Nudging the heavy glass door of Conference Room 43, I felt that familiar, creeping numbness in my jaw-the physical residue of having smiled professionally for three hours straight. Inside, the candidate, let’s call him Marcus, was staring at a half-eaten granola bar like it held the secrets to the universe. This was his fifth interview of the day. My colleagues and I had already burned through 33 collective hours of productivity this week alone on this one role. We aren’t even going to hire him. I knew it the moment I walked in, not because of some brilliant intuitive flash, but because the three previous interviewers had already Slack-messaged me their doubts, yet here we were, performing the ritual anyway. It is a peculiar form of madness, this modern hiring loop, a series of disjointed, repetitive conversations that test a person’s ability to survive a marathon of interrogation rather than their ability to actually do the job.
I spent 53 minutes this morning updating the firmware on a diagnostic laser level I haven’t used in 2023 days. It was a pointless exercise, a reflexive need to ensure my tools were ‘current’ even if the task at hand didn’t require them. We do the same with hiring. We update the ‘loop,’ adding a culture fit round, a technical deep dive, a peer lunch, and an executive visionary session, believing that more layers equal more certainty. But more layers often just mean more noise. Marcus looked at me, his eyes glazed, and I realized I was about to ask it. I couldn’t stop myself. It’s the default setting for an exhausted brain.
“
‘So,’ I said, leaning back as if I were about to deliver a profound inquiry, ‘tell me about yourself.’
He sighed, a microscopic exhale that probably cost him 3 calories he didn’t have left, and launched into the same chronological biography he’d given to the recruiter, the hiring manager, the lead developer, and the product owner. By the time he reached his 2013 internship, I was already thinking about the 13 unread emails in my inbox. We call this a ‘rigorous evaluation process.’ In reality, it’s productivity theater. We feel like we’re being thorough because we’re being thorough with our time, but we’re actually just being wasteful with our attention. We’ve replaced actual assessment with a sequence of theatrical performances.
The Brutal Math of Consensus
The math is brutal. If 11 people spend 3 hours each on a candidate, that’s 33 hours. Multiply that by 3 candidates for a single role, and you’ve lost nearly 100 hours of high-value work time. For a startup, that’s a feature launch delayed.
Consider my friend Indigo N.S., a medical equipment installer who spends their days calibrating machines that cost more than my first three houses combined. When Indigo N.S. goes to a new site, they don’t sit the MRI machine down and ask it how it handles conflict with a CT scanner. They use specific, calibrated tools to measure output. They check if the bolts are torqued to exactly 83 foot-pounds. There is a binary reality to the work: it is either installed correctly or it is a liability. In the white-collar world, we’ve lost that tether to reality. We’ve decided that if we talk to someone for 3 hours, we’ll somehow catch the ‘vibe’ of their competence. But competence doesn’t have a vibe. Competence has a trail of evidence, and yet we rarely look at the trail; we only look at the person telling us about the trail.
“
I once watched a manager reject a candidate because they ‘seemed a bit low energy’ during the 163rd minute of their interview day.
– Internal Observation
Of course they were low energy! They had been performing a one-person show for four different audiences in a windowless room with nothing but a lukewarm cup of water for 3 hours. We treat candidates like they are infinite resources of charisma, forgetting that the context of an interview is entirely divorced from the context of the actual work. Unless the job is ‘Professional Interviewee,’ we are testing the wrong variables.
This is the hidden cost of the disjointed loop. We think we are getting 3 different perspectives, but we are usually just getting 3 versions of the same superficial impression. Because we don’t coordinate, we ask the same 3 questions. I’ve sat in those debrief rooms where we spend 43 minutes debating whether a candidate’s ‘communication style’ was too assertive or not assertive enough, while the actual technical requirements of the role were barely mentioned. The loop doesn’t eliminate bias; it just averages it out into a beige, safe hire who won’t rock the boat but might not actually move it either.
This is exactly why firms like
have gained so much ground lately; they actually understand that the ‘loop’ is often just a circle leading back to the same indecision we started with. They bypass the theater and focus on the alignment of skill and trajectory.
The Illusion of Philosophical Depth
Binary Reality: Level or Liability.
We get dizzy remembering the job description.
I remember an installation Indigo N.S. told me about. They were setting up a surgical lighting array. The hospital administrator wanted to ‘interview’ the installation team to ensure they had the right ‘philosophical approach’ to patient care. Indigo N.S. just held up a spirit level and pointed at the mounting bracket. The bracket was level or it wasn’t. The light would stay up or it would fall. There was no ‘philosophical approach’ that could compensate for a loose bolt. In our world, we’ve replaced the spirit level with a series of 3-way mirrors.
The Alternative: Paying for Insight
If we really wanted to hire well, we’d stop talking and start observing. We’d give them a real problem-not a ‘riddle’ about how many ping-pong balls fit in a Boeing 743-but a real, messy, internal problem that we actually haven’t solved yet. We’d pay them for 3 hours of their time to work alongside us.
(Worth 33 hours of exhaustion)
Yesterday, I saw a job posting that required 13 separate interview rounds including a ‘social dinner.’ I felt a physical pang of sympathy for the applicants. It’s a test of privilege, too-who has the 23 hours of free time to dedicate to a single company’s ego-driven hiring ritual?
The Illusion of Progress
I’m looking at my spectrum analyzer now. It’s fully updated. The screen is crisp, the battery is at 100%, and I have absolutely no intention of using it today. I just liked the feeling of the progress bar moving. That’s what our hiring loops are: a progress bar that makes us feel like we’re moving toward a ‘perfect’ hire while the seat remains empty and the team grows more resentful…
Hiring Loop Completion
73%
(The process is polished, the result is empty)
Indigo N.S. once said that the hardest part of the job isn’t the heavy lifting; it’s the recalibration after someone else has messed with the settings. When we put a candidate through a 33-hour meat grinder, we aren’t getting a ‘calibrated’ view of who they are. We are hiring the person who was best at pretending the meat grinder didn’t hurt. Then we wonder why, 3 months later, they seem like a completely different person than the one we met in the loop. They aren’t different. They’re just finally allowed to stop performing.
THE INTERVIEW IS A MASK
– The Work Is The Face
Perhaps the solution isn’t to add more rounds, but to subtract them. What if we only allowed 3 people to interview a candidate? What if those 3 people had to reach a decision in 103 minutes or the candidate was automatically hired? It sounds reckless, doesn’t it? But is it really more reckless than wasting 33 hours of executive time on a ‘maybe’ that eventually becomes a ‘no’ because of a lack of consensus? We’ve turned hiring into a defensive crouch.
I walked out of that room with Marcus and apologized. He laughed, a dry, papery sound, and said, ‘It’s okay. I’ve got the 2013 internship story down to a science now.’ He isn’t a software engineer anymore; he’s a storyteller who happens to know how to code. And we are a group of listeners who have forgotten how to hear the music because we’re too busy counting the beats. Does it really take 33 hours to see if a light is level?