How Many Candidates Do We Interview?

We interview lots of candidates. During hiring season I may do up to 8 interviews per week, split between phone and in-person interviews. My record is four in-person interviews in one day, which unfortunately has happened more than once. I was pretty pooped at the end of those days. But then again, as a manager I don't do any other real work anyways, right? Seriously, I feel that finding good talent is the most important part of my job, so I don't mind spending so much time on it.

In doing so many interviews you may wonder how we exactly we winnow the candidates to the ones we hire. Some companies may interview 10 candidates for a position, then trim the list down to 2 or 3 and bring them back for another round of interviews. Or heaven forbid, they might decide they don’t like any of the finalists and start over with a fresh set of candidates.

Fortunately that’s not how we do things at my current company. We are growing at the moment, and we typically always have a number of positions open. So if we bring in 10 candidates and see 5 good ones we’ll make 5 offers.

Alas, we rarely see that kind of success rate; our typical ratio is perhaps 1 offer for 4-5 in-person interviews. And each of those in-person interviews is the result of 4-5 phone interviews, and each phone interview is in turn culled from any number of resumes. And there is no way for me to know how many resumes were filtered out by the recruiter or culled by our own HR department, though we try to limit the filtering at the early stages.