‘Congratulations! We’re delighted to inform you that you’ve made it through to the fifth stage.’ At this point, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I’d done the HR screening call; completed the written task; got through the first-stage interview and then repeated myself in the second. So what, exactly, was left? A PowerPoint presentation? A half-marathon? Solving a Rubik’s cube underwater?
Experiences like this became a common feature of my life after I was made redundant from my job at a technology magazine in 2024. While I was fortunate enough to secure regular freelance and contract work, the lack of a fixed salary quickly created friction elsewhere. Mortgage lenders, for instance, tend to view freelance income with the same suspicion a nightclub bouncer might have for a teenager’s driving licence. Nor did I have paid holiday or sick leave.
And so, for the better part of two years, I drifted in and out of job applications across journalism, copywriting, publishing and PR. Across all of them, I often encountered the same thing: an astonishing disregard for people’s time.
Modern hiring practices have mutated from assessments into tests of endurance. What begins as a CV and cover letter (assuming either is read) now routinely swells into five stages, sometimes more. And one wonders: what exactly is being uncovered at the fifth stage that wasn’t clear from the ones before?
Perhaps what candidates are really being congratulated on is stamina. Another opportunity to give their ideas away for free. Another couple of weeks of low-hum anxiety while waiting for someone ‘just circling internally’.
One multinational company actually put me through eight stages over six months: an HR screening call, a portfolio submission, a one-on-one interview, a panel interview, a writing task, another panel interview, another writing task and then yet another panel interview. Then silence.
After two weeks of hearing nothing, I rang the company’s New York office, at a cost of £17, simply to ask what had happened. It turned out they had just forgotten to let me know. Maybe it would be comforting to believe this was unusual. But LinkedIn is awash with horror stories of similarly sluggish processes and sudden ghostings.
Perhaps what candidates are really being congratulated on is stamina. Another opportunity to give their ideas away for free
What has led us here? Budgets are tighter and organisations are more risk-averse than they were a decade ago. No one wants to ‘own’ a bad hire. So companies respond by layering process upon process until liability is diluted into abstraction.
The irony is that these sprawling applications often undermine the very qualities employers claim to value. Curiosity, initiative, judgement, entrepreneurialism –these are all difficult to gauge through a five-stage obstacle course managed entirely via calendar invites and applicant portals.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when a well-judged email might lead to a quick coffee or a 15-minute phone call. Not a promise of a job necessarily, but a conversation. A chance to establish whether there was chemistry, mutual interest or simply a useful exchange of ideas before anyone committed to months of back and forth.
Increasingly, though, organisations seem to treat unsolicited approaches as inconveniences rather than opportunities. Everything must enter through the proper channel, at the proper stage, in the proper format. In trying to make hiring more controlled, many companies have also made it painfully inflexible.
This is not an argument for abandoning standards or just hiring friends. But there is value in managers having enough autonomy to follow a promising conversation where it leads. Sometimes it will become obvious that someone is entirely wrong for the role. Equally, it might surface an unexpected fit that no applicant tracking system (read AI) would ever have identified.
Nowadays, professional life often feels over-engineered to the point of paralysis. Calendars are booked weeks in advance; meetings arrive with agendas longer than international trade agreements; every interaction must be pre-scoped, pre-approved and logged.
Yet some of the most useful professional interactions I’ve had were the least formal. Indeed, the job I eventually secured emerged through precisely this sort of openness. Towards the end of my search, exhausted by portals and staged assessments, I sent a cold email directly to a CEO. No referral, no attempt to optimise anything on my CV. Just a note explaining who I was, my experience and a plain outline of what I felt I could do for his organisation.
To my pleasant surprise, he replied. I still had to interview and complete a task, of course. There was still scrutiny. But the entire process felt human-sized, sensible even. Most importantly, there was an actual person inside it exercising judgement rather than merely administering stages.
What struck me afterwards was not just that the approach worked, but how unusual it now felt. The small act of knocking on a door and someone answering it had somehow become radical.
Perhaps the answer is not to abandon systems entirely, but to reverse engineer some of the over-engineering. Leave room for the unscheduled coffee. Reply to the speculative email. Allow managers enough slack in their diaries to have exploratory conversations without immediately triggering a formal process. Because while companies have spent years trying to remove friction from recruitment, they may also have eliminated something else: the human instinct to simply have a chat.
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