The candidate, a product manager with 10 years of experience who is now employed and actively seeking other interest, accepted a new offer during the third week of waiting following her fifth interview at a prominent financial services firm in Chicago. After the fourth round, the company she rejected informed her that she was one of two finalists. When the rival offer came in, she was still awaiting word on the fifth.
She had already given notice at her current job when the recruiter from the first company eventually sent a scheduling request for what was described as a “final conversation with the business unit head.” for an alternative employer. A company that had completed the full process in eleven days defeated the firm’s top contender. This is not a unique tale. Over the past few years, it has become nearly commonplace.
From the first interview to the offer, the typical corporate hiring procedure in the US now takes about 44 days. Before competing offers come in, high-demand candidates—the individuals who the majority of businesses claim to be looking to hire—usually stay accessible for ten days.
Because scheduling between four available stakeholders in a large organization is genuinely difficult, HR departments continue to add interview rounds, require take-home projects, and allow weeks to pass between conversations. This mismatch between those two numbers is the fundamental structural problem of modern hiring. The challenge is genuine. The candidate leaving is the price of that challenge.
Although it has been silently growing for more than ten years, the proliferation of interview rounds is a relatively new phenomena. Between 2010 and 2024, the average number of rounds at large employers nearly doubled, and top engineering positions at some tech organizations now sometimes require six to eight distinct conversations. When you take into account that the marginal signal from interviews five through eight is usually low and that each additional round is another chance for a candidate to receive and accept a competing offer before yours arrives, the stated justification—consensus-building, lowering hiring risk, and ensuring cultural fit—seems reasonable.
This expansion is driven by a committee-based sign-off process that is not primarily used as an assessment tool. It is a risk-distribution mechanism that makes it impossible for one individual to be held responsible for a hiring choice that may turn out to be incorrect. It feels like a grind to the candidate. It is perceived by the business as due diligence. Both of these descriptions are true.
The most common reason given by candidates for dropping out is the communication silence that typically accompanies lengthy processes. According to SHRM data, over 58% of mid-process dropouts credit their decision mostly to prolonged quiet or a lack of status updates; this is not the length of the process per se, but rather the lack of any indication of what’s going on during that time.
A candidate who sent a follow-up email eight days ago and hasn’t heard back is in a different psychological situation than one who knows they are in week three of a five-week process since someone informed them that at the beginning. Giving the information is not hard. It seems that the dedication to delivering it is less common than it ought to be.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the businesses who are most obviously having trouble with this issue are also the ones that are most obviously complaining about a lack of talent. There is talent. Before they have had a chance to fully assess it, it is departing their employment pipelines. The solution is not very enigmatic: limit the number of rounds, combine evaluations into concentrated sessions, make timescales apparent from the outset, and handle a take-home project as something that needs to be paid for or given a truly respectful scope.
Some businesses have taken this action; Shopify and Stripe, for example, have both openly discussed shorter hiring periods and increased first-choice hiring rates. Knowing what works is not the constraint. The organizational will is what overrides the committee’s sense that greater scrutiny is always safer, even if it means the hire will cost more.
