I hear about multi-month, six-round ordeals. Here’s my process for scientists/engineers in a consulting role:
We usually only take two people to step 3. Sometimes just one. Screen to offer takes about a month.
A couple of years ago I went through six interviews over six weeks a job that looked like a move up for me.
Recruiter
Hiring manager
[potential] Future coworker
[potential] Future coworker
Hiring manager’s manager
Head of Talent Acquisition
They finally made me an offer ten weeks after first contact. For a position that was two levels junior to the one I was originally recruited for, that would pay $75k LESS than I was making and would represent a 20 year regression in my career.
The ridiculously long interview process has been something I have encountered three times in the last 25 years. Each time with a company that was an industry leader at the time, but has now fallen way behind. For example the clowns I describe above, five of the six people I interviewed with are no longer with the company two and a half years later. Private Equity strikes again.
At our company you talk with a recruiter for 15 minutes max, then have a Zoom interview with the hiring manager and another manager (hiring manager interviews for 45 minutes, then another manager joins for 15 minutes). Then interview with department head, which is almost a formality. More people fail the background check than get bounced by the department head!
In my recent experience as chair of a search committee at a small public university, it goes like this:
It’s maddening. Particularly since I’m in a humanities field where there are many more well-qualified PhDs than tenure-track jobs posted, and theoretically this ought to be easy. I thought I was doing a terrible job at being a search committee chair, but then it turns out that the other search in my department was running into similar issues and will probably also conclude without hiring anybody. At least our (very good) non-TT guy gets to stay employed for another year, because we will have plenty of classes we need to cover…
Thank you for giving me an opportunity to rant anonymously 
Sounds almost exactly like the faculty hiring process where I used to work!
Staff hiring was less complicated/time-consuming, but we’d still get people dropping out during the selection process, turning an offer down or even working for a few weeks or months and then going elsewhere when something with higher pay came along.
I got a rejection letter from a federal agency in 1994 for a bank examiner position. I had applied for the job in fall 1991, interviewed on campus and then at their offices 1000+ miles away, went through a Byzantine process to be reimbursed for travel expenses, got ghosted, graduated in May 1992, started a job in the private sector and then my parents received the rejection letter at their address more than two years after my last contact with them.
There was a whole section in our University Placement office that just helped students fill out that application (Form SF171). Private employers, you would just drop a resume into a box two weeks before the recruiters were to hit campus and you would find out a week ahead whether they would interview you or not. Federal Government applications were sent in in early September for November/December interviews on campus. Due to the location of our University a large proportion of the graduates were interested in Federal jobs.
I guess this is for non-technical positions? I’ve been involved in probably over 100 interviews in my career for engineering positions, from both sides, at a dozen or more companies, and I’ve never seen one that involved only talking to managers. That seems like a good way to hire personable outgoing people who can’t program their way out of a paper bag.
A bit out of date, being pre-Zoom, but when I was hiring 7 years ago it would be telephone screen, then if we were interested turn it over to HR to make travel arrangements and scheduling. There might be interest from several groups so the amount of time we had to interview varied. It was usually 3 - 4 technical people and one manager.
I realize things are different today. My son-in-law interviewed with Google and some other places. By the third or fourth Google interview, he had already taken a job and had moved. He strung them along just for fun. This was before all the layoffs.
BTW, I always got HR to give me the last interview slot for my group, and I took the last slot in it. Interviewees are usually overwhelmed especially when right out of grad school and interviewing with 4 different groups, and they tend to remember the last person they talked to. If they were good, I did a sales job, which few other interviewers bothered to do. I had a high success rate for them taking my open position even when several groups were interested. We always let them choose.
Just took a new job in the financial markets.
They reached out to me on LinkedIn. I was already familiar with the company and very interested in working for them.
Screening interview. 30 minutes, phone audio only.
1st interview: direct manager, 45 minutes video interview on teams
2nd interview: CEO video interview on teams. Got lucky as I’d just seen the CEO in an interview on CNBC and asked him about it during the interview. Knew I had the job right then and there.
