Many job seekers are forced to go through too many rounds of job interviews where they are, moreover, asked the same questions all over again without the company informing them about the result and whether they succeeded. John Sullivan, respected HR consultant and current professor of management at San Francisco State University, aptly named this frustrating experience in his recent article on ERE.net. He calls it the "death by interview." He also answers the question of how companies can prevent the deadly experience of applicants with job interviews.
Too many interviews
There are companies forcing applicants to pass more than ten interviews, e.g. Google. The reason is they want the applicants to pass an interview with the greatest possible number of people they will come in contact with in the new job. They also certainly want to examine the applicants and so the interviews can take several hours. According to John Sullivan, a candidate should go through no more than three interviews. A higher number of interviews causes unnecessary stress, forces candidates to lie more and costs the company money in connection with the loss of time of the emyployees who are preparing and conducting the interviews. Moreover, it also damages the company's reputation when frustrated applicants express their complaints on social networks.
Repeated questions
The situations when different interviewers ask repeatedly about the same things are another reason of applicants' frustration. The need to answer the same questions every time not only annoys them, but also supports their belief that the company is unable to manage effectively. The feeling that their first answers did not correspond with the employer's expectation can also arouse in them together with the need to change their original answers. How, then, can the company decide who to hire? Only a structured approach to interviews and coordination of the individual activities can help to avoid this dilemma. Human resources together with managers should create questions and assign each involved manager as specific questions as possible according to their field of expertise. HR should also control whether these questions are really asked.
Uncertainty of the result
The higher number of interviews an applicant passes, the greater the uncertainty that the interviewers will not inform him about the results. It is very frustrating to go to new interviews without knowing what to focus on. This often forces especially young people who require accurate information to leave the recruitment process prematurely. Companies make mistakes especially in following the principle of promise nothing that they can't be accused of failures to comply with their promises. Human resources should not try to justify the lack of feedback to candidates by their fear of conflicts or even legal problems.
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