The fifth interview is rarely where a hiring decision suddenly becomes intelligent. More often, it is where the organisation reveals that the people involved never agreed on how the decision would be made. One executive wants to meet the candidate because the role is important. Another was unavailable during the original panel and would like a separate conversation. Finance wants comfort in commercial judgement. The managing director asks for one final meeting. Someone then suggests a culture interview because nobody is quite ready to say yes. Individually, each request sounds reasonable. Collectively, they may reveal a recruitment process that is using meetings to compensate for a lack of agreement. There is an important difference between careful hiring and organisational hesitation.
More interviews do not necessarily mean more evidence.
Every appointment carries risk, particularly where the role is senior, specialist or commercially important. Management therefore has every reason to examine candidates properly. The mistake is assuming that another conversation automatically produces another layer of useful evidence. If three panels ask a candidate to describe the same leadership experience in slightly different language, the organisation has not necessarily deepened its understanding of that candidate. It may simply have collected three reactions to substantially the same answer. That is where long recruitment processes become deceptive. They feel thorough because many people have participated. Yet participation is not the same as evidence.
A candidate who has already explained the same career history four times should not be asked to explain it a fifth time merely because another executive would like to “get a feel for them”. The organisation should already know what remains unresolved.
Design the decision before designing the interviews.
A sound recruitment process should begin before the vacancy reaches the market. Management should first determine what the person appointed must deliver. It should establish which capabilities genuinely matter to those outcomes, then decide what evidence would give the organisation reasonable confidence that those capabilities are present. Only then should interviews be designed.
If strategic judgement matters, decide how it will be assessed.
If the person will lead a difficult team, build a realistic people-management question into the process.
If analytical ability is central to the role, allow the candidate to analyse something.
If writing is important, assess writing.
This appears obvious, yet many organisations still design recruitment around meetings rather than evidence. Structured interviews offer a stronger approach because candidates are asked comparable questions connected to job-related competencies and their responses are considered against defined criteria. Work samples can strengthen the process further because the candidate is required to perform or respond to something that resembles the work itself. Research on personnel selection has consistently found both approaches useful when they are properly designed. The purpose is not to remove human judgement. It is to give human judgement something better to work with.
Not every stakeholder requires an interview.
A second source of unnecessary complexity is the belief that anybody with an interest in the appointment should meet the candidate personally. That is rarely necessary. Some stakeholders should help define the role. Others may contribute technical expertise. A senior executive may appropriately participate where the appointment carries material organisational consequences. But consultation and decision rights are not the same thing. A well-governed recruitment process makes it clear who provides input, what each interviewer is responsible for assessing and who ultimately has authority to make or recommend the appointment. Without that clarity, another interview becomes the safest response to uncertainty. Nobody wants to own a poor hire, so the decision moves from person to person until enough executives have participated that responsibility itself becomes difficult to identify. That is not stronger governance. Strong governance should make accountability clearer, not more crowded.
There is no magic number of interviews.
The argument is not that every vacancy should have two interviews. That would be as simplistic as insisting on seven.
A chief executive appointment may require board engagement, shareholder consideration and deeper assessment.
A specialist position may require technical evaluation. A mid-level operational role may need considerably less.
The appropriate number depends on the role and the evidence required. The test is much more useful than any numerical rule:
What will the next stage tell us that we do not already know?
If there is a clear answer, the stage may be justified. If there is no answer beyond “another person would like to meet the candidate”, management should ask whether the meeting belongs in the selection process at all.
Kenya's recruitment market makes delay worth examining.
Kenya's Labour Market Information System now provides vacancy intelligence covering areas such as hard-to-fill occupations and what it terms time-to-fill analysis. KLMIS defines that particular measure as the period between a vacancy advert opening and closing, so it should not be confused with an employer's complete interview-to-offer cycle. Its inclusion is still useful because it reflects a wider management reality: vacancy duration matters.
For an individual employer, unnecessary delay can become expensive when capable candidates are considering other opportunities, managers are carrying vacant-role workloads or an important business function remains understaffed.
The current Kenyan recruiter discussion also reflects concern about lengthy hiring processes, candidate drop-off and the need to move more clearly from interview to decision. This is practitioner observation rather than national prevalence data, but the operational issue is recognisable. The answer is not reckless speed. It is the removal of delay that contributes nothing to decision quality.
Fix this before Monday.
Take the last five people your organisation hired.
Map every interview they attended.
For each stage, ask what new evidence entered the decision: Which interview established something important? Which assessment changed the panel's view? Which meeting merely repeated what had already been discussed?
Then remove the repetition. If two panels are testing the same capability, redesign the process. If several executives have overlapping authority, clarify decision rights. If the panel cannot agree what good performance in the role looks like, solve that before advertising another vacancy.
Kenya's Employment Act already treats recruitment procedures, advertising and selection criteria as part of employment policy and practice. Consistency in selection is therefore not merely an efficiency concern. It sits within the broader responsibility to conduct employment practices fairly. The objective is not to make recruitment shorter at any cost. It is to make every stage earn its place.
Seven interviews may occasionally be justified, but it looks like seven people never agreed on the decision and are not rigorous. They are organisational indecision wearing the clothes of caution.
At Eagle HR Consultants, we support organisations with recruitment and executive search, structured candidate assessment and the design of selection systems that improve decision quality without unnecessary process complexity.
If your organisation is repeatedly losing strong candidates, extending critical vacancies or adding interview stages without clearer evidence, our Human Capital Advisory team can help examine what the hiring process is actually accomplishing.
Before another candidate is invited back, ask one question: what will we know after this meeting that we do not know now?
If the organisation cannot answer, the candidate probably does not need another interview. The organisation needs a decision.
