Some years ago I was going through an interview process for a senior executive role. By the time I reached what I thought was the final stage, I had sat through 12 separate interviews. I was then told that I was the preferred candidate, but that two more interviews were required before a decision could be made.

I politely declined. I explained that if, after 12 interviews, the company still wasn't clear on the value I could bring them, I doubted two more conversations would get them there.

At the time it felt like a bold move. Looking back, I realise I was doing something every good salesperson is trained to do. I was qualifying out a deal that had no clear decision-maker and no end in sight.

The deal you would never let your team chase

Imagine one of your sales reps came to you with this opportunity. The prospect has asked for 12 meetings with 12 different stakeholders. They want a three year strategy for their business, built without access to their data, before they decide whether to buy. Nobody can tell you who signs off, and every time you think you've reached the end of their evaluation process, another meeting appears.

You would tell that rep to walk away. You would call it a poorly qualified deal, and you would most likely be right.

Yet many sales leaders who would never tolerate this in their sales practices run hiring processes that look exactly like it. In my coaching work I hear these stories constantly, and they reveal a double standard that the sales profession rarely acknowledges. We expect discipline, clarity and respect for time from our buyers, but we don't always offer the same to the people we're trying to hire.

When consensus becomes cover

Long interview processes are usually explained as a desire for consensus. Every stakeholder wants a say, and each extra interview feels like a sensible precaution. I think the honest explanation is less comfortable. Adding interviews is a way of spreading accountability. If twelve people approved a hire, no single person owns the decision if it goes wrong. Another interview rarely makes the decision better, but it does make it safer for the people making it, and the candidate pays for that safety with their time.

One leader I coached went through 12 interviews for a single role. The final stage was an eight-hour, almost non-stop round of interviews at the company's headquarters in San Francisco, scheduled for the same day she landed from Singapore on a red eye flight. By the end, she wasn't being assessed on her capability or experience. Instead she was being tested on her stamina and her ability to perform without sleep, neither of which had much to do with the job.

What's clear is that he evidence doesn't support this approach. Google once put candidates through as many as 12 interviews before its People Analytics team reviewed five years of interview data and feedback to work out how many interviews were actually needed. They found four interviews were enough to predict a hire with 86% reliability, and that each interview after the fourth improved accuracy by less than one percent. If one of the most data-driven companies in the world concluded that four is enough, it's hard to argue that twelve makes a decision better. It mainly makes it slower.

The longer the process, the weaker the shortlist

There's a cost to long processes that most hiring leaders never see, because it shows up in the candidates who simply aren't there at the end.

The people most likely to drop out of a 12 interview process are the ones with the most job options. They are performing well in their current roles, they often have other conversations underway, and they don't need to put up with a process that doesn't respect their time. The candidates still standing at the end are frequently the ones with the fewest job alternatives.

In other words, the longer and more demanding the process, the more likely a company is to hire the most available candidate rather than the best one. Leaders tell themselves that a rigorous process protects them from a bad hire, when in practice it may be steadily filtering out the people they most wanted to attract.

Free consulting, dressed up as assessment

The second trend that concerns me is the growing expectation that candidates produce substantial work as part of the process.

A former colleague was asked to prepare a three year strategic plan for the business, including an assessment of a range of strategic options. That is the kind of work a company would normally pay a management consultant to do, and the consultant would have full access to the company's data, people and customers. My colleague had none of that. Another colleague went through several rounds of scenarios that, taken together, amounted to designing a custom product management methodology incorporating multiple rounds of customer input.

I understand the intent. Companies want to see how someone thinks. But there is a difference between assessing a candidate's thinking and extracting free consulting from them. If the brief would take a professional weeks and a budget to complete properly, it has crossed that line. It also rarely produces a fair assessment, because candidates have to fill the gaps in their knowledge with assumptions, and the best connected candidate often wins rather than the best one.

The 90 day plan everyone writes

Then there is the 90 day plan. Almost every senior candidate I work with is asked for one, and almost every plan says the same thing. The first 30 days are spent listening and asking lots of questions. The next 30 days are about socialising potential changes. The final 30 days are when change starts to be driven.

The framework is sensible, but because everyone uses it, the exercise does little to separate one candidate from another. More revealing is what the request says about the company. In many cases, the hiring manager asking for a 90 day plan hasn't clearly defined what success looks like at 90 days themselves.

A better approach is to turn the exercise around. The hiring manager presents their own view of the first 90 days, including the problems they expect the new leader to tackle, and asks the finalist to challenge it. What would they change, what have they seen go wrong in similar situations, and what's missing? That tests judgement, experience and honesty using real information, rather than testing who can produce the neatest slide.

What good looks like

None of this means senior hiring should be casual. The roles matter, and a bad hire is expensive. But rigour and length are not the same thing, and some companies show a better way.

1. The first change is to run fewer, shorter and more focused interviews. Google's Rule of Four caps most candidates at four interviews of 45 to 60 minutes, with each interviewer scoring against the same rubric while covering a distinct area. Capping the loop cut Google's time-to-hire to about 45 days from closer to six months. The principle is simple - every interview should have a clear purpose that no other interview covers.

2. The second change is to focus on what someone has done, not what they say they will do. A 2022 re-examination of decades of hiring research by Sackett and colleagues found structured interviews to be the strongest predictor of job performance, ahead of work sample tests and cognitive ability tests, and well ahead of unstructured interviews. For a sales leader, that means asking them to present how they turned around an underperforming team, rebuilt a forecasting process or opened a new market, and then probing the detail. A track record examined properly tells you far more than a hypothetical plan for a business the candidate doesn't yet understand.

3. The third change is to pay for real work if you want it. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, asks qualified candidates to complete a paid project of five to 40 hours using real work, specifically to assess mutual fit. You don't need to copy that model to adopt the principle. If an exercise is valuable enough to shape your strategy, it is valuable enough to compensate.

4. The fourth change is to be clear about the process from the start and then stick to it. Tell candidates how many stages there are, who they will meet, what each conversation is for, and who makes the final decision. Adding two interviews at the end of a 12-interview process doesn't signal rigour. It signals that nobody owns the decision.

The question every hiring leader should ask

Every interview process tells a candidate something about the company they are considering joining. A long, consensus driven process says decisions are slow and accountability is shared so thinly that nobody really holds it. Unpaid strategy work says the company is comfortable taking value without giving it back. The strongest candidates notice these signals, and many of them quietly leave before the process ends.

So if you are hiring right now, here is a question worth sitting with. If your best candidate treated your hiring process the way you train your reps to treat a poorly qualified deal, would they still be in it?

P.S. I work with sales leaders on both sides of this, helping candidates navigate demanding interview processes and helping leaders build hiring approaches that attract the people they actually want. If either is on your mind right now, my DMs are open.