Job interviews are laden with opportunities for humiliation. Who wants to describe their greatest weakness to a panel of peers? Or be made to feel like a quiz show contestant with brainteasers like “how many golf balls can you fit in a Boeing 747?”. Unfortunately for job seekers, the rigmarole is getting increasingly out of hand. 

Demands from hiring committees in the tech sector are piling up. That means more interviews but also more technical tests. Alongside coding evaluations come requests for essays, lengthy take-home assignments and even days spent working with existing teams. One friend in the Bay Area made it through multiple interview rounds only to be presented with a final challenge to “entertain” the company’s leadership. There were no other instructions. She didn’t get the job. 

Recruiters will say that this is not being done to make life difficult for job seekers but because it is growing harder to find the right candidates. The blame, they say, lies with job seekers themselves. Online postings make speculative applications easy to fire off. In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers reported receiving a record 1.2mn applications for 17,000 graduate vacancies this year. Human resources software maker Workday reports that the number of global job applications is growing four times faster than job openings.