Modern Day Job Interviews & Application Processes

Depends totally on the organisation.

I've heard of some crazy ones eg a friend had five interviews (which he had to travel up from Limerick for, at his own cost) for a fairly low level support job. If it was me, I'd have told them where to go after the 3rd.

Whereas for my current gig, I had 1 interview with the senior manager.

All I can remember is trawling through job adverts (which were few and far between) and applying for perhaps five or six a month, of which I might get two acknowledgements. If you got any interviews you'd only hear back from less than half of them. The usual was aptitude tests followed by up to two rounds of interviews. I was applying for everything from merchant navy to civil service to accountancy firms, semi states and local factories. 18 months before getting a job I then spent 35 years at and loved every minute of it. But at one point it seems like a never ending hopeless cause. This was in the late 70s.

I was doing multi round interviews back in the early 2000s for finance Jobs. All sorts of aptitude tests, phone interviews, assessment centres, group presentations, all sorts of crap. Being told you got into the final 6 people out of 800 applications and still not getting a job.

3 is the most I've had, and 4 really should be the most. Like even for a larger organisation, it's generally been preliminary interview to get to know you, proper interview and aptitude test, and then a meeting a senior manager/head of in team you're joining. There's no real need for more than that.

In my own experience and locality, there were more jobs to apply for 15-20 years ago with a less arduous application process. Typically, I would've applied with a bare CV and a cover letter, usually from an ad in the local paper, got an interview with the manager and/or senior staff member and heard back pretty soon. Now it's all online, with a couple of rounds of interviews, use of the STAR method and placed on a panel from which I've rarely been called. I recently had two County Council interviews for separate roles. One of them was like speed dating with hypothetical "What would you do if...?" questions instead of asking about my experience. I've noticed that things have also changed in terms of work that would've been almost 'easy' to get years ago but not so much now. Years ago I walked in to my local pharmacy and asked for work which I got there and then. To get the same job now, I was told I'd need at least a pharmacy assistant certificate. Even a retail job in the local fruit and veg shop had a lot of applicants and was filled in a day.

It's hard to give a like-for-like comparison. As said above, there was a time that you could approach a business looking for work and end up being told to stand behind the counter there and then for a half-day's trial. But the further you go back, the more it depended on who you were and who you knew. In the 1980s, a clean cut young man could say he was looking for work and after a short chat, he'd be invited in. A woman or a guy who sounded like he was from the flats would told a flat out "no thanks" and be sent on their way without an interview.

There is a much greater level playing field these days, which has given rise to a much more sanitised and formal interview process. Which has its pros and cons.

There is also a lot of variance in how companies do their interview processes, because it turns out that in spite of decades of research and analysis, we still have no real way of knowing how to select the best people from a panel of otherwise unproven/anonymous candidates. This is why you get "trends" in interview processes, like lateral thinking questions, 2-day onsite interviews, and whatnot. Because someone decides they've cracked the interview problem, implements a far-out solution, and then everyone else copies it.

Microsoft championed the "lateral thinking" interview in the 1990s ("How could calculate how many elephants could fit in Croke Park"), abandoned it not long after, but companies still persisted with it for a decade after. Likewise, in the late 2000s a big song and dance was made about Google with their 20-step interview process, as well as flying candidates from everywhere in the world to San Francisco for an intensive on-site interview. And all of the other big tech companies followed suit, and kept doing so up well up to the end of the last decade, even though Google had abandoned it after 3-4 years because it wasn't any better at selecting candidates than a standard interview. Smaller companies without huge budgets still stuck with having an insane number of interviews, and some still do.

The modern workflow now is a phone screen to make sure you're not a weirdo and not completely lying on your CV, if it's a technical position there may be a technical test or technical interview to validate your knowledge, followed by a final main interview to shake you down properly and see if you get on with the general culture of the company.

Thinking of my own company now and our process, there's a lot of focus on not hiring the wrong person, to the detriment of all the right people applying. I honestly think it's the right approach. It's difficult to remove people who are not a good fit, even with probation periods, and HR is so averse to any form of confrontation.

We have:

1. HR interview. Make sure you're some way sane and presentable.
2. Manager/Tech interview: Make sure you're not lying on your CV and have some technical knowledge and would be a good fit with the team.
3. Personality test: This is mandatory and company policy.
4. Tech interview: Series of questions, half based on the candidates CV, half standard tech questions to see how deep their knowledge fo
5. Team lead interview: You have the job if you get this far, it's just a meet and greet ahead of job offer.

That's a very interesting point. I always thought it was said that it's always easier to get another job when you are already in employment.