[gdb]

That's what I said in the post :)! But we felt it was important and he was up for it.

More seriously, hiring an executive is very different from any other hire. You're fundamentally hiring someone who is going to be affecting the jobs of (at least) every single person in their organization (compensation, performance reviews, etc.), as well as shaping and evolving what your company even is.

Making everyone feel comfortable with a hire like that isn't easy, and doing so takes a lot of time. But we owe it to the people we've hired to be thorough (and conversely, we owe it to the executive to make sure we've set expectations as fully as is possible, and made sure that both of us have a picture of what we're getting into).

[highlander]

Hey, well it was obviously the right way for you all at the time. I was just surprised because I haven't seen execs interviewed that way, but my experience is heavily skewed towards very large companies. The more typical pattern I've seen has been (over a few weeks) an informal meeting, lunch/dinner then a few hours of in-house/panel interviews.