He was a senior professional, well employed, and not looking for a break. A friend watched him go through a large company’s recruitment cycle anyway: one or two early interviews, a written assignment, then the loop — a four-and-a-half-hour panel interview.
The process took two weeks and monopolised the time he would otherwise have spent doing the job he already had. At the end, an offer arrived, significantly below the compensation the role had advertised.
What stayed with the friend was not the number. It was how he looked afterwards. The panel had torn apart every answer and every example — hyper-critical, asking for things beyond what his previous employers had expected. He came out shaken, closer to tears than the friend had ever heard him.
Maybe it was a stress test. Maybe it was the culture. Either way, the friend’s conclusion was blunt: if people leave your interview looking like that, the problem is not the candidate.