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Hey Everyone - it’s Brandon, Co-Founder & CEO of SCALIS. I’ve been noticing recently that companies interview processes are starting to get out of hand - round after round after round with no end in sight. So, let’s dig into it.

You applied six weeks ago. Since then: a recruiter screen, a hiring manager call, a take home task, a four person panel, and a "final" with a VP. Yesterday the recruiter emailed asking if you have time for "one more quick chat with the team." You said yes, because what else do you say. You are now ten conversations deep on a job you have never done.

You are not unlucky, and you are not being strung along by amateurs. You are inside the new default. GoodTime's 2026 hiring report found that 42 percent of employers now run candidates through five or more interview rounds before deciding. SHRM puts average time to hire at roughly 44 days. Half of hiring processes now run past four weeks.

Here is the part that should change how you behave. Research on structured interviews has consistently found that predictive power plateaus fast, roughly after two well designed rounds. Everything past that adds calendar time and cost while telling the company almost nothing new about whether you can do the job. So why does round five exist? Because bad hires feel expensive, so risk averse managers add insurance. Because there is internal disagreement nobody wants to voice out loud. Because the requisition itself is wobbling. In that same GoodTime data, 90 percent of companies missed their hiring goals.

Translation: the gauntlet is mostly not a test of you. It is a symptom of them. And candidates who understand that stop treating the loop as an obstacle course and start running it like a campaign they are managing. Here is how.

Almost nobody asks for the process upfront, which is strange, because recruiters will usually just tell you. Before you book the second conversation, send one message and get the shape of the whole thing in writing.

That single question does four things. It tells you what this is about to cost you. It lets you pace yourself instead of burning your best material in round two. It gives you a baseline, which is what makes the next tip work. And it quietly marks you as someone who manages projects, because asking for scope and timeline reads as senior in a way no answer to "tell me about yourself" ever will.

Most companies now run structured hiring, which means interviewers are not just freestyling. In systems like Greenhouse and Ashby, each interviewer is assigned specific attributes to probe, and they write scored feedback into a shared kit, often before they see anyone else's notes.

So when you tell the same flagship project story in all five rounds, you are not reinforcing it. You are burning four slots and leaving four competencies unevidenced. The panel's debrief then reads as "strong on execution, unclear on everything else," and unclear is what generates round six.

The fix is simple. At the top of each round, ask: "What part of the role are you closest to, and what are you hoping to get a read on today?" Then pick a different piece of evidence for that person. Give the engineering lead the technical decision. Give the cross functional partner the time you got a stalled project unstuck. Same you, different proof.

When a process that was defined as four rounds suddenly grows a fifth, something changed on their side. In my experience it is almost always one of three things: two decision makers disagree and want a tiebreaker, budget or headcount got shaky, or an internal or referred candidate entered late.

None of those are things you fix by being more charming. They are things you fix with information. Ask the recruiter plainly: "Happy to do it. Can you help me understand what this round is meant to answer that the earlier ones didn't?" A specific answer ("Dana wants to go deeper on stakeholder management") means you are still in a real process, and now you know exactly what to bring. A vague answer means the req is unstable, and your move is to keep the conversation warm while you aggressively re-energize every other pipeline you have.

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Scheduling is the biggest operational drag in hiring, and candidates fall out of processes over calendar friction far more often than over bad answers. Every week of drift is a week for priorities to shift and another candidate to close first.

So make yourself the easiest person on the recruiter's list. Never reply with one available slot. Send three to five wide blocks across multiple days, including early and late. Reply within hours, not days. And at the end of every round, close the loop out loud: "What are the next steps, and what is the timeline you are working toward?" Ambiguity is where processes go to die, and you are allowed to be the person who removes it.

Round four or five is where the surprise assignment shows up: a strategy deck, a written plan, a "small" project. You are allowed to negotiate the shape of it, and doing so professionally almost never costs you the role.

Scope it and timebox it. Try: "Happy to do this. To make it useful for both of us, can we scope it to about two hours and focus on the one problem your team cares most about right now? I would also love thirty minutes live to walk you through my thinking." That reframe is strong on purpose. It caps your exposure, it signals you value your own time, and the live walkthrough is where you actually win, because defending your reasoning out loud beats any polished artifact you could hand in.

Copy these into your notes and use them in the last five minutes of every conversation. They cost nothing and they surface more than most people learn in the entire process.

Question one gives you the chance to answer an objection in the room rather than losing to it in a debrief. Question four is the one nobody asks, and it is the one that tells you whether round six is coming.

The loop is longer than it should be, and you did not build it. But you can be the candidate who runs it with a map, fresh evidence in every round, and zero ambiguity about what happens next. In a process where half the field is quietly drifting out from exhaustion, that is most of the edge.

Most people feel behind. But the people that don’t, aren’t smarter. They’re just better informed.

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