Dan Mall’s Post

Seven interviews? My sympathies for your friend; that number is both absurd and inefficient. Money should be paid to all candidates that pass through the second-round interview. All interviews after the second one should pay increasingly higher amounts to candidates after that point 💰 Companies must learn that there is a price to pay for wasting candidates' time, energy, and trust that they may have initially had in the business and their hiring process. While I'm certain companies would find the loopholes if they put their mind to it, putting laws in place to make payments to candidates for interviewing 2+ times mandatory might protect candidates from that kind of abuse and ensure they find the companies that are serious about hiring them more quickly 😊

I’ve seen worse, unfortunately. I’ve had as many as a dozen with no job offer 🤦♂️ . I vowed to never do that to a candidate.

Rejection after 10 rounds is my personal record. The only feedback I received is that ONE member of the 7-person hiring team “didn’t quite agree” with an approach I took during a case study presentation. That presentation was the 4th round.

Thanks for raising awareness to this. I try to be *so* mindful of the psychological and time burden associated with so many rounds. I try to place a strict time limit on any sort of challenge or exercises, and I try to be as communicative as possible where we are in the process. It takes a ton of work to do it well, so I understand why people drop the ball; but if you're going to hire, I think there is some burden on orgs to conduct themselves well.

My most so far has been 9 rounds. Including a panel presentation. For which I created around a 30 slide design presentation prototype in Figma. 10 total meetings and an entire month to get to a no. 😐

This is why im done with animation for a while, the industry is stinky garbage now. Im gonna wait a year or so and see where its at, Trying to make any headway right now is a waste of time.

I had this exact scenario happen to me as well Dan. I think the most frustrating thing is the lack of any tangible feedback about your performance or their ability to assess your abilities well from the company(s) that do this. Most of the time you’re ghosted and at best you’re lucky to be given the corporate friendly phrase, “we chose to go with other candidates that were better suited for the role”.

I wouldn't do any more than three interviews before withdrawing my candidacy

My record: nine rounds with 12 people over a month. I was a contractor applying for an FTE position doing the same work. I was scheduled for PTO after the interviews were done so I made sure to send individualized thank you notes to EVERY person I spoke with. The day before I my flight, the hiring manager posted the job on LinkedIn, and when I returned, the job was never mentioned again. I believe the role was eventually eliminated, but can’t be certain because I was offered a role in another org and I left. Still amazes me that I was ghosted internally.

Depending on the role and the org I’m not surprised. It’s clearly highlighting that organizations see design as a service function to all of these steakholders. Design is reporting to and being vetted by functions that are new to the role and responsibilities so they take a committee approach and end up hiring for culture fit without clearly defined expectations. This often leads to “yes men” and people trying to get a long over pushing for impact/consumer value. Its in some ways good because these growing pains of bringing design to the table is at least happening at a lot of firms.