Time to hire

This piece from Emily Stewart lays out the trend of interviewing becoming a lengthy slog through multiple rounds of interviews and take-home assignments and tests. And look, I get it: hiring someone who doesn’t turn out to be right for the job is a costly and frustrating mistake, for both the manager and the worker. And we’re right to suspect that the traditional mode of interviewing is insufficient to create the perfect assurance that we’re making the right decision. But then, any process is insufficient for allaying all doubts—homework and panel interviews and tests might get us closer to really knowing how someone will perform once on the job, but nothing will get us all the way. My rubric has always been: ask yourself if someone with both a full-time job and caretaking responsibilities could reasonably complete your process without losing sleep. And if you’re the candidate, take note of how a prospective employer respects your time during the interview process; it’s a good tell for how they’ll respect it on the other side.