Applying for a mid-career engineering role, they had cleared a phone screen, then an initial Teams interview with the role’s direct manager.
Then came the invitation they were not expecting. The company wanted to bring them on site for “the final round” — which turned out to be five back-to-back interviews, with five different people, one after another.
They conceded it was better than five separate rounds spread across five separate visits. But it still felt, as they put it, like a gauntlet — and they could not tell whether it was normal. They were posting to ask others who had been through it what to expect.
An afternoon of interviews is not a conversation. It is an endurance test, dressed as a final step.