Weekly Column
Four Interview Rounds Isn't Thorough. It's Insecure.
Fortune 500 companies run multiple interview rounds for defensible reasons, especially for vaunted six- and seven-figure jobs. A structured panel, a skills assessment, a culture round with a different department, maybe a final conversation with a VP. Each round has a purpose. Each round exists because the company is hiring at scale, has legal exposure to manage, and has built a process that, in theory, reduces bias and bad hires across thousands of candidates a year.
Small companies have no such excuse. And yet, I've sat through and participated in the constipated process of multiple-round interviews at companies as small as 25 people, a peculiarity that seems to have cropped up in just the past decade or so. Here's how it actually worked. Round one: the head of HR. Round two: the president of the company. Round three: the help desk manager, who would actually be my boss. Round four, sometimes, just to make sure everyone felt heard: whoever else in leadership hadn't gotten their turn yet.
Nobody could tell you what each round was screening for. Nobody had a rubric. What they had was an org chart full of people who each wanted their own private audience with the candidate, because sitting in a room together felt "intimidating."
Three people in a room asking me questions has never intimidated me. And okay, maybe it's not about me. But why even entertain the idea of a candidate who can't handle an interview that's the equivalent of a cocktail party? What's actually happening is not concern for the candidate's comfort. It's insecurity dressed up as consideration. Nobody in the chain wants to admit that an interview for a position like this needs only two interviews, max: a technical interview and an interpersonal interview. If done with any brains at all, two members of leadership could accomplish this in one interview. So the "we didn't want to overwhelm you" line is a courtesy story.
There's a cost to this beyond wasted candidate time. Multi-round processes at small companies signal something about the org itself: a flat structure that behaves like it has five layers of management, a leadership team that hasn't figured out who actually owns the hiring decision, and a culture where consensus is more valued than a clear call. In MSP work specifically, where speed and decisiveness under pressure are the job, that tells you something about how incidents get handled once you're inside. If it takes four people and four separate calendar invites to hire a technician, imagine how many people have to weigh in before a critical patch gets approved.
Contrast that with a well run panel interview at a much larger company. Three or four people in the room together, same hour, same questions, immediate cross talk about the candidate's answers. It's more efficient for everyone's calendar, and it's honestly a better signal for the candidate too. You get to watch how the team interacts, whether they defer to one person, whether they push back on each other. That tells you more about the culture in forty five minutes than four separate one-on-ones ever will.
If you're a candidate sitting through round three at a company with fewer than fifty employees, pay attention to what that process is actually telling you. It's not that they're being thorough. It's that nobody there is comfortable making a call in front of their peers, and that discomfort didn't start with your interview.
Daniel