Talent disconnect | From presentations to trial shifts, is your interview process too long?

Candidates tell stories online of how they were forced to undergo time-consuming, arduous interview processes, only to get rejected. Sometimes employers don’t even offer a rejected candidate feedback or a rejection email, despite having an interview process that requires a lot of preparation.

Some firms require candidates to undergo up to five or six interviews, meeting some interviewers more than once. With interviews themselves sometimes consisting of presentations, competency tests, tasks, and the more conventional Q&A section. There’s no hiding that candidates are spending more and more time preparing to impress recruiters.

To a small degree, this has shifted since the pandemic. As employment rose, a skills gap grew, and employers became desperate for talent amid the Great Resignation. Recruiters knew they needed to find a way to obtain talent quickly, and a lot of this manifested in shorter interview processes that focused on finding a cultural and personality fit, over everything else.

With the tides turning when it comes to the skills employers are looking for in their endeavour to find new talent, with many recruiters prioritising soft skills above anything else, what is reasonable to ask a candidate to do in preparation for a role they might not even get?