Now, the cursor is blinking. It’s been 9 seconds, which in Zoom-time is roughly the length of a minor ice age. I am staring at the reflection of my own tired eyes in the webcam, waiting for ‘Director of Talent Synergy’ number three to join the call. This is the beginning of the 9th round of interviews for a position that, on paper, is responsible for managing spreadsheets and ensuring the project management software doesn’t implode. I recently spent 49 minutes reading through my old text messages from 2019, back when I thought a three-round interview was an insult to my time. How naive that version of me was. Back then, the world felt like it moved with a certain purpose, whereas now, we seem to be trapped in a perpetual loop of ‘just one more conversation’ to mitigate the terrifying risk of actually making a decision.

Round one was a 49-minute phone screen that felt like a psychological interrogation disguised as a vibe check. Round two was a video interview with a recruiter who seemed to be reading from a script written by a particularly uninspired algorithm. Round three was the technical assessment-a 9-hour marathon of uncompensated labor where I rebuilt their entire workflow in a software suite I had only heard of 19 days prior. Round four involved ‘meeting the team,’ which turned out to be 9 different people in 29-minute increments, each asking the exact same question about my ‘greatest weakness’ as if they were looking for a secret password to a club I wasn’t sure I even wanted to join. Round five was a presentation to leadership, and Round six was the ‘culture fit’ interview, which is usually corporate code for ‘do we want to drink expensive coffee with you?’ Yet, here I am, 89 days into the process, and the job posting is still flickering on the board like a neon sign in a ghost town.

We have collectively decided that rigor is synonymous with volume. If we ask enough questions, if we involve enough stakeholders, if we stretch the process across enough fiscal quarters, then the decision will somehow make itself. It is an elaborate ritual designed to avoid the one thing corporate structures fear most: individual accountability. If the new hire doesn’t work out after 19 rounds of vetting, nobody is to blame. The ‘process’ failed, not the person. It’s a beautifully expensive way to be wrong. They’ve likely spent $49,999 in internal hourly rates just to decide if I’m worth a $54,999 salary. The math doesn’t just not add up; it actively subtracts from the sanity of everyone involved.

I catch myself criticizing this madness while simultaneously checking my LinkedIn notifications every 9 minutes. It’s a contradiction I haven’t quite reconciled. I hate the game, but I’ve spent the last 19 years learning exactly how to play it. I once told myself I’d never be the person who tolerates a 9-round interview process, yet here I am, adjusting my ring light and making sure there are no stray socks in the background of my home office. It’s the same way I used to treat my health-complaining about the stress while reaching for the very things that exacerbated it. Sometimes, you realize that the ritual itself is the addiction. We become addicted to the struggle of the climb, even if the mountain is just a pile of corporate paperwork.

A Different Kind of Rigor

I was talking to Laura E. about this last week. She’s a wind turbine technician who spends her days 289 feet in the air, dangling from a harness while the wind whips around her at 39 miles per hour. Her hiring process was remarkably different. They checked her certifications, made sure she wasn’t afraid of the heights, and put her to work. There is a brutal honesty in manual labor that corporate environments have scrubbed away with layers of middle management. Up there, on the turbine, if you don’t know what you’re doing, the consequences are immediate and physical. In an office, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can usually hide it for at least 499 days by using phrases like ‘strategic alignment’ and ‘circling back.’ Laura E. told me that the most dangerous part of her job isn’t the fall; it’s the complacency that comes after doing the same safety check 109 times.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being ‘on’ for three months straight. You start to lose the edges of your own personality. You become a polished, sanded-down version of a human being, designed to fit into the specific negative space that the company has carved out. It’s a habit-forming cycle of performance. We replace our genuine reactions with calculated ones, much like how we replace old, damaging habits with new, intentional ones to find a sense of peace. For instance, instead of reaching for another cup of bitter office coffee or a cigarette to deal with the pre-interview jitters, some people find that a Calm Puffs provides that necessary pause, a thoughtful replacement for the oral fixation of stress without the toxic baggage. It’s about finding a way to breathe through the absurdity without letting it stain your lungs or your spirit.

I’m not saying that hiring should be a coin toss. But there is a point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in and starts beating you over the head with a clipboard. After the third interview, you aren’t learning anything new about the candidate; you’re just testing their ability to maintain a facade. You’re filtering for people who have the financial stability to wait 89 days for a paycheck, which automatically excludes some of the most hungry and capable talent in the market. It’s a filter for privilege disguised as a filter for excellence. We’ve confused the ability to survive a marathon of bureaucracy with the ability to do the job.

The Fear of Bad Hires

I once made a mistake in a previous role where I hired someone after a single 29-minute conversation. It was a disaster. He ended up deleting a database on his 9th day because he thought ‘truncate’ meant ‘optimize.’ I felt like a failure. That mistake is probably why I tolerate these 9-round gauntlets now. I’m afraid of my own judgment. We all are. That’s why we invite 9 people to the ‘meet the team’ session. We want to spread the potential guilt of a bad hire so thin that nobody actually feels the weight of it. It’s collective cowardice masquerading as ‘collaborative decision-making.’

If we spent half as much time onboarding and training people as we do interviewing them, we wouldn’t need 9 rounds. We treat the hiring process like it’s the finish line, but it’s actually just the starting blocks. Most companies are so exhausted by the time they actually hire someone that they just throw the new recruit into the deep end and hope they don’t drown in the first 19 days. It’s a bizarre way to run a business. We spend $49,999 to find the ‘perfect’ person, then give them a broken laptop and a 10-page PDF from 2009 and expect them to change the world.

The View from Above

Laura E. says that when she’s up on the turbine, she can see for 29 miles in every direction. She sees the curvature of the earth and the way the clouds shadow the farmland. From that height, the corporate towers in the distance look like tiny gray teeth. They look insignificant. I think about that when the recruiter asks me where I see myself in 9 years. I want to say that I see myself 289 feet in the air, away from the spreadsheets and the culture fit interviews and the project management software that requires a 4-hour tutorial just to log a task. But instead, I smile. I use my ‘professional voice.’ I tell them that I am deeply passionate about their mission to ‘disrupt the space’-a space that is already so disrupted it’s basically just a collection of floating debris.

I wonder if the recruiter knows I’m lying. I wonder if they’re lying too. Is this just a 9-round game of poker where nobody actually has any cards, and we’re all just betting with imaginary chips? Maybe the $49,999 they spent on this process was just the price of admission to a theater where we all pretend to be more certain than we are. We are all just terrified children in blazers, hoping that if we follow the ritual closely enough, the monsters of uncertainty will stay under the bed.

When this call finally ends-likely at the 59-minute mark-I will close my laptop and sit in the silence of my room. I will think about the 9 other candidates who are probably doing the exact same thing. I will think about the absurdity of a world that requires 89 days of vetting for a job that could be explained in 19 minutes. And then, I’ll probably wait for the email that tells me they’ve decided to ‘move in a different direction,’ which is just the final ritual in a long line of hollow ceremonies.

Does the rigor of the hunt justify the smallness of the prize?