Scraping the residue of a crushed arachnid off the sole of my left boot requires more focus than I initially anticipated. It was a common house spider, harmless mostly, but it startled me while I was holding a piece of cobalt glass from 1898. The glass survived; the spider did not. Now, as I sit at my workbench surrounded by the metallic scent of lead solder and the sharp, clean tang of glass cleaner, I find myself staring at a notification on my phone. It is an invitation for an eighth interview. Not a fourth, not a sixth, but an eighth.

I feel a peculiar sort of exhaustion just looking at the screen. It is the same exhaustion I experience when a client asks me to justify a restoration choice for the 18th time. You either trust the craftsman or you do not. In the corporate world, however, trust has been replaced by a sprawling, multi-headed beast of committee-based decision-making. We are told these marathons are about ‘culture fit’ or ‘due diligence,’ but as I look at the smear on my boot, I realize that these processes are rarely about finding the best person. They are about the terror of being wrong.

When a company demands that you speak to 8 different stakeholders across 48 days, they are telling you exactly how they function on a Tuesday afternoon. They are telling you that no single person has the authority or the courage to say, ‘This is the one.’ They are signaling that their internal structure is so fragmented that consensus is the only shield against future blame. If you hire someone after two rounds and they fail, it is your fault. If you hire them after eight rounds and they fail, it is the process’s fault. It is a brilliant, cowardly way to dilute accountability until it is as thin as the dust on a cathedral clerestory.

I once spent 28 hours restoring a single panel because the board of the historical society couldn’t agree on the shade of amber. We went through 18 iterations. By the end, the glass was brittle from being handled, and the lead came was fatigued. That is what these interview processes do to a candidate. They take a person who was once vibrant and full of potential and they turn them into a weary, rehearsed version of themselves. You start to lose your edges. You begin to offer the answers you surmise they want to hear rather than the truth of your experience.

We perceive these stages as a ladder, but they are actually a sieve. They don’t catch the best talent; they catch the most patient talent. Or perhaps, more accurately, they catch the talent that is most desperate or most skilled at enduring corporate theater. The true innovators, the people with the 188-IQ-level sparks of brilliance, usually walk away by round three. They have work to do. They don’t have time to explain their existence to a junior associate in the marketing department who was added to the panel simply because the hiring manager felt bad about leaving them out.

I remember a specific mistake I made early in my career. I hired an apprentice because 8 different people in my local guild said he was ‘easy to get along with.’ I ignored the fact that his soldering was sloppy and his eye for color was dim. I wanted the safety of the group’s approval. Within 18 weeks, he had ruined a commissioned piece of etched glass and lost us a major contract. The group’s approval didn’t fix the glass. It just gave me 8 people to point my finger at, which, it turns out, is a very cold comfort when you are broke.

You see this most clearly in the tech sector, where the ghost of ‘The Bar Raiser’ haunts every Zoom call. There is this belief that if we just add one more perspective, we will finally reach a state of objective truth. But truth is not additive in that way. Adding more people to a decision doesn’t make the decision more accurate; it just makes it more average. It rounds off the interesting corners. It produces a hire that everyone can live with, rather than a hire that everyone is excited by.

In my studio, I work with lead cames-the H-shaped strips that hold the glass together. If the lead is too soft, the window bows. If it is too hard, the glass cracks. A good interview process should be like a well-made lead frame: firm enough to hold the structure, but flexible enough to account for the unique shape of the glass. When you reach 8 rounds, the frame has become so rigid and complex that the glass hasn’t a chance of fitting. You are no longer looking for a human; you are looking for a miracle that can survive a gauntlet.

I recently spoke with a colleague who went through 108 days of interviewing for a mid-level management role. By the time they offered him the job, he had already accepted a position elsewhere. The recruiter was shocked. They couldn’t envision why he wouldn’t wait for the ‘prestige’ of their brand. But prestige doesn’t pay the mortgage, and prestige certainly doesn’t compensate for the realization that your future boss can’t decide on a sandwich, let alone a strategic direction. If the hiring process is a mess, the onboarding will be a disaster, and the daily operations will be a slow-motion train wreck of 58-person email threads.

There is a specific kind of arrogance in asking for that much of a stranger’s time. It assumes that the candidate’s life is on hold, that their 48 other priorities don’t exist. It treats the candidate as a resource to be mined rather than a partner to be recruited. I often wonder what would happen if candidates started charging for their time after the third round. If an hour of your life cost the company $878, would they still need that 8th ‘meet the team’ coffee chat? I suspect the process would magically streamline itself down to a lean, efficient two rounds.

When you are in the thick of it, it is easy to convince yourself that this is just ‘how things are done.’ You tell yourself that the company is just being thorough. You ignore the 18 red flags waving in your face because you want the role. But I encourage you to look at the process as the first deliverable of the job. This is the company’s work product. This is how they solve problems. This is how they communicate. If you find the process confusing, redundant, and exhausting, it is because the job will be confusing, redundant, and exhausting.

Navigating these waters requires more than just a good resume; it requires a strategy to handle the psychological toll of being perpetually ‘under review.’ Many find that working with a service like Day One Careers provides the necessary perspective to see the forest for the trees when the process starts to feel like a hall of mirrors. You need someone to remind you that your value isn’t determined by a committee of 8 people who only read your CV 18 minutes before the call.

I look back at the spider on the floor. It was an efficient creature. It built a web, it waited, it acted. There was no committee. There was no multi-stage evaluation of the fly. There was just the reality of the moment. Humans have a tendency to overcomplicate the simple to avoid the discomfort of direct action. We build these 8-round interview processes to protect ourselves from the stinging possibility of a bad hire, forgetting that a slow, bureaucratic hire can be just as fatal to a company’s health.

If you find yourself scheduled for round 8, ask yourself what hasn’t been said. Ask yourself what 48 hours of conversation couldn’t uncover that one more hour will. Usually, the answer is nothing. The data is already there. The hesitation isn’t about you; it is about the person sitting across from you on the screen who is terrified of making a choice. They are looking for a sign from the universe, or a unanimous vote from 18 peers, because they don’t trust their own eyes.

I prefer the glass. If I cut it wrong, it breaks. I can’t hide the crack with a committee report or a 108-slide deck. I have to acknowledge the error, sweep up the shards, and start again. There is a dignity in that kind of failure that the corporate world has lost. We have traded the honesty of a mistake for the safety of a slow, suffocating consensus.

As I prepare to solder the next joint on this Victorian restoration, I’ll probably leave the phone in the other room. The 8th round can wait. Or better yet, I can realize that any organization that needs 8 looks at me to see who I am is never going to truly see me at all. They are just looking at their own reflection in the glass, hoping it doesn’t break.