[jacurtis]

Yes these ideas are all certainly valid concepts about interviewing. But it would be nearly impossible to optimize for all of them.

Furthermore, some really are impossible. For example #2 is to schedule interviews in cohorts. I tried to follow this in my most recent job hunt and it is truly impossible. The problem is that some jobs I would go through a phone screen and hear back later that day or the next morning in order to schedule another interview. Some companies will wait a week to get back to you. Others are 3-4 days. As just one example, I interviewed with a large tech company and they were the first ones to actually offer me an initial interview. I went through 3 stages of interviews with them and had the 4th stage scheduled when I canceled because i had already received multiple job offers from other companies, which I had applied to several weeks after them.

In tech a lot of these are easier because you have a lot more power over the interview process if your job skill is one of the in-demand ones. In my interview process I really could bend most of the companies to meet my needs and to move faster than they planned for. But that is a fortunate position to be in. I am watching my sister go through job interviews right now for HR related jobs and the process is completely different. I was going through a 3-4 stage interview process in 1.5-2 weeks. My sister was waiting 2-3 weeks between individual interview stages. In my interviews I could tell people that I want to accept an offer in 2 weeks, so they need to speed up and they would do it for me. If my sister said that in her HR interviews, they would simply disqualify her.

So count your blessings if you are in tech. Sure, we get to complain about take-home interview projects and technical interviews. But we can get jobs within weeks (or even a week) that pay 2-4 times what other people are getting after months-long interview processes. So consider ourselves fortunate.

[cableshaft]

It really depends. I've seen things go pretty quick in other industries, like my wife, who works in marketing. At most she usually has a call, a psychological test of some sort, and a long onsite. She's also had some that were about as long as mine, but on average it's relatively short.

And she never has to grind or prepare beyond making sure her portfolio is ready. They don't ask her to prove her InDesign or Powerpoint or HTML or even tech skills (one job she had to lead a tech initiative to lead the department into evaluating and then switching to new proposal management software that was HTML template driven, and then basically be tech support for a bunch of salespeople that didn't want to invest the time to learn how to use it).

I'd rather go through her process than mine, quite frankly. Although she has found it more difficult than I have to find a company willing to pay her what she's making now, as her salary has gotten pretty high for her field, and she often has to sell them more on what she can bring to the table since she's had experience with so many large accounts in the past.

Meanwhile I could move to SV and double my salary easily, so I'm nowhere near the top, just the top of the ranges for all the recruiters in my region that contact me (I could probably find something in the area that's about $50k higher, I'm guessing, but no one is advertising it, most are advertising about $30k less than I'm making right now). And yet my process always seems to be long and painful.