I do that? What did I do it for?'”
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