The Costs of Serial Interviewing

One challenge effecting companies, recruiters and candidates is what I call serial interviewing.

When a company gets highly interested in a candidate, usually after a couple telephone interviews and maybe one round of face-to-face discussions, but long before the deal is done, they frequently let other prospects slide to the back-burner. It's often not by design, but if the subsequent interviews take a while to get scheduled, and the negotiations take a while, then the recruiter and other candidates can get left in limbo.

Doing so can be tempting, because interviewing numerous candidates and bringing several in for face-to-face interviews can be time-consuming and expensive, but if the main candidates falls through, you often find that the pipeline has run dry, other candidates have accepted other offers and the process has to be ramped up again, which in the long run, can end up being being even more costly.

I encourage employers to take a parallel approach and keep a pipeline of prospects going, until someone has accepted the position and is firmly moving towards the start date. Not doing so is the surest way to having a position stay open for months as one hot prospect is chased, and then disappears, and then another, and another. If you have several in work concurrently, the odds of someone landing in the role in reasonable time frame are much improved.