At my place of employment here’s how it goes.
Recruiter screen typically < 20 minutes. It varies depending on the position, but we’ll often ask technical questions, give a brief overview of the job description, discuss salary ranges, and answer any questions the candidate has about the company.
Interview. This is a panel interview with 2-3 people that will include the hiring manager, a subject matter expert (a potential coworker), and sometimes HR (always present for supervisor or above position).
I don’t really see the value in a long, drawn out interview process for most positions. We have a long, drawn out process for directors and executives, but they hardly represent the bulk of our hires. And I’m not at all involved in those.
By technical, do you mean “writes code [in a specific language or on a specific platform] as a primary job responsibility”?
If so, yes these are non-technical positions.
Current chair of one non-tenure track search at a large public university and deeply involved as 2 more as the department chair:
Post job in new HR system for faculty jobs that is COMPLETELY separate from the one for staff jobs which we already know well. Fight with office on campus to have positions posted there titled in such a way that they’ll make sense to applicants. FINALLY get a compromise. Positions were posted late February.
Position open for 30 days.
Review applications with search committee (different committee for each of 3 positions, fwiw).
Identify some portion for screening interviews. For 3 committees, this ranged from 5 to 10.
Review screening, invite 3 finalists (there MUST be 3) to campus for finalist interviews. Unit HR manages the scheduling/travel process thank goodness.
Schedule interviews in light of the Dean’s schedule because he’s out of the office a good bit right now and will be completely unavailable the first 2 weeks of June so if we’re hoping to have people start in July we need them in to interview in May. Get 9 candidates scheduled before the end of May by some miracle.
First set of three in, committee makes recommendation to Dean. Dean contacts top candidate, negotiates, cannot come to agreement. Dean offers to second candidate who accepts, start date identified, formal offer to be issuedd,
Other two searches are in the middle of interviews. So February to May - which is actually reasonably fast for some portions of academia.
All this is on top of having searched on a university-level search committee this semester because I didn’t expect to have 3 searches going on in the unit I lead.
Where I work, it’s all about knowing the right people.
I just moved jobs in March to a senior “individual contributor” role at a big tech company and the process (both for the one that gave me offer and one that ghosted me at the end of the process 
) was something like:
TBH I was somewhat surprised how non-evil the whole process was. Was expecting a lot of hellish “leet code” style bullshit coding questions (I’ve had friends treat the tech hiring process the way lawyers prepare for the bar exam, where they dedicate weeks to just revising coding Qs). But there really wasn’t any of that, there were a couple of coding questions but they were the kind of thing you can talk through not a pass-fail based on whether you can implement a red-black tree from memory.
When I finished school, getting a job was a mix of meeting with HR+hiring manager for all roles I applied to, and for the job I got I also went to a second interview with the supervisor. The process took many months, with many interviews before I landed any job at all
Since then, I’ve changed jobs twice and they had to do the convincing as I was specifically recruited for both. I did have to submit a resume and formally apply through the system, but my resume is pretty bare bones because it didn’t really matter, although for my current job the unaware HR drone decided I wasn’t a valid candidate and caused delays despite the job description being literally tailored to me after I’d already tentatively accepted a verbal offer. I’m not impressed with the larger HR organization at my company.
I’m grateful I’m at this point in my career where my work is known and I guess it stands on its own. I’m definitely very fortunate in that regard.
This is why our process takes longer than it could. We’re hiring for an unusual role and I want to take time to sell it and (more importantly) make sure people understand it.
I hired for a very specialized high tech role. I’m not sure why selling makes the process take longer. Getting the offer package signed off certainly does.
Our ~3h session could be half as long if we didn’t spend so much time describing the role. I’m talking about candidate hours spent, not days to decide.
Ah, got it. That makes more sense. If a lot of groups wanted to interview a candidate, it got quite grueling.
When I interviewed at Intel, they never quite described the role since it was secret and the hiring manager was on Sabbatical. Did not turn out well.