Daily dispatches from the hiring pipeline

The candidates are fine.
The interview is the one failing.

True stories, running totals and the occasional forged memo from tech's most over-engineered ritual. Read by people on both sides of the table.

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From: The Rest of Us <everyone@goodbyeinterview.com>

To: The Tech Interview Process

Subject: Re: your application to remain the default

Dear Hiring Process,

Thank you for your interest in everyone's time. After careful consideration — eight rounds of it — we have decided not to move forward.

While we were impressed by your ability to reject the author of the tool your team uses daily, we are currently looking for something that works.

We'll keep your CV on file.

Best of luck in your future endeavours,
— Everyone

Latest issue

Thursday, 11 June 2026

True story · as told to the Host

Nine rounds. Eleven weeks. One auto-reply.

M. has run platform teams for twelve years. The fintech's recruiter called the role "urgent." The process that followed included a screening call, two technical interviews, a six-hour take-home, a take-home defence, a systems round, a values round, a panel, and a "quick chat" with a VP who asked what his weaknesses were.

Week eleven: an email arrived. For a moment he thought it was the offer. It was a notification that the role had been reposted — with one extra round added to the description.

"I'd already done more work for them unpaid," he says, "than their take-home asked me to estimate."

ScreeningTech ×2Take-home 6hDefenceSystemsValuesPanelVP chatOffer — ghosted

Senior platform engineer · UK fintech, Series C · company on file

Read the full story →

Quick hits · from around the web

The number

£4,900

Median engineer-time cost of a single 7-round loop, per candidate, at UK senior rates — paid in full whether anyone gets hired or not.

One that went right

Two calls. Five days. Offer.

A 40-person logistics startup asked R. to pair on a real bug from their backlog for 90 minutes — paid. The offer came before the invoice did.

Intro callPaid pairing 90mOffer — day 5

⚠ Satire — fictional. Any resemblance to your hiring process is your problem.

From the Satire Desk

Internal documents we made up

FROM: Office of the Hiring Committee, Cromulent AI (Series B)
TO: All Engineering
RE: Q2 Hiring Retrospective — wins and learnings

FROM: Office of the Hiring Committee, Cromulent AI (Series B) TO: All Engineering RE: Q2 Hiring Retrospective — wins and learnings

Summary. This quarter the committee invested 140 engineer-hours interviewing 31 candidates across 7 rounds each, achieving our best-ever rejection accuracy of 100% among candidates who later shipped products at competitors.

Win: Candidate #14 passed all nine rounds. Unfortunately, the role was eliminated to offset the cost of the nine rounds. The committee considers this a strong validation of process.

Learning: Candidate #22 built the open-source scheduler our platform runs on. She was unable, however, to invert a binary tree under time pressure, and the committee agreed we cannot lower the bar.

Action items. (1) Add a round. (2) Update careers page to say "we move fast."

Cromulent AI is fictional. The maths, regrettably, is not. Satire pieces are clearly labelled and never name real companies — the real stories above do that on their own.Read the full memo →

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HOST: So — which round did it actually fall apart in?
YOU: Honestly? It passed every round. That's the worst part.
HOST: Tell me about the email that never came.