Hiring is the most important thing you are doing in a company. Always has been. From my experience it's also highly dependent on how big the org is and how structured it is. No two hiring processes are alike. Common theme I've picked up when hiring people is first and foremost to do a 'vibe check' convo through which both you and the applicant get to know a bit each other, ambitions, learn about the role and do a q&a. If you have experience with this, and you know your team(s), you will easily pick up if the person fits the bill. That usually takes around an hour to two _at most_. Second part is then for the person to talk to the team itself, the team lead. Over time, I found it's best to do a live exercise of either walking through something or doing something (not leet code, just something representative as a mental exercise) while chit chatting about it which is also a covert vibe check. If that passes, third convo is back to the same person initially talked to to strike a deal (which was foreshadowed with terms on the first talk). All in all 3-4 hours total after years of pruning.
Personally - vibe check, vibe check, vibe check. Never let HR do the talk, let HR funnel candidates for a shopping list.. or in this case it seems to be essays that do that.
Suppose you get interviews on 10% of those. That’s 10 interview pipelines, and if every company had this policy, 90 unpaid interviewing hours.
Like the comment elsewhere in this thread, candidates will find other roles before your interview gauntlet concludes.
Spotted your first problem. Don't shotgun apply to anyone and everyone. You should only be applying to jobs you actually want.
I've always preferred this kind of targeted application -- I've applied to 5 jobs total in my ~15 year career and gotten 4 offers, two of which I accepted. Everyone has their own objectives they optimize for -- personally, I care most about building monuments of lasting value.
When a company says they have 9 hours of interview time, that’s usually the maximum time if you make it through all the rounds. If you get that far, you’re highly likely to get an offer.
You would also be surprised at how many people will actually do 10-20 long interview rounds to try to maximize their chances for the best job.
There are almost two different bubbles of candidates: Those who refuse to do anything more than a couple quick calls, and those who will rearrange their life to spend days putting in work for each job they want. I think that’s fine and everyone should do what works for them, but if you think 9 hours of interviewing is going to turn candidates away from a company like Oxide you’d be very surprised to see the quantity and caliber of applicants who line up for jobs like this.
I think you also might need to adjust your expectations now that AI interview cheating is getting out of control. A lot of companies are moving back to on-site interviews. I’d happily do 3 x 3 hour video calls more than flying and staying at hotels and renting cars to get to an office in another city just to interview.
I'm on the market right now due to a layoff and I have an agent that reviews linkedin every morning and cross references levels.fyi for role leveling and salary and then assess fit to my resume. I get around 5-10 _possible_ positions per day and with human judgement that's usually down to 0-2, averaging about 0.5 per day.
I hear back from probably close to 10% but that's with a highly targeted approach, not just spamming my resume everywhere. And my pipeline is freaking full. It's a full time job doing prep and participating in all the interviews.
The only interview so far that's been a huge time sink has been anthropic's. But that's because I chose it. Their take home I have the option to use between 2 and 8 hours and I used the full 8 hours because I'm highly motivated and the position is well fit to my career history.
If X and Y are large enough sure. Most of the time X is hidden and Y is hard to gauge